Red/blue Chair

Gerrit Rietveld always identified himself primarily as a furniture maker, although he later came to be known as an innovative architect. In 1919, Rietveld joined the De Stijl movement (“The Style”), a Dutch artist group that included Piet Mondrian. De Stijl advocated purity of form and rejected the subjectivity of the artist, but Rietveld continued, in his own words, to “march to a different drummer.”

The chair’s simple but solid back is unattached to the legs, a quite modern innovation at the time. The seat itself forms a right angle that seems to float at a slant above the angular open frame. Like Mondrian’s two-dimensional compositions, Red/Blue Chair features primary colors and uses negative space as effectively as positive space in the construction of the base. Finally, the consideration made for mass production by using standard-sized wood contributes to the chair’s celebrated status in the history of 20th-century design.