Red/blue Chair
Designer: Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (Dutch, 1888-1964)
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: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 artist group that included Piet Mondrian. 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 features primary colors and 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.
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 features primary colors and 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.
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