Yet again I have been put onto something intriguing by the vigilant Jim Barnes in Scotland. This time it is an unexpected connection between the Scottish art nouveau designer, Margaret MacDonald, and a man who has had considerable coverage over the years on Modern Printmakers. I mean Hugo Henneberg. To be honest, I was unaware of the extent of Henneberg's collecting, but in the photograph (above) from the Austrian magazine Ver Sacrum you can see a smoker's cabinet he bought from MacDonald and her husband, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, after it was exhibited at the 8th Vienna Secession exhibition in 1900.
The two silver-plated panels representing night and day were made for the cabinet by MacDonald in 1899 and were considered lost until they turned up for sale at Dorotheum where they sold for 94,000 euros. That was in December, 2019. As you see, they combine classic elongated art nouveau forms with the eliptical shapes characteristic of the Celtic style which played such a part in the national revival in Scotland and Ireland. The ancient Celtic-speaking people of the maritime coast of Europe were famed for their craftsmanship, particularly in bronze, copper, gold, silver and enamel and, as Simon Esmond Cleary once said, objects like the British torc (below) from 1st Century BC remain the finest things ever made on these islands of ours.
But it was all rather odd the way MacDonald went about it. She wore her own hair the same was as the figure in the panel and the whole approach had a sense of theatricality and dressing up which now appears to be at odds with the stringency of what became modern design. Nevertheless, Scotland made a unique contribution and the purchase of MacDonald and Mackintosh's work by such an innovatory artist was typical of the eclecticism of so much modern art (though eclectic may not be the word art historians would make use of).
Henneberg may already have been thinking about a setting for his new piece of furniture because soon afterwards he asked Josef Hoffman to design a house as part of a group of four artist's residences on the Hohe Warte in the hills above Vienna. The semi-detached houses occupied by the artist, Carl Moll, and designer Koloman Moser were covered some years ago in a post called ' Carl Moll: secessio plebis in montem sacrum'. It was a title I could not resist. Nor could another well-known blogger resist the idea I had had because it was immediately plagiarised much to everyone's disbelief.
The Villa Henneberg in particular gave expression to the idea that fine art, design, architecture, gardening and music all belonged together in the same domestic setting, even if it was nit a very comfortable one. Dress reform also played its part as you can see from the photograph of MacDonald. Gustave Klimt was famous for wandering about in long loose gown and Henneberg went to him for a portrait of his wife, Marie, to hang above the over-scale fireplace in the large hall, which you can see in the immaculate maquette above. It was made deliberately hard to say whether you were inside or out. The trellis pattern was borrowed from garden design and it naturally played a part outside.
The house was completed in 1902 in a style which I can feel no great enthusiasm for and which I suspect would generally be regarded to day as laboured if not heavy-going. What it gained in originality, it lost in charm. I used to think that was the way it was with the secession but it was much the same with other artist's houses. About 1906, Pierre-Auguste Renoir had a house built in a gnarled old olive grove above Cagnes sur Mer near Nice. Supposedly based on a local style of farmhouse, the exterior is striking for its overall lack of appeal, but is full of exquisite detail and such a a refined sense of colour, it makes the National Trust look like beginners.
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