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

Art in America, Jan, 1994 by Overty Paul

(7.)From a letter written in English to Mr. and Mrs. De Leeuw, July 8, 1951, quoted in Bless, 1982, p. 53. De Leeuw was the director of Metz & Co., the Dutch furniture store which marketed much of Rietveld's furniture from the 1930s through the 1950s.

(8.)Both Judd and LeWitt have designed furniture themselves. LeWitt's extensive collection of Rietveld furniture was exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., in 1980. (Martin Friedman, "Echoes of De Stijl," in Mildred Friedman, ed., De Stijl 1917-1931: Visions of Utopia, Oxford, 1982, pp. 210-12.)

(9.)Daniele Baroni, The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, New York, 1978, p. 140; see also pp. 143-45. For further discussion of Rietveld's furniture as sculpture, see Hugh Honour, Cabinet Makers and Furniture Designers, London, 1969, p. 295; Paul Overy, De Stijl, London and New York, 1969, p. 127ff.; William Tucker, The Language of Sculpture, London, 1974, pp. 124-27.

(10.)De Stijl, vol. 2, no. 11, Sept. 1919, p. 133. The unpainted prototype of the Red Blue Chair (ca. 1918) was illustrated in the same issue (pl. XXII), but van Doesburg's comments were clearly intended to apply generally to Rietveld's early furniture constructed on similar principles. Along with the Red Blue Chair, he illustrated three other pieces in De Stijl in 1919-20: the High Back Chair and the Buffet, both designed ca. 1919 (De Stijl, vol. 3, No. 5, Mar. 1920, pl. VII), and the Child's High Chair, ca. 1918 (De Stijl, vol. 2, no. 9, July 1919, pl. XVIII).

(11.)"On De Stijl," quoted in G. Rietveld Architect, exhib. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Hayward Gallery, London, 1971-72, n.p.

(12.)Bertus Mulder, "Op zoek naar de weelde van de soberheid; herinneringen aan een persoonlijk contact met Gerrit Rietveld," architectuur/bouwen, vol. 4, no. 6/7, 1988, p. 69.

(13.)Mulder, 1988, p. 69.

(14.)The "Rietveld joint" is sometimes referred to as a "Cartesian node" because it supposedly represents the Cartesian coordinates in three-dimensional form. (Rietveld made a model of this joint many years later for display in a retrospective exhibition of his work, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, in 1958.)

(15.)Rietveld's tubular steel designs include metal versions of the Red Blue Chair and the Zig-Zag Chair (1932), produced and marketed by the Dutch furniture store Metz & Co. in the early 1930s. From 1930 on, Metz also manufactured and sold chairs made of bent metal rod and plywood (Beugelstoel), first designed by Rietveld in 1927.

(16.)The handwritten list with drawings is in the Rietveld-Schroder Archive, Centraal Museum, Utrecht. It is reproduced in Paul Overy, De Stijl, London, 1991, p. 78, and in Kuper and Van Zijl, 1992, p. 94.

(17.)The association of the primary colors with De Stijl was partly a retrospective "construction." In the early years De Stijl artists and designers just as often used secondary colors. (See Overy, 1991, pp. 11, 90.)

(18.)For the painting of the Red Blue Chair, see Kuper, 1983, pp. 19-20, and Kuper in Blotkamp, 1986, pp. 272-73. Rietveld had apparently already made a crib for one of his children decorated in primary colors as early as 1919 (Kuper in Blotkamp, 1986, p. 272). Mondrian only began to use primary colors consistently in his paintings in about 1921-22, although he had used them intermittently in some of his works from ca. 1917. Bart van der Leck was the first artist or designer associated with De Stijl to use primary color, as Mondrian acknowledged in the final (van Doesburg memorial) issue of De Stijl in 1932 (vol. 9, pp. 48-49).