Red and blue chair
The armchair designed by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld in 1918 , which only got its distinctive color scheme with primary colors around 1923 and was officially named a red-blue chair for the first time in 1958 , is considered a prime example of the avant-garde art movement De Stijl .
Basics
As a furniture maker and budding architect, Rietveld knew how to construct a chair, but was also able to fall back on existing models. For example , the Morris Chair from 1866, named after its designer William Morris , the seating machine (chair 670) by Josef Hoffmann from 1905 and, last but not least, a blue chair with a design by his teacher Piet Klaarhamer from 1904 Armrests where the seat and backrest are only slightly inclined and do not touch each other. As Rietveld adopted in his chair, the backrest is extended behind the seat to a cross connection near the floor, to which it is attached.
The Cartesian knot named after Rene Descartes , which arises in the red-blue chair where three slats meet from three directions, appears as early as 1480 in the painting St. Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini and was therefore known as a structural element at least since the Middle Ages .
design
Although Rietveld was always generous in passing on his production plans, he never publicly explained the technical side of his designs in more detail. About the design of the red and blue chair, he said that when combining the individual parts, he attached great importance to the fact that all parts should be of equal value and complement one another without one part dominating or subordinating to another.
In the design phase, Rietveld also transferred architectural techniques to furniture design. Most of his designs are based on a modular system. In the red and blue chair, for example, all dimensions are calibrated to the square profile of the slats.
construction
The chair consists of 17 machine-made pieces of beech wood, sawn flat, and 24 dowels made from a round rod. According to Rietveld, oak or any other hardwood can be used instead of beech wood.
The base consists of 13 slats with a square profile and 2 slats with a rectangular profile as armrests. 2 boards made of solid wood, which can be attached to the frame either with nails or screws, serve as the seat and backrest.
For the red-blue version, the frame is stained aniline black, the seat is lacquered in ultramarine and the backrest in crimson red, and all visible ends of the black slats are painted in chrome yellow. Other designs were either completely stained or, in some cases, painted in multiple colors.
Models
In the first version, the chair still consists of 19 parts. In addition to the 15 slats and 2 boards, there are two small rectangular panels, the lower edges of which have been sawn off at the angle of the seat and which are attached to the inside of the chair under the armrests. A photo of this chair , with the caption “Armchair by Rietveld” appeared in De Stijl magazine in September 1919.
It is not clear whether there have already been several copies of this prototype. Versions that were created around 1920–1922 and have survived to this day are almost identical to this version, but the diagonal cut has been dispensed with for the side panels, so they are rectangular. This version has not yet been painted, only stained. Preserved specimens can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London , the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Centraal Museum Utrecht .
In 1923 the design was revised by Rietveld. The side panels were discarded came for seat and back, then Triplex-called core plywood used - because sawn from solid wood panels tend to form deforming or cracks - also the bar profile 25 was increased mm mm to 30, which also is changed the width of the armrests, by which the new design can be recognized at first glance, even with monochrome chairs.
All chairs with surfaces made of triplex were varnished to be opaque. The red and blue color scheme was only one of the possible designs and, as the art historian and Rietveld specialist Marijke Kuper reconstructed, was probably chosen by Rietveld to match an [interior] designed by him at the same time for a household fair in which the The color accents of the exhibited furniture were related to the abstract pictures by Bart van der Leck, which were also kept exclusively in primary colors .
From 1925 onwards, Rietveld commissioned his assistant and former apprentice Gerard van de Groenekan , who at that time had been self-employed as a cabinet maker , to produce his furniture.
After Rietveld's death in 1964, the Rietveld heirs sold, among other things, the trademark rights to the red and blue chair to the Italian company Cassina, which since 1973 has been an industrial re-edition of the chair in a standardized form, with its own dimensions and colors that differ from the primary colors produces in series.
Because the dimensions are freely available, there are also countless individual products by hobby carpenters but also by professional craftsmen.
The Vitra Design Museum also offers the Rietveld chair as a miniature on a scale of 1: 6.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Marijke Kuper, Lex Reitsma, De stoel van Rietveld, NAi010, 2011, ISBN 978-90-5662-778-2
- ↑ a b Danielle Schirman TV documentary “The Rietveld Chair”, Arte France, 2009
- ^ Hollandsche Revue, October 1919
- ^ Peter Drijver, Johannes Niemeijer, Rietveld meubels om zelf te maken, 1989 ISBN 90-6868-280-6
- ↑ https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O58654/armchair-rietveld-gerrit-thomas/
- ↑ https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3894?sov_referrer=artist&artist_id=4922&page=1
- ^ Paul Overy, De Stijl, 1969, ISBN 0-500-20240-0