Gerrit Rietveld
Creator of the Red and Blue Chair.
Gerrit Rietveld was a cabinetmaker and architect of De Stijl. His Red and Blue Chair and the Rietveld Schröder House are icons of modernism.
Gerrit Rietveld was born in 1888 in Utrecht in the Netherlands. His father was a cabinetmaker, and Gerrit began working in his father's workshop at the age of eleven. At the same time he took evening classes in drawing and architecture. In 1917 he opened his own furniture workshop.
Around 1918 he created an armchair of straight boards and slats, at first unpainted. In 1919 he came into contact with the artists' group De Stijl, where Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and others were working towards a new art of straight lines and primary colours. In the early 1920s the chair was painted red, blue, yellow and black and became known as the Red and Blue Chair. It showed that a piece of furniture could be an abstract spatial composition.
Rietveld's best-known building is the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht of 1924, designed in close collaboration with the client, Truus Schröder-Schräder. The upper floor of the house can be reconfigured with sliding partitions, and the façade consists of freestanding planes, lines and fields of colour. In 2000 the house was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and it is managed by the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, which has the largest collection of his work. Rietveld and Schröder had a close relationship, and after his wife's death he moved into the house.
Rietveld continued to experiment with simple, inexpensive furniture. The Zig-Zag Chair from the early 1930s consists of four boards, and his crate furniture was intended to be buildable by anyone. In 1928 he was one of the founders of the international architects' organisation CIAM. After the Second World War he designed housing, schools and the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Rietveld died in 1964. His last major commission was the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which opened in 1973. The Red and Blue Chair and the Rietveld Schröder House are among the best-known works of modernism and have inspired architects and designers for a hundred years.