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

Art in America, Jan, 1994 by Overty Paul

But, ironically, by the time Rietveld began to attach the Morgenstern label underneath the Red Blue Chair in the early 1930s, the chair had in fact outgrown that role. It was already a part of design history, well on its way to becoming an icon of the modern movement. Furthermore, it must also by then have appeared quite clumsy and old-fashioned in comparison with the sleek, chromed-steel and molded-plywood furniture of the late '20s and early '30s.

Sitting in the unpainted Red Blue Chair outside his workshop around 1918, Rietveld had looked confident enough, as if he anticipated that the chair would make his reputation and become a canonic modernist object. Another photograph, taken later, shows Truus Schroder and her young daughter Han sitting in chairs designed by Rietveld in the dining area of the newly completed Schroder House. Full of self-assurance and sanguine about the future life that they will lead in this modern house, they gaze directly at the viewer. Here, too, the act of sitting seems to suggest an assertion of faith in the modern.

For contemporary viewers, however, there is an odd sense of pathos in both photographs. These people look out at us steadfastly, from an age of belief and a world that is now lost to us. Unlike the confident, quizzical young Rietveld and the grinning young apprentices outside his Utrecht workshop, we ourselves now exist in a landscape more like the one inhabited by de Chirico's mannequin--the nondescript open space of the postindustrial world. And perhaps the appropriate backdrop for us might be de Chirico's desolate and derelict factory, the symbol of a failed and surpassed modernity.

Writing about Rietveld after his death in 1964, the British architect Colin St. John Wilson said that he made "the first chairs, the first light-fittings, table, cupboard, radio-set, desk, flexible walls--in short the first house and the equipment in it to match the dream of a world in which only the New could be marvellous and desirable." According to Wilson, Rietveld created a "new canon" whose plastic rules "were few and were formulated like a set of philosophical propositions about elements and their relations; their aim was to celebrate a faith as much as they were constructive means; they were tools of a positivism claiming mystical insight."(33) Four years later, in 1968, John Berger wrote of the Red Blue Chair: "The Chair, hand-made, stands there like a chair waiting to be mass-produced: yet in certain ways it is as haunting as a painting by Van Gogh. Why should such an austere piece of furniture have acquired--at least temporarily for us--a kind of poignancy?" Berger's answer is that the era of modernism had come to an end in the early 1960s: "Thus today we can see the prophecies of the early European artistic avant-gardes in a different light. The continuity between us and them--such as we might have believed in an attenuated form only ten years ago--has now been broken." And Berger too finds "an almost unconscious doubt expressed in the Rietveld [the Red Blue] chair," concluding: "That chair haunts us not as a chair but as an article of faith."(34)