Thursday, May 12, 2022

Artist of the Day, May 12, 2022: Gerrit Rietveld, a Dutch furniture designer and architect (#1567)

 Gerrit Rietveld (1888 –1964) was born in Utrecht as the son of a joiner. He left school at 11 to be apprenticed to his father and enrolled at night school before working as a draughtsman for C. J. Begeer, a jeweller in Utrecht, from 1906 to 1911.

By the time he opened his own furniture workshop in 1917, Rietveld had taught himself drawing, painting and model-making. He afterwards set up in business as a cabinet-maker.

Rietveld designed his Red and Blue Chair in 1917 which has become an iconic piece of modern furniture. Hoping that much of his furniture would eventually be mass-produced rather than handcrafted, Rietveld aimed for simplicity in construction. In 1918, he started his own furniture factory, and changed the chair's colors after becoming influenced by the De Stijl movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year in which he became an architect. The contacts that he made at De Stijl gave him the opportunity to exhibit abroad as well. In 1923, Walter Gropius invited Rietveld to exhibit at the Bauhaus.

He built the Rietveld Schröder House, in 1924, in close collaboration with the owner Truus Schröder-Schräder. Built in Utrecht on the Prins Hendriklaan 50, the house has a conventional ground floor, but is radical on the top floor, lacking fixed walls but instead relying on sliding walls to create and change living spaces. The house has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. His involvement in the Schröder House exerted a strong influence on Truus' daughter, Han Schröder, who became one of the first female architects in the Netherlands.

Rietveld broke with De Stijl in 1928 and became associated with a more functionalist style of architecture, known as either Nieuwe Zakelijkheid or Nieuwe Bouwen. The same year he joined the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. From the late 1920s he was concerned with social housing, inexpensive production methods, new materials, prefabrication and standardisation. In 1927 he was already experimenting with prefabricated concrete slabs, a very unusual material at that time. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, all his commissions came from private individuals, and it was not until the 1950s that he was able to put his progressive ideas about social housing into practice, in projects in Utrecht and Reeuwijk.

Rietveld designed the Zig-Zag Chair in 1934 and started the design of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was finished after his death.

In 1951 Rietveld designed a retrospective exhibition about De Stijl which was held in Amsterdam, Venice and New York. Interest in his work revived as a result. In subsequent years he was given many commissions, including the Dutch pavilion for the Venice Biennale (1953), the art academies in Amsterdam and Arnhem, and the press room for the UNESCO building in Paris. Designed for the display of small sculptures at the Third International Sculpture Exhibition in Arnhem's Sonsbeek Park in 1955, Rietveld's ‘Sonsbeek Pavilion’ was rebuilt at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 1965. Due to irreparable damages caused by regular decay, it was once again rebuilt, this time with new materials, in 2010. In order to handle all these projects, in 1961 Rietveld set up a partnership with the architects Johan van Dillen and J. van Tricht built hundreds of homes, many of them in the city of Utrecht.

His work was neglected when rationalism came into vogue, but he later benefited from a revival of the style of the 1920s thirty years later.

Rietveld had his first retrospective exhibition devoted to his architectural work at the Central Museum, Utrecht, in 1958. When the art academy in Amsterdam became part of the higher professional education system in 1968 and was given the status of an Academy for Fine Arts and Design, the name was changed to the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in honor of Rietveld. "Gerrit Rietveld: A Centenary Exhibition" at the Barry Friedman Gallery, New York, in 1988 was the first comprehensive presentation of the Dutch architect's original works ever held in the U.S. The highlight of a celebratory “Rietveld Year” in Utrecht, the exhibition “Rietveld’s Universe” opened at the Centraal Museum and compared him and his work with famous contemporaries like Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.
© 2022. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Gerrit Rietveld or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

 Gerrit Rietveld
 Gerrit Rietveld at work
Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, 1965-2010
Red and Blue Chair, 1917
 Elling buffet cabinet (Cassina), 1919
 Hoge Stoel Highback Chair, 1919
 Berlin chair, 1923
 Child's wheelbarrow, 1923
Stool, 1923-24
The Rietveld Schröder House, 1924 (private residence until 1985)
The Rietveld Schröder House, 1924 (private residence until 1985)
Schroeder house End table, 1924-60
 Table Lamp, 1925
Beugel (Bow) Child's Chair 1927–30
Beugel (Bow) Child's Chair 1927–30
Crate chair and desk, 1934
Crate chair, 1934
Crate chair, 1934 detail
 Zig-Zag Chair, 1934
 Utrecht (Cassina), 1935
 New Amsterdam, 1937 blueprint
 New Amsterdam, 1937
Armchair for Metz & Co, 1942
 The Danish Chair, 1949
 Dutch pavilion for the 1953 Venice Biennale
Mondial (Gispen), 1958
Mondial (Gispen), 1958
 Press Room chair, 1958
 Rietveld, 1958 Centra Museum Utrecht
Slat chair Holland, 1960
 Steltman Chair, 1968
 Steltman Chair, 1968
  Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, 1973
  Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, 1973
Armchairs, A Pair

 

1 comment:

  1. Some of those chairs can still be seen all over the world. Great work.

    ReplyDelete