Red/blue Chair
Manufacturer: G. van de Groenekan
Date: Designed 1918; Made between 1946-1956
Dimensions:
H: 34 7/8 in. (88.4 cm); W: 23 5/8 in. (60 cm); Depth: 29 3/4 in. (75.5 cm)
Medium: Beech (ebonized and painted)
Classification: Furniture
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott
Object number: 1985.48
Label Text:“I do not make my furniture for ‘the people’ in the sense that I let the people make demands and deliver judgments… But I am myself one of the people, and I am creating them according to my own needs.” –Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, 1920
Gerrit Rietveld always identified himself primarily as a furniture maker, although he later came to be known as an innovative architect. In 1919, Rietveld joined the De Stijl movement (“The Style”), a Dutch artists’ group that included Piet Mondrian, whose painting is also in this gallery. De Stijl advocated purity of form and rejected the subjectivity of the artist, but Rietveld continued, in his own words, to “march to a different drummer.”
The chair’s simple but solid back is unattached to the legs, a quite modern innovation at the time. The seat itself forms a right angle that seems to float at a slant above the angular open frame. Like Mondrian’s two-dimensional compositions, Red/Blue Chair uses negative space as effectively as positive space in the construction of the base. Finally, the consideration made for mass production by using standard-sized wood contributes to the chair’s celebrated status in the history of 20th-century design.
Gerrit Rietveld always identified himself primarily as a furniture maker, although he later came to be known as an innovative architect. In 1919, Rietveld joined the De Stijl movement (“The Style”), a Dutch artists’ group that included Piet Mondrian, whose painting is also in this gallery. De Stijl advocated purity of form and rejected the subjectivity of the artist, but Rietveld continued, in his own words, to “march to a different drummer.”
The chair’s simple but solid back is unattached to the legs, a quite modern innovation at the time. The seat itself forms a right angle that seems to float at a slant above the angular open frame. Like Mondrian’s two-dimensional compositions, Red/Blue Chair uses negative space as effectively as positive space in the construction of the base. Finally, the consideration made for mass production by using standard-sized wood contributes to the chair’s celebrated status in the history of 20th-century design.
On view
In Collection(s)