Rietveld and his colleagues in the de Stijl art and architecture movement sought to create a utopia based on a harmonic human-made order, which they believed could renew Europe after the devastating turmoil of World War I. New forms, in their view, were essential to this rebuilding. from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 86 Licensing of MoMA images and videos is handled by Art Resource (North America) and Scala Archives (all other geographic locations). All requests should be addressed directly to those agencies, which supply high-resolution digital image files provided to them directly by the Museum. This record is a work in progress. The Red and Blue Chair is a chair designed in 1917 by Gerrit Rietveld. It represents one of the first explorations by the De Stijl art movement in three dimensions. The original chair was constructed of unstained beech wood and was not painted until the early 1920s.
[1] Fellow member of De Stijl and architect, Bart van der Leck, saw his original model and suggested that he add bright colours.[2] He built the new model of thinner wood and painted it entirely black with areas of primary colors attributed to De Stijl movement. The effect of this color scheme made the chair seem to almost disappear against the black walls and floor of the Schröder house where it was later placed.[3] The areas of color appeared to float, giving it an almost transparent structure. The Museum of Modern Art, which houses the chair in its permanent collection, a gift from Philip Johnson, states that the red, blue,and yellow colors were added around 1923.[5] The chair also resides at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.[6] It features several Rietveld joints. The Red and Blue Chair was reported to be on loan to the Delft University of Technology Faculty of Architecture as part of an exhibition. On May 13, 2008, a fire destroyed the entire building, but the Red and Blue Chair was saved by firefighters.
As of 2012, it resides in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota[]. As of 2013, it has been moved to Auckland, New Zealand[]. ^ TU Delft fire news storyGerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), a Dutch furniture designer and architect, created his Red-Blue Chair in 1917, but the bright colours and, indeed the name by which it became known, were not adopted until several years later.Originally made in plain beech wood, the design was deliberately kept as simple as possible because Rietveld wanted it to be mass-produced rather than crafted by hand. The pieces of wood that are used are all in the standard measurements of lumber that was available at the time.Two years after making the chair, Rietveld joined the De Stijl movement and it was under the auspices of its most famous member, Piet Mondrian, that, in 1923, the chair was painted in the distinctive colours of red, yellow, blue and black. The De Stijl movement was founded in 1917 and its members believed in pure abstraction by reducing pieces to their essential forms and pure colours.
Furniture was simplified to horizontal and vertical lines and they used only the primary colours with black and white.The movement reached its apotheosis between 1923-24, when Rietveld designed a house for Dutch socialite Truus Schröder and her three children in Utrecht, Netherlands. The Rietveld Schröder House, as it became known, is the only building to have been made completely according to the De Stijl movement’s principles.Schröder, who was closely involved in the design, requested the house be made without interior walls as she wanted a connection between the inside and outside. There was an open-plan layout downstairs, while upstairs could be divided by a system of sliding and revolving panels giving almost endless permutations to the space.The Rietveld chair fitted in perfectly and appeared to float on the black floors.Schröder lived there until her death in 1985 and the house was later opened as a museum. It has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2000 and was depicted on a euro coin issued by the Royal Dutch Mint earlier this year.
Design Icon: Rietveld Red & Blue Chair Design: Red and Blue Chair Designer: Gerrit Rietveld (Dutch, 1888-1964) Date: 1918 (colors added in 1923) Country of Origin: The Netherlands Associated Movement: De Stijl (pronounced “de style”) Materials & Construction: lacquered beech wood Background: Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue chair is one of the most well-known icons of the De Stijl movement, a design ideology that sprang to life in post-WWI Holland. Also known as “Neoplasticism,” the movement championed extreme abstraction through the use of severe horizontals and verticals and primary colors. With proponents of the style ranging from the movement’s founder, Theo Van Doesburg to the painter Piet Mondrian, it has been posited that De Stijl’s distilled aesthetic was a response to the chaos and turmoil of the first World War—an effort to create harmony and order in people’s lives. While Rietveld was, like many, a Modernist designer interested in creating designs that were ergonomic and able to be easily reproduced, he also longed for his work to transcend material function, to allow for spiritual enrichment, as well.