Mackintosh was part of the
Arts and Crafts movement and occasionally accused of being a part of the decadent
Arts Nouveau school, which was looked upon with distrust by
England. He helped found the
Glasgow School of Art, which is now the
Mackintosh Building. He was celebrated in Vienna, but, as above, largely ignored in his homeland--especially because of his difficult-to-grasp concept of
total design in
architecture. He died in the south of
France in 1928 of cancer, having given up architecture and turned to
landscape painting in his last years.
He and his friend
Herbert MacNair also worked with the artist sisters,
Margaret and Frances Macdonald. Together they embraced the "crafts" portion of the movement by working on not just illustration but also
furniture and
metalwork. They were derisively called "the
Spook School."
Among his most recognizable and still-reproduced motifs is an abstracted, squared-off
rose. One of the most common Art Nouveau
fonts is a copy of Mackintosh's lettering, with rounded corners, high crosspieces and extra elements such as dots and double lines.