Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Certain signature furniture designs --tall-back chairs, geometric clocks, cabinets with curvilinear Art Nouveau ornamentation Ï have become so well-known they scream Mackintosh to the point of drowning out his equally important contributions as architect and painter.

The current exhibition, organized by the Glasgow Museums, opened at the McLellan Galleries there last May, and will be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until February 16, after which it travels to Chicago and Los Angeles.

Born in 1868, the son of a police clerk, Mackintosh grew up in one of Scotland's grimmer industrial cities, yet was inspired to attend the Glasgow College of Art in 1883. There he began his study of architecture, entering numerous competitions in the field, which would eventually lead to local commissions for municipal, commercial and domestic buildings.

Continuing at the school as a student until 1894, the young architect expanded his interests to include fine and decorative arts, inspired in part by his friendship with the sisters Frances and Margaret Macdonald. He married the latter in 1900, and the couple enjoyed a lifelong artistic collaboration which continued until his death in 1928.

Twentieth Century specialist Jonathan Hallam, gallery director of New York's Historical Design Collection, has only praise for the show.

"The exhibition doesn't talk down to the public but lures the visitor in, making it very clear who Mackintosh was and what his aim was," he said. "You're surrounded with fascinating things, then suddenly the show's over and you think, `I could go through that again.'

"The designers also didn't over-theatricalize the thing Ï dress it up to be something it's not," Hallam continued, "which is an easy trap to fall into with someone as famous Ï and visual Ï as Mackintosh. They played that down beautifully and let the pieces speak for themselves."

Responsible for the installation at the Metropolitan is J. Stewart Johnson, consultant for design and architecture in the department of Twentieth Century art.

"In every show I do, it seems to me that the most successful designs are the most self-effacing," he commented. "What you want to see is not the designer but the works that are being displayed. I did things that are sort of Mackintosh, but I resisted the urge to have 18,000 squares or anything of that sort.

"There's hardly any color in the show, as a matter of fact," he explains, "but I go from whites through a range of grays, following his career. As things get worse and worse in his life, it gets darker and darker. Then at the end, when the couple go to France, and he's doing those wonderful sun-filled landscapes, it's all a very sunny white. I don't think the average viewer is even aware of things like that."

According to Johnson, the galleries are 25 feet high, which made it possible to install the Ladies' Luncheon Room from Ingram Street, a mezzanined area. For more intimate things Ï individually displayed chairs or tables or watercolors Ï a horizontal line was brought down to about ten feet and continued around the gallery.

"Psychologically, the viewer perceives the space as being below that artificial line," said Johnson. "It's something that Mackintosh did repeatedly; he often was working with spaces that already existed that didn't suit him, so he would arbitrarily bring the line down to where he wanted it to be and introduce a very simple molding."

Another challenge faced by the exhibition was how to give Mackintosh's architecture its proper weight in a retrospective, something two-dimensional building sketches or even photographs cannot really accomplish. Although informed collectors realize that surviving furniture and decorative arts come from integrated interior environments designed as part of Mackintosh's architectural commissions, few ever have the opportunity to travel to visit the surviving structures in Scotland.

Ellen Goheen, administrator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, was a recent pilgrim to the Glasgow sites and found the experience intriguing.

"You see the buildings piecemeal in books, never as a complete idea," she recalls. "When you actually visit the houses, you realize that they are compositions of light areas and dark areas. I had a sense from photographs that a lot of his architecture was light, but there are these dark rooms with smoked oak, almost black."

"At Hill House," she continued, "designed for publisher Walter Blackie in 1904, you go into an meandering entry hall, all dark, then you emerge into a light room that is just like walking into a vat of cream. It's such manipulation."

"It's hard to give the experience of architecture to people," admits Johnson. This challenge has been met at the exhibition by combining the architectural sketches and period photographs with specially constructed models and a remarkable series of videos building the view through the interiors.

"The videos take you on a walking tour into the various Mackintosh houses and show you room by room how they look without overwhelming you," relates Hallam. "They allow you to be the explorer Ï a marvelous idea. They can't bring the houses to New York, so they've made up for that in a very clever way."

For the show in New York, Johnson created a new series of videos which differ from those shown at the Glasgow exhibition last year.

"They had videos done by a French team, but when I showed those to our education people here at the Met, they felt they were a bit frenetic for an American audience," he explained. "They used a steadycam Ï we used a steadycam, too Ï but they used it very actively, so there was an awful lot of swooping and swerving. We decided on a more paced presentation, as if you were actually moving around a room, but with time to really take in all the things you were seeing."

Both sets of tapes will be sent on for the exhibition opening at The Art Institute of Chicago on March 29, and it will be interesting to see which are selected for use at the venue.

Another delightful surprise at the exhibition are Mackintosh's watercolors, some of which date to the couple's London residency after 1915, when they were engaged in textile design, and others to a long French holiday in the 1920s.

Particularly striking from the latter period are views he painted around Port Vendres on the Mediterranean, which demonstrate the artist's skillful use of color Ï already apparent in his London still lifes Ï and an interesting style in which both buildings and landscapes are formed from a succession of flat planes.

The catalogue, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, edited by Wendy Kaplan, is a joint publication of the Glasgow Museums and Abbeville Press. The 383-page reference includes a useful chronology and "cast of characters" as well as bibliography and checklist of the exhibitions. Order by phone from the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore, 212/879-5500, for $45 softbound, $60 hardbound, plus shipping and handling.

Miss Cranston's Team Rooms