It may be housed in the most famous Charles Rennie Mackintosh building in the world, but Glasgow School of Art says its links to the iconic architect are putting other artists in the shade.

While the school's administrators admit that the building attracts visitors from all over the globe, they believe that other talented former staff and students are being overlooked as a result of Mackintosh's popularity. To remedy the situation, the school has overhauled its in-house art collection and archives and pledged to lend as much as possible of its mostly unseen material to galleries around the world.

Peter Trowles, Taffner curator of the Mackintosh Collection at the Glasgow School of Art, revealed the change in direction yesterday during a lecture at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. “The connection with Mackintosh goes before us - it is a wonderful PR tool and one we want to continue,” he said. “But it has been a help and a hindrance.

“When I am giving international talks people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, you're that famous Mackintosh building', but they don't know anything about the school and what it does. These days we are trying to do more and more work centred around figures associated with the school. Those who came to the school in the 1950s could be the next Mackintosh for all we know.”

Glasgow School of Art was founded in 1865 and a competition was launched in 1896 to find a design for its new premises. Mackintosh, a former art school student, was announced as the winner and the building was completed in 1909.Its unique status has made the school a leading tourist attraction which attracted 23,000 paying visitors last year. Mr Trowles emphasised that he was not ungrateful but said that only about “half a per cent” of the work carried out by students and staff was known to the public because of the international obsession with Mackintosh. “Many more deserve recognition," Mr Trowles said. “We are a school of many parts.”

Among the artists the school is keen to promote is Robert Anning Bell, the art nouveau painter and illustrator who was head of the glass department at the school from 1911. Although Anning Bell was originally from London, the Glasgow school was bequeathed a significant collection of his work.

Others include Robert Stewart, who trained at the school in the 1940s before teaching there and designing for fashion houses such as Liberty and Pringle in the 1950s and 1960s.

The new focus was made possible with a £4.6million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has allowed the school to conserve and catalogue its vast range of material in an archive. It includes more than 18,000 pieces produced by former students and staff, including watercolours by Mackintosh, drawings by famous students from Jessie King, Eduardo Paolozzi and Joan Eardley and the only collection of architectural drawings by Eugene Bourdon, the Parisian engineer who became the first director of the institution's architectural department.

Since opening two months ago, the archive has attracted researchers from as far as New Yorkand has pieces on loan to Helsinki in Finland, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

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