Equipment for utopia - furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld, Hessenhuis, Antwerp, Belgium

Art in America, Jan, 1994 by Overty Paul

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888-1964) is known best as the author of a handful of iconic furniture and architectural designs linked to the modernist fine art tradition and closely associated with De Stij.(1) Of these, the most familiar are his Red Blue Chair (ca. 1918), which has often been compared to Mondrian's painting and is frequently mentioned in the literature on De Stijl, and the Schroder House (1924-25), which is regarded as one of the earliest masterpieces of the modern movement in architecture. However, the current retrospective of his work (organized by the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, and the Netherlands Architecture Institute) reveals that Rietveld was in fact a designer and an architect with a far more varied and extensive professional practice than is usually recognized.(2) In addition to his famous chair, he designed a number of other innovative pieces of furniture in the years immediately following World War I, and in the '20s and '30s he also created a large body of commercially manufactured wood and steel furniture. The Schroder House, designed in close collaboration with his female client, Truus Schroder, was Rietveld's first building;(3) many other residences, public institutions and housing projects followed, and toward the end of his life he was awarded major public architectural commissions such as the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Rietveld was born in Utrecht and lived there all his life. The son of a cabinetmaker, he started working in his father's shop at the age of 12. He appears to have had ambitions as an artist in his early 20s, attending evening classes in painting, anatomy, clay modeling and drawing.(4) He took on at least one portrait commission and in 1912 exhibited paintings at the Utrecht art society Kunstliefde (Love of Art), where painters such as Mondrian and Bart van der Leck, who were later to be associated with De Stijl, also showed their work.(5) Rietveld himself was closely involved with De Stijl from 1919 to 1931, though he seems to have had little, if any, personal contact with Mondrian, who had by then returned to work in Paris.(6)

Rietveld probably had to abandon the idea of a career as a professional painter for economic reasons. He had married in 1911, and the first of six children was born in 1913. Around that time, he returned to work for his father and did not set up on his own as an independent furniture-maker and designer until 1917. It seems quite possible that he might have become a painter if his financial circumstances had been more favorable. Many years later he wrote that architects were often "failed painters."(7) He was specifically referring to Theo van Doesburg, who had turned to architecture in the final years of his career, but perhaps he was also remembering his own early experience. In the late 19th and early 20th century, many designers were either "failed painters" or, like Henry van de Velde, had abandoned painting under the influence of Ruskin, Morris, Semper and Berlage in the belief that design and architecture were more socially useful than fine art. Since Rietveld became involved with left-wing politics shortly after starting his own business, his political beliefs may well have played a role in his decision to be a designer rather than a fine artist.

Nevertheless, for most people, Rietveld remains an "artist-designer" whose early modernist furniture, designed between 1918 and 1923, has the impact and formal qualities of painting and sculpture. And, indeed, those early pieces have frequently been written about as if they were sculpture. In the late 1960s and early '70s, there seemed to be obvious, if perhaps superficial, parallels between his furniture and the work of the American Minimalists as well as the early painted metal sculpture of Anthony Caro and his followers. Minimalists like Don Judd and Sol LeWitt became avid collectors of Rietveld furniture,(8) and the Dutch Conceptual artist Jan Dibbets acquired one of the earliest surviving examples of the unpainted Red Blue Chair. In 1978 Daniele Baroni compared Rietveld's Crate furniture of the '30s (a series of utility pieces designed during the Depression years and made from the type of cheap red spruce used for packing cases) to Arte Povera objects.(9)

The presentation of Rietveld's early furniture as sculpture goes back to the time that the Red Blue Chair, the High Back Chair (ca. 1919), the Buffet (ca. 1919) and the Child's High Chair (ca. 1918) were first introduced to an international audience by van Doesburg, who published pictures of them and discussed them in De Stijl in 1919 and 1920. "Through its new form," van Doesburg wrote, this furniture "gives a new answer to the question of what place sculpture will have in the new interior. Our chairs, tables, cabinets and other objects of use are the (abstract-real) images of our future interior."(10)

Rietveld himself sometimes wrote about his furniture as if it were sculpture, although more often he represented it as somewhere between function and symbol. He seems to have considered his early furniture designs as "experiments"--as efforts to invent a new type of form. The Red Blue Chair, the Child's High Chair, the Buffet and other pieces of so-called "slat furniture," as well as the slightly later asymmetrical, planar pieces like the Berlin Chair and the End Table (both 1923), were clearly first arrived at as exercises in form and then adapted to particular functions. Rietveld admitted as much when later characterizing the work of his De Stijl period. "To me," he said, "De Stijl represented a unit of construction and space-defining elements which I considered of prime importance. A practical realization was not always feasible. Function was for me a thing by itself which I never overlooked, it is true, but it did not come into play until the construction and spatial exercises in De Stijl had been completed."(11)