Reading around the subject of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld and the De Stijl movement he is so closely associated with, what really stands out today; around one hundred years on, is how the atmosphere in which they worked was so politically and philosophically charged.

Rietveld and his contemporaries, whether in the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands, or over at the Bauhaus in Germany, were making art and design that was motivated not just by the desire to make a nice chair, a pleasing reading light, or a beautiful painting, but by the notion that these objects had the potential to change society and culture, and to elevate the living experience of those that used them. Rietveld, by the age of forty, with a relatively small number of objects and one incredible house, had somehow managed to bring the ideas of the group to life, in such a lucid way, that the reverberations are still felt today.

The son of a cabinet-maker, Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was born in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1888. After taking an apprenticeship in his father’s workshop as a teenager, he went on to train first as a draughtsman at a goldsmiths workshop, and then attended architecture drawing classes in the evenings. He also taught himself to paint, make models and was an active member of the Kunstliefde art association, one of the oldest in the Netherlands. In 1917, he established his own cabinet-making business in Utrecht, and a year later was introduced to the De Stijl (meaning “The Style”) group, a movement centred around a magazine of the same name, and led by artists including Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrain, Vilmos Huszár and the architects J.J.P Oud and Rob van t’Hoff.

The group ideas were based “on an idealist philosophy that sought an art embodying a new vision of modern life”, explains John Heskett in his Thames and Hudson book on Industrial Design. Influenced by ideas about the mathematical order of the universe, the group focused on formal compositions of horizontal and vertical lines, and worked only with primary colours. Heskett asserts that “The equation of geometric forms with machine production, seen as a means of extending harmony throughout the visible environment, lent a strong social-utopian emphasis to their theories.” Rietveld was very taken with the ideas of the group, and became one of the first members. He soon designed a number of objects based on the theories of the group, which were also known, through Mondrian’s ideas, as Neo-Plasticism.

With a keen interest in production methods, standardisation, and the ideas around modern manufacturing, Rietveld had already been creating chair and furniture designs that he hoped would be mass produced; they also happened to fit well with the idea of the De Stijl group. His High Chair for a child, first created in 1915, and his unpainted version of the famous Red/Blue Chair, from 1917-18, were stripped back utilitarian objects of great beauty and elegant construction. He first painted a version of the Red/Blue chair in accordance with the group’s colour theories in 1921 or 1923, depending on what source you read. A painted version of the chair was included in an exhibition at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923, and published in the De Stijl magazine in the same year. It was hugely influential then, and has remained so for over a century. As Heskett puts it: “It was a fundamental structural redefinition of the chair, without precedent.” It has remained a kind of motif for the modern movement, and is probably one of the few chairs that is recognised the world over.

Following on from this, Rietveld continued to experiment with furniture designs based on the theories of the group, while in 1921 he also began a fruitful collaboration with the socialite and interior decorator Truus Schröder-Schräder. They worked on the development and build of a house in Utrecht, which was completed in 1924 and became known as the Rietveld-Schröder House. Much like the Red/Blue chair, the house is “the programmatic expression of De Stijl.” As detailed in the entry on Rietveld in the Encyclopedia of 20th Century Architecture by Thames and Hudson. “Here the use of a lightweight steel skeleton made possible a flexible, continuous interior space without enclosed rooms, and even the boundaries between inner and outer spaces are minimised.”