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Gerrit Rietveld - early Red and Blue Chair N° 231 by Cassina De Stijl Bauhaus

About the Item

RATIONAL SCULPTURE The red and blue chair by Gerrit Rietveld is one of the most iconic pieces of furniture in De Stijl design and a symbol of the modern design movement. It was designed by Rietveld in 1918 and later in the 1920s was given the characteristic colors red, blue, yellow and black, inspired by the color theory of Piet Mondrian. The chair consists of simple geometric shapes - straight lines and right angles dominate the design. It is made of wood and consists of thin slats for the frame and rectangular panels for the seat and backrest. The backrest is painted a vibrant blue. The seat is red. The supporting wooden elements (the slats) are black, while the connecting pieces at the ends are highlighted in yellow. The chair appears deliberately minimalist and reduced to its basic elements. The slats and panels seem to almost float together, as screws and other connecting elements are discreetly concealed. Itis not so much designed for comfort as it is an experimental exploration of space, line and color. It stands for the idea of merging art, architecture and design, which was a central idea of the De Stijl movement. The red and blue chair was not only designed as a piece of furniture, but as a kind of sculptural object that demonstrates the principles of neoplasticism in practice. Today, it is one of the best-known design classics of the 20th century and can be found in many museums of modern design. The chair shown here is an early production by Cassina with the number 231 and has a wonderful patina of use that you will not find on any other Red + Blue Chair! Take a look at the photos to get an impression - a great piece of contemporary history. Dear interior designers, architects and of course all other interested parties - due to the image compression of 1stdibs the photos here are unfortunately mostly rather spongy and possibly not suitable for customer presentations. feel free to contact us - we will send you high resolution photos in best quality! To judge colors and nuances correctly, please use a mac retina display to view our photos!

Creator:

Gerrit Rietveld (Designer)

Design:

Red and Blue Chair

Dimensions:

Height: 34.65 in (88 cm)Width: 25.79 in (65.5 cm)Depth: 32.68 in (83 cm)Seat Height: 13 in (33 cm)

Style:

De Stijl (In the Style Of)

Materials and Techniques:

Wood,Hand-Crafted

Place of Origin:

Italy

Period:

1910-1919

Date of Manufacture:

1980

Condition:

Wear consistent with age and use. Minor fading.

Seller Location:

Munster, DE

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU1391243237232

Red and Blue Chair

With its geometric composition and primary colors, the Red and Blue armchair has become the definitive symbol of the Dutch De Stijl (“the Style”) movement. The chair’s creator, Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), was perhaps an unlikely pioneer of this revolutionary aesthetic movement given his traditional path to making furniture. The son of a carpenter in Utrecht, Rietveld left school at age 11 to begin an apprenticeship with his father. Later, he attended night school and worked for a goldsmith. In 1917, Rietveld opened his own furniture workshop.

Although he trained as a cabinetmaker, Rietveld’s interests eventually grew beyond craftsmanship, and he began to focus closely on the intellectual concepts of design. He built objects from minimal materials and believed that a chair could provide more than rest for the body; the greater goal — the one he set for this chair — was to provide for the “well-being and comfort of the spirit.” On the underside of the seat he inscribed, “When I sit, I do not want to sit as my seated flesh likes, but rather as my seated spirit would sit, if it wove the chair for itself.”

Designed in 1918, the original Red and Blue armchair was neither red nor blue — it was made of beechwood. But in its geometric precision, the piece embodied the modernist De Stijl philosophy to achieve postwar harmony through a rigorous aesthetic of pairing basic shapes with a minimal color palette. Rietveld designed the chair using only wood that had been cut in standard, readily available sizes. In doing so, he hoped it would one day be mass produced. This move toward an ethos of industrialization was pure De Stijl, and would later influence movements like Bauhaus and International Style. Writer and architect Theo van Doesburg, who cofounded the movement with the artist Piet Mondrian, featured Rietveld’s chair in De Stijl, the magazine he edited and published that launched alongside the Dutch movement.

It wasn’t until approximately 1923 that Rietveld painted the chair in the colors it is known for today — the colors most frequently associated with Mondrian and De Stijl. In addition to furniture and decorative objects, Rietveld designed 100 buildings throughout his career but only one outside the Netherlands. By far the most important is the Rietveld Schröder House (1924), considered the only house built completely on De Stijl precepts. Cassina manufactures the Red and Blue chair today, and the ingenious simplicity of Rietveld’s construction continues to challenge designers as often as it delights them.

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Shop All Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld

Best known for his Red and Blue chair, a modernist icon created using only two plywood plates and 15 connecting bars, Dutch designer Gerrit Thomas Rietveld trained as a cabinetmaker, and his bold vision for furniture was supported by his expertise in construction and craftsmanship.

