Red and Blue Chair
A chair like a three-dimensional Mondrian: boards and rails that cross without meeting. The colours came a few years after the first version.
The rails end in yellow tips – they seem to continue out into the room.
Gerrit Rietveld was a Dutch cabinetmaker and architect from Utrecht. He made the first version of the chair around 1917–1918, when it was unpainted. Shortly afterwards he came into contact with the artists of De Stijl, a movement founded by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, among others. The coloured version, which has become the best known, was created in the early 1920s. Rietveld had learned his trade in his father’s furniture workshop and had no formal training as an architect.
The chair consists of straight boards and rails that cross one another. The backrest is a red panel and the seat a blue one. The frame is black, and the ends of the rails are painted yellow. The rails pass by each other at the intersections, so that they appear to float. There is no decoration and there are no curved forms.
The form is built from simple geometric elements. The backrest slopes backwards, and the seat slopes down towards the back. The chair looks like a three-dimensional version of Mondrian’s paintings, with straight lines and pure colours. It was meant to show how space can be divided by lines and planes without being enclosed.
The chair is made of wood in standard sizes, which was intended to make it easy to produce. The parts are joined with dowels and screws. Rietveld wanted to show that furniture could be made from simple, industrial parts. In practice most examples were made by hand in his workshop. The dimensions corresponded to ordinary timber available on the market, and in principle anyone could cut the parts.
The chair has been interpreted as a manifesto of De Stijl’s ideas: to strip away everything superfluous and achieve universal harmony through basic forms and colours. It has been criticised as uncomfortable, and Rietveld himself stressed that it was an experiment in form and space more than an ordinary piece of seating.
Rietveld later became known as an architect. In 1924 he designed the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht together with Truus Schröder. The house is built on the same principles as the chair and is now a World Heritage Site. He also designed other furniture, such as the Zig-Zag Chair of the 1930s. In the 1950s his designs included the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
The Red and Blue Chair is today an icon of modern design. It is in many museums, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It is still produced under licence by an Italian furniture company. It has inspired architects and designers and shows how close art and design can be.