Red and Blue Chair Gerrit Rietveld

RED AND BLUE CHAIR

 

Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), a Dutch furniture designer and architect, created his Red-Blue Chair in 1917, but the bright colours and, indeed the name by which it became known, were not adopted until several years later.Originally made in plain beech wood, the design was deliberately kept as simple as possible because Rietveld wanted it to be mass-produced rather than crafted by hand. The pieces of wood that are used are all in the standard measurements of lumber that was available at the time.

 

Two years after making the chair, Rietveld joined the De Stijl movement and it was under the auspices of its most famous member, Piet Mondrian that, in 1923, the chair was painted in the distinctive colours of red, yellow, blue and black.The De Stijl movement was founded in 1917 and its members believed in pure abstraction by reducing pieces to their essential forms and pure colours. Furniture was simplified to horizontal and vertical lines and they used only the primary colours with black and white.

 

Frame in black stained beech seat blue and back red in lacquered multi plywood

Height: 88cm Seat height: 33cm x Width: 65.5cm x Depth: 83cm

"The chair (read Red and Blue Chair) was specifically built to show that it is possible to create something beautiful, a spatial creation, with simple machine- processed parts. I cut a board of wood into planks and squares. I then sawed the middle part into two for the seat and the backrest, and I made the frame part out of the different lengths of plank. But as I was working on the chair, it never crossed my mind that one day it would become so significant that it would even influence architecture." Gerrit Rietveld, about the Red and Blue Chair.














The movement reached its apotheosis between 1923-24, when Rietveld designed a house for Dutch socialite Truus Schröder and her three children in Utrecht, Netherlands. The Rietveld Schröder House, as it became known, is the only building to have been made completely according to the De Stijl movement’s principles.

Schröder, who was closely involved in the design, requested the house be made without interior walls as she wanted a connection between the inside and outside. There was an open-plan layout downstairs, while upstairs could be divided by a system of sliding and revolving panels giving almost endless permutations to the space.
The Rietveld chair fitted in perfectly and appeared to float on the black floors.
Schröder lived there until her death in 1985 and the house was later opened as a museum.