Red and Blue Chair

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld – Red and Blue Chair, 1917

The red and blue chair (in Dutch: Rood-blauwe stoel, / ro: t 'blawə stu: l /) is a piece of furniture designed by the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld in 1917.
Rietveld had made a prototype of the chair already in the summer of 1918, well before – therefore – of meeting with Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, founding fathers of the De Stijl group. It was only after Rietveld joined this group, however, that the Chair was finally brought to fruition. In fact, De Stijl preached an art form capable of restoring, through harmonious proportional relationships between zones and colors, the ideal structure of space: to this principle all the works attributable to the group responded, and in particular those of Mondrian, author of famous paintings where the effect of balance and harmony is achieved, with implications also astray, thanks to the use of black lines intertwined at an angle and vivid backgrounds of primary colors, black and white.

It is no coincidence, therefore, that if the red and blue chair is considered a three-dimensional embodiment of the figurative principles that underlie Mondrian's art. The chair is made up of fifteen beech wood slats, aggregated together in such a way as to form a network of lines and planes based on verticality and horizontality: in this linear grid, then, two axes of plywood are inserted, the backrest and seat. In full harmony with De Stijl's poetics, the various constituent elements of the chair are assembled by simple juxtaposition and overlap without getting stuck or interpenetrating: this aggregative criterion generates a chair with constituent elements reduced to a minimum, almost without mass or volume, which does not interrupt the space in which it is placed ….Wikipedia …. >>