CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH; `CRAWL, STUMBLE, STAGGER -- BUT GO ALONE'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

With his foppish attire, curling black moustache and dark, soulful eyes, the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh looked more like an Italian opera tenor than a radical Scottish architect.

Indeed, by most accounts, Mackintosh was no dour Highlander, but a restless idealist whose cosmopolitan spirit would've been more at home in Berlin or Vienna than in grimy turn-of-the-century Glasgow.

So it's a bit of a shock to encounter Francis Newbery's portrait of the middle-age Mackintosh about two-thirds of the way through the large new exhibition of the architect's work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Painted on the eve of World War I, it depicts a clean-shaven, conservatively dressed man of affairs clutching the blueprints for his architectural masterpiece, the magnificent Glasgow School of Art. Though Mackintosh bears the stigmata of worldly success, his furrowed brow hints at the demons of alcohol and depression that already were nipping at his career and speeding his tragic unraveling.

For decades, scholars have cherished this bleakly romanticized view of Mackintosh (1868-1928) as a neglected genius, a victim of knotty-headed philistines, curiously stranded between the erotic whimsy of Art Nouveau and the no-frills puritanism of the Modernists.

``Charles Rennie Mackintosh'' sets out to provide a more complex reading of the man sometimes labeled ``the European Frank Lloyd Wright,'' mostly due to his penchant for light-filled, geometric interiors over pompous Victorian clutter. Like Wright, Mackintosh had the talent to coordinate every last detail of those interiors. But unlike the Chicago master, he didn't coerce his clients into acting out a script for living.

Revival in the 1980s

Including samples of his furniture, metalwork, leaded glass, posters and flatware, plus numerous scale models and architectural drawings, the exhibition reflects Mackintosh's popular comeback, which began in the 1980s. This survey of 250 works also is the first to exhibit the watercolors and landscapes he produced during his final years in southern France - exiled, broke and dying of cancer. Largely ignored at the time of his death, except by specialists and architects, it took 40 years before a 1968 exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum began to reclaim his reputation.

If not a misunderstood visionary, who then was this controversial Scotsman?

Hard to say, exactly. As art historian Wendy Kaplan observes in the exhibition's superb, beautifully illustrated catalog, Mackintosh gave few lectures and posted no manifestoes. The exhibition quotes only a few paragraphs from his diaries and letters, scattered shards of emotional insight. Mackintosh did his talking through his work alone, Kaplan writes, leaving history to judge his legacy.

(Originally mounted for Glasgow's McLellan galleries before moving on to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and Los Angeles, the exhibition presumes a greater working knowledge of Mackintosh's life and times than is probably wise for a North American audience.)

Mackintosh sometimes gets lazily lumped in with Britain's Arts and Crafts movement, that brilliant starburst of rustic furniture, flower-print wallpaper and medieval mysticism that swept late-industrial Europe.

To be sure, Mackintosh and the other founders of the so-called ``Glasgow Style'' shared certain traits with William Morris and his socialistic brethren. Both schools gravitated toward ethereal colors. Both concocted an elaborate pastoral iconography full of stylized floral motifs and willowy sylphs with waist-length hair, twisting and bending like cedars in a storm.

NOT Arts and Crafts 

Mackintosh's wife and sometime collaborator, Margaret Macdonald, and her sister, Frances, specialized in these eerie Art Nouveau sprites, earning the epithet ``Spook School'' from hostile Scottish critics.

But while the Arts and Crafts movement evoked an idealized, pre-industrial never-never land - a Marxist fantasy of Arthurian Britain - the Glasgow Style drew its vitality straight from its booming, thoroughly modern hometown. Though author Thomas Carlyle described Glasgow as ``a murky, simmering'' hell, Mackintosh and his contemporaries viewed the Clyde River port as a wellspring of inspiration, not a hub of original sin.

As Juliet Kinchin writes in her essay ``Mackintosh and the City,'' fin de siecle Glasgow was in many ways a more sophisticated, ``Europeanized'' place than its utilitarian British rivals, such as Manchester and Liverpool. Industrial progress was the local gospel, and Glasgow's edgy, well-traveled citizens - as eager to flaunt their nouveau wealth as a Hollywood Hills screenwriter - embraced it with a vengeance.

You can feel this dynamic culture expressed in Mackintosh's architecture, in the unfussy symmetry of his Scotland Street School (1903-1906) and the Daily Record Building (1900-1901), with its facade of geometric patterned brick accented by cantilevered bay windows.

Becoming a draftsman at age 16, in the progressive firm of Honeyman and Keppie, Mackintosh quickly proved a master of three-dimensional perspective and bold simplicity. While the previous generation of British Romantics had deemed Gothic the only worthy architectural style, Mackintosh took his cues from the stripped-down experiments already going on in Vienna and Turin.

``Shake off all the props - the props tradition and authority offer you, and go alone,'' he wrote in 1902. ``Crawl, stumble, stagger - but go alone.''

Unions and contrasts

In private commissions such as the massive Hill House, built for a wealthy publisher in 1902, he created a unifying effect by blanketing entire rooms in a single color, usually white. Playing feminine against masculine, nature against geometry, his rooms achieved what critics have described as a stark sensuality. Mackintosh's furniture, his tapered, high-backed chairs and severe wardrobes and writing desks, convey a similarly austere beauty.

But perhaps his most singular achievement was the dozen tea rooms he worked on between 1896 and 1917. A full-scale reproduction of one of these genteel watering holes, designed for Macintosh's feisty chief patron, Kate Cranston, forms the exhibition's centerpiece. Every detail, from the elegant light fixtures to the decorative wall panels designed by Mackintosh and Macdonald, speaks to the restorative pleasures of art, conversation and city life.

Yet even in Glasgow's receptive climate, Mackintosh by the early 1900s was starting to feel irrelevant. Art Nouveau was on its way out. A harsh neoclassical tradition was all the rage in Europe.

In 1914, Mackintosh and Macdonald quit Glasgow for good and moved to London, where the onset of a disastrous world war made architectural commissions tough to come by. Though he produced some striking interior designs in England, his alienation only grew.

He fled again, first to Britain's Suffolk Coast and finally to France, where he stayed for four years until the need for medical treatment drove him back to London, a few months before he died.

Few details of Mackintosh's final years have survived. What's left to us are his serene watercolors of the French countryside. Devoid of human figures, they show the same architectural precision as the drawings he made as a 16-year-old prodigy.

In all cases, the surfaces were exquisite. But the inner man stayed hidden from view.

The Facts

What: ``Charles Rennie Mackintosh.''

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

Hours: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesday. Through Oct. 13.

Admission: Adults $6; students with ID and seniors $4; children $1; children under 5 free. The second Tuesday of every month is free to all. For information, call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

7 Photos

PHOTO (1) A Charles Rennie Mackintosh clock made of ebonised wood with ivory and plastic inlay in 1917.

(2) Mackintosh designed this high-back chair (1898-99) for the tea room of his chief patron, Kate Cranston.

(3 -- 6) Clockwise from above right, a poster for the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts; a 1904 washstand of oak, ceramic tiles, and leaded and mirror glass; Mackintosh's ``The Hill House, Helensburgh: Perspective From the Southwest,'' a 1903 ink drawing; and the 1900 Ladies Luncheon Room for Kate Cranston, restored 1992-95.

(7) A chair for the order desk of the Willow Tea Rooms, built of ebonised oak and reupholstered with horsehair, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1904.