Skulpturel lænestol malet i De Stijl palet
A sculptural seat with a pure and rationalist form, this chair became an authentic Manifesto for Neoplasticism, embraced by the Dutch De Stijl movement in 1917. An outlook shared by Piet Mondrian, whose objective was to seek out the essential nature of things, combined with the harmonious equivalence of colors, and the use of right-angle. Rietveld produced his first prototypes in 1918, expressing the philosophy of organizing space using the same colors for similar components. He later applied this same approach to separate out constructional elements according to their function. Thus the base was black, and the seats colored. As a consequence, the name of the piece changed, from Slat Chair to Red and Blue.
Design Gerrit Thomas Rietveld
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, born in Utrecht on 24 June 1888, seems possessed of two personalities, each so distinct that one might take his work to be that of more than one artist. The first personality is that seen in the craftsman cabinet-maker working in a primordial idiom, re-inventing chairs and other furniture as if no one had ever built them before him and following a structural code all of his own; the second is that of the architect working with elegant formulas, determined to drive home the rationalist and neoplastic message in the context of European architecture. The two activities alternate, overlap, and fuse in a perfect osmosis unfolding then into a logical sequence. In 1918 Rietveld joined the “De Stijl” movement which had sprung up around the review of that name founded the year before by Theo van Doesburg. The group assimilated and translated into ideology certain laws on the dynamic breakdown of compositions (carrying them to an extreme) that had already been expressed in painting by the cubists: the “De Stijl” artists also carefully studied the architectonic lesson taught by the great Frank Lloyd Wright, whose influence was widely felt in Europe at that time.
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DIMENSIONER
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B 69 cm / D 83 cm / H 88 cm / SH 33 cm
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