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

Art in America, Jan, 1994 by Overty Paul

It seems likely that Rietveld's painterly ambitions and talents encouraged him to produce pieces which were as much formal experiments as functional furniture. And his fine-art interests no doubt led him to paint his furniture in the bright primary colors and complementary neutral gray, black and white associated with De Stijl.(17) But it was not until around 1923 that the Red Blue Chair was actually given its familiar colors--a treatment that made it look extraordinarily like a three-dimensional Mondrian.(18) The painted chair's resemblance to abstract painting or Constructivist sculpture was probably influential in securing its iconic place in histories of De Stijl and the modern movement from the 1930s onwards, but when Rietveld produced the Red Blue Chair and other experimental pieces of 1918-19, he was not yet familiar with Russian avant-garde art. By 1923, however, when he designed the Berlin Chair and the End Table, Russian work was widely circulated in reproduction in Western Europe. And it was perhaps these resemblances that caused his furniture from the De Stijl period to be better known than his later, more functional pieces.(19)

When it was first designed, and for the next decade and a half, the Red Blue Chair was not particularly privileged above Rietveld's other early furniture--pieces which were also illustrated in De Stijl and often received equal, and sometimes greater, attention elsewhere.(20) It was only from the mid-1930s on that the Red Blue Chair acquired the special status it still has today.(21) Important in this regard was its inclusion in a large exhibition of furniture design of the preceding 40 years at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the winter of 1934-35,(22) and the prominent position it was subsequently given in Alfred H. Barr's seminal "Cubism and Abstract Art" show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.(23)

From the very beginning, as indicated above, van Doesburg had promoted Rietveld's early furniture as fine art. In March 1920, a few months after his 1919 description of it as interior sculpture, he wrote a commentary in De Stijl about one specific Rietveld piece, the High Back Chair, which he compared to a "metaphysical" drawing by Giorgio de Chirico titled Solitudine (1917). The drawing depicts one of the mannequin figures which appear frequently in de Chirico's works of this period--an amalgam of a traditional artist's lay figure and the dummies used to dress shop windows at the time. The mannequin figure, a naked male, is placed in the foreground of a desolate open space (it could hardly be called a piazza) obviously on the periphery of the city. The figure is seated on a plinth in the foreground and is thrust so far forward that it makes the space seem claustrophobic. Its back is supported by a structure of wooden angles and triangles which allude to the drawing instruments of the architect, engineer or designer, objects that are frequent props in de Chirico's metaphysical paintings. These objects are "props" in a double sense of the word, for as well as looking like stage props they literally support the mannequin figure. For van Doesburg, there is a striking similarity between this figure and Rietveld's High Back Chair, which he calls "A Slender Space-Animal." For him, the chair's handling of open spaces is "ruthless" and in conflict with its function as a seat; it has the "mute [or dumb! eloquence of a machine."