selected Publications

  • Current Masters World Wide Art Books/Artavita, Santa Barbara, CA, 2023

  • Excellent Art, Enter-into-Art, Bonn, Germany, 2023

  • Art in Dialogue with Nature, Bonn, Germany, 2022

  • Odyssey of Life, Enter-Into-Art, Bonn, Germany, 2022

  • Moonlight Sonatas, Enter-Into-Art, Bonn, Germany, 2021

  • Easel to Edifice, Common Ground Research Networks, February 2019 (see below)

  • The First Berliner Art Book, Art Management Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 2017, 2018, 2019

  • The Divine Sarah: Seeking Immortality through Film, Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature, and Ideas, Spring 2015, Issue 35

  • Hindsight/Foresight: Two Art Nouveau Masters Wed Traditional Craft to Industrial Innovation, Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal, Vol. 5, Issue 3

  • Interview with Miriam Kotzin Per Contra: The International Journal of The Arts, Literature, and Ideas, Winter, 2009

  • The Two Cultures: The Literary Moderns Revisited The Forum on Public Policy, The Oxford Round Table, Winter, 2007

  • Charlotte Salomon: Life or Theater?, Bulletin of The Center for Holocaust Studies, The University of Vermont, Burlington, Fall, 2001

  • Learning to Bow, Bruce Feiler, book review, Philadelphia Inquirer, February, 1992

  • Discord in a Japanese Sculpture Garden, Vassar Quarterly, May, 1989

  • Part-Time Pathos, Temple University Faculty Herald, December, 1984

  • Claire Evans, American Artist, March, 1981

Easel to Edifice

Intersections in the Art Nouveau Paths of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Henry Van de Velde

by Judith E Stone

Easel to Edifice traces the professional development of two Art Nouveau masters, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Henry van de Velde, who shared a commonality rare among the creative figures who played central roles in that turn-of-the-century design movement. Both began their careers with a lifetime of easel art-making as their goal, but ultimately redirected their energies to the functional realms of architecture and the applied arts.

One can, moreover, point to the other similarities between the two innovators. For one, while most at home with the painstaking precision of hand craftsmanship, both were, at the same time, drawn to the advantages of industrial production: speed, volume, and product uniformity. For another, both found greater appreciation for their groundbreaking efforts on foreign soil than in their home countries, Mackintosh in Vienna’s Eigth Secession Exhibition, van de Velde in Siegfried Bing’s Parisian gallery, Maison Art Nouveau and the legendary, otherwise all-German Deutscher Werkbund. Finally, like their Art Nouveau peers, both masters were significantly influenced by the norms of Japanese design, among them the stripping away of superfluous surface ornament and the stylization of natural forms.

There remains, however, one parting of the ways in the careers of the two masters, a divergence linked to the emergence of women as creative forces in design. The pooling of skills by Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret MacDonald, in the completion of major commissions, added to the freedom given the couple by the entrepreneurial Catherine Cranston in the fitting out of her Glaswegian tearooms, funds no parallel in van de Velde’s career path. The striking impact of women on today’s design cosmos is owed in, in large part, to these exceptional Scotswomen.