Brilliant Phantasy: The Art of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh

This study explores constructions of gender and identity within the work of Anglo-Scottish artist-designer Margaret Macdonald (1864-1933). In paint, metal, and embroidery, Margaret created images of bodiless women at a time when male artists considered the female form the ideal object for the display of their genius. Her images place emphasis on the decorative itself, rather than on the female body as decorative form, complicating our understanding of the gendering of the decorative as feminine and of the feminine as decorative. The opening chapter examines Margaret's use of fairy tale themes. Margaret had good reason to depict scenes from fairy tales, as they represented a cultural tradition persistently connected with women as their narrators, creators, subjects, and audiences. Since fairy tales have been institutionalized as part of a discourse of gender and power in a specific historical instance, Margaret's images constitute analyzable markers to the construction and operation of that discourse in visual terms. The second chapter investigates another set of themes based upon symbolist dramas. In these images Margaret's depiction of faces achieves a mask-like quality not inappropriate for subjects in which women actors represented abstract concepts. Here I explore links between the theatricality of these images and broader concepts of the decorative, artificiality, and the feminine. Considered on a formal level in the third chapter, Margaret's compositions incorporate a sense of texture which extends reception of the works beyond the purely visual categories of analysis. This insistent tangibility stimulates a fetishistic response seconded by the compartmentalizing of figures into individual body parts that has implications for understanding these objects as themselves only parts of larger architectural projects. In the last chapter, I consider Margaret's works as elements of interior designs created in collaboration with her husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In the same way that Margaret's images collapse the boundaries between dreams and reality, subject and viewer, the Mackintoshes' interiors collapse the distinction between public and domestic space. These interiors extend the fantasy realm of the images out into the actual spaces themselves, creating a structure for the playing out of contingent social roles and complex private-public desires.