NAi Publishers: Rietveld's Chair

Marijke Kuper
Lex Reitsma (film)

Rietveld's Chair

Design: Lex Reitsma, Illustrated (colour and b/w), Paperback + DVD, 192 pages, size: 15.5 x 19 cm
English/ Dutch edition, ISBN 978-90-5662-778-2, € 24.95 / OUT OF PRINT
March 2011

In association with Premsela, Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion

Publication in the context of Rietveld Year 2010 and the ‘Rietveld’s Universe’ exhibition at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht from 20 October 2010 to 11 January 2011.

Rietveld's Chair The Red-Blue Chair by furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld belongs, along with the Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe and the Chaise Longue by Le Corbusier, to the most famous pieces of modern furniture in the world. Since 2006 the Red-Blue Chair has figured as the visual icon of De Stijl in the Canon of Dutch History.

The chair is found in important museum collections all over the world. Rietveld’s Chair is the result of an investigation into the genesis and development, use and reception of this modern classic by art historian Marijke Kuper. The book presents new facts and visual materials as well as an overview of all the prewar examples of the chair discovered thus far. It is an openended overview, because there is still a chance that an unknown original model of the Red-Blue Chair, or one presumed lost, could suddenly surface somewhere.

In the documentary by graphic designer and filmmaker Lex Reitsma, the furniture restorer Jurjen Creman reconstructs the prototypical version of the chair, which is no longer extant. Using family photos and letters, Professor Erik A. de Jong explains how his grandparents, the architect Piet Elling and Diek Elling-Nijland, lived with their Rietveld furniture in the 1920s. The footage of auction houses and the art trade stands in sharp contrast with this, demonstrating how nowadays the chair has lost its original function and has instead acquired an iconic value that is expressed in the astronomical sums of money that examples of it command. Its museological status is explained by curators from internationally renowned institutions such as the Rijksmuseum and the Victoria & Albert Museum.