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Red and Blue Chair
Iconic Designs

Red and Blue Chair

About the Design

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.

Gerrit Rietveld Red And Blue Chair

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Red & Blue De Stijl Armchair by Gerrit Rietveld, vintage 1970-80s
By Gerrit Rietveld
Located in Vorst, BE
The icon of the "De Stijl" movement, created in 1917 by Gerrit Rietveld. This chair is a one off piece, made by a German engineer in the 1970s for his private use. This is a very w...
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Italian Bauhaus Armchair Red and Blue by Rietveld 1st production Cassina 1971
By Cassina, Gerrit Rietveld
Located in MIlano, IT
Italian Bauhaus Armchair Red and Blue by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld for Cassina 1971 Armchair mod. Red and Blue entirely in wood painted in yellow, red, blue and black. The chair has an ...
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Vintage Red and Blue Chair by Gerrit Rietveld
By Gerrit Rietveld
Located in PRAHA 5, CZ
Iconic chair designed by Dutch artist Gerrit Rietveld between 1918 - 1923. This particular piece comes from early 1970's. Manufacturer is unknown however all the joints and overall c...
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Gerrit Rietveld Red and Blue Chair for Cassina, Italy, new
By Gerrit Rietveld, Cassina
Located in Berlin, DE
Chair designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1918. Relaunched in 1973. Manufactured by Cassina in Italy.
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Pair of Gerrit Rietveld 'Red and Blue Chair' by Cassina
By Gerrit Rietveld, Cassina
Located in London, GB
A sculptural seat with a pure and rationalist form, this chair became an authentic Manifesto for Neoplasticism, embraced by the Dutch De Stijl movement in 1917. An outlook shared by ...
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Gerrit Thomas Rietveld Red and Blu Chair for Cassina
By Cassina, Gerrit Rietveld
Located in bari, IT
A world icon of neo-plasticist design this chair armchair called Rood Blauwe (Red and Blue) by its Dutch designer Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Cassina production in the 1960s.
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Gerrit Rietveld Zeilmaker Version of Black Red and Blue Chair by Cassina
By Cassina, Gerrit Rietveld
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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Vintage Modernist Design Rietveld Red & Blue Chair by Cassina, 1970s
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The red & blue chair is also known as the “Rietveld Chair” after its designer Gerrit Rietveld, counts as one of the most recognizable pieces designed by De Stijl movement in the 1920...
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More Gerrit Rietveld Designs
Gerrit Rietveld Red And Blue Chair
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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. ...
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“It is not a chair but a designer joke,” Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964) famously said of the piece that would, ironically, become perhaps his most recognizable chair design. Introduced in 1934, the Zig-Zag chair was the result of Dutch department store Metz & Co having enlisted Rietveld to create a chair for mass production.By this time, Rietveld had gained international acclaim for designs like his famous Red and Blue chair as well as the groundbreaking Rietveld Schröder House (1924) in his...
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