Born in Utrecht, Rietveld learned goldsmithing in addition to the cabinetry apprenticeship he had in his carpenter father’s workshop. He studied draftsmanship with architect Piet Klaarhamer at the Utrecht Museum of Applied Arts and opened his own furniture workshop in 1917. In the 1930s, Rietveld began to experiment with then-unusual materials like plywood and aluminum, and he pursued intellectual concepts through his design, even considering a seat as a resting place for the body and the soul.

Designed in 1918, the minimalist Red and Blue chair is widely coveted by collectors and gained admirers in the likes of legendary American sculptor and designer Donald Judd over the years. (Examples of Rietveld’s designs can be found in Judd’s restored home-museum in New York City.) The Red and Blue chair is so stunning in its geometric simplicity that it is one of the most important symbols of the Dutch art and design movement of the early 20th century called De Stijl, of which Rietveld was an important part. De Stijl means “the Style” and was an effort to express utopian values through pure abstraction in design and the use of primary colors.

Another example of Rietveld’s celebrated seating furniture is the Zig-Zag chair, which was commissioned by the Dutch department store Metz & Co. and intended to be mass-produced. The resulting design — to which the rights to manufacture were bought by Cassina in 1971 — is the essence of the De Stijl movement and an example of Rietveld’s experiments with jointless chairs made from a single material, wood. The Zig-Zag chair’s armless, legless, elegant form is pure abstraction, yet it is also sturdy and comfortable.

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Gerrit Rietveld Zeilmaker Version of Black Red and Blue Chair by Cassina

By Gerrit Rietveld, Cassina

Located in Barcelona, Barcelona

Chair designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1920. Relaunched in 2015. Manufactured by Cassina in Italy. One of the versions of the iconic model dated 1918. The structure is in black-stained beechwood with white contrasting parts. Seat and back in green lacquered multiplywood. The armchair can have a single seat and backrest cushion in fabric or leather. The black red and blue (Zeilmaker version) born from Rietveld’s chromatic experimentation While researching the origins of the red and blue model in collaboration with the Rietveld heirs, it emerged that the key idea of the first prototypes was based on the concept of spatial organization expressed through the monochrome tones of its elements. The first version was in fact produced in 1918 in completely unpainted wood. In the following years Rietveld proposed various examples, either monochrome or painted in different colors, depending on the requirements of his customers and the interiors for which the chairs were intended. As such, it comes as no surprise to find this 1920s version, presented as part of Cassina’s MutAzioni selection, created for the school teacher Wicher Zeilmaker with a black frame with white ends and a dark green painted seat and backrest. It was Rietveld’s ever-increasing involvement in the De Stijl movement that led him to also use primary colors on this model in 1923, and as such the chair became a veritable manifesto for the emerging neoplastic movement. Initially dubbed slat chair, Rietveld only gave it the name red and blue in the 1950s following its chromatic evolution. The various owners of the different examples used the chair as an abstract-realist sculpture in their interiors and, in some cases, as a simple tool for sitting on, adding cushions to make it more comfortable, just like Cassina offers for the black red and blue today. Production delay: 8-9 weeks Important information regarding images of products: Please note that some of the images show other colors and variations of the model, these images are only to present interior design proposals. The item that is selling is on the first image. Important information regarding color(s) of products: Actual colors may vary. This is due to the fact that every computer monitor, laptop, tablet and phone screen has a different capability to display colors and that everyone sees these colors differently. We try to edit our photos to show all of our products as life-like as possible, but please understand the actual color may vary slightly from your monitor About the designer: Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, born in Utrecht on 24 June 1888, seems possessed of two personalities, each so distinct that one might take his work to be that of more than one artist. The first personality is that seen in the craftsman cabinet-maker working in a primordial idiom, re-inventing chairs and other furniture as if no one had ever built them before him and following a structural code all of his own; the second is that of the architect working with elegant formulas, determined to drive home the rationalist and neoplastic message in the context of European architecture. The two activities alternate, overlap, and fuse in a perfect osmosis unfolding then into a logical sequence. In 1918 Rietveld joined the “De Stijl” movement which had sprung up around the review of that name founded the year before by Theo van Doesburg. The group assimilated and translated into ideology certain laws on the dynamic breakdown of compositions (carrying them to an extreme) that had already been expressed in painting by the cubists: the “De Stijl” artists also carefully studied the architectonic lesson taught by the great Frank Lloyd Wright, whose influence was widely felt in Europe at that time. Collaborating first with Robert van’t Hoff and Vilmos Huszar, then with Theo van Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren, Rietveld soon became one of the most distinguished interpreters of the neoplastic message. Among his most important works are: the Schröder house at Utrecht (1924); the “Row Houses” at Utrecht (1931-1934); the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennial (1954); the sculpture pavilion in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller at Otterloo and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (1955). Out of his equally important furniture, Cassina has chosen for its own production: the “Red and Blue” (1918), the “Zig-Zag” (1934), the “Schröder 1...

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