Arts and Crafts and De Stijl - chair design

I know a great deal about Arts and Crafts and a great deal about Bauhaus but nothing about De Stijl. This is strange.. since all three movements were European, and all three were late 19th century or early 20th century.

So many thanks to Bronwyn Watson who wrote about the influential member of De Stijl (1917-1932), the architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld. Rietveld had a great belief that furniture should be democratic — that is it should be simple, clean and functional, not ostentatious, not dripping with status. Therefore the furniture had to be cheap to make and should not have required the top craftsmen in the nation. His furn­iture had enduring appeal because it valued concepts like truth to materials, honesty to construction, revealing structure, no upholst­ery, nothing unnecessary, it was flexible and had movability, and it did not use extravagant materials. Note that this furniture was that nothing was hidden - it had a pared-back sensibility.

De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian went even further in describing a theory base for the movement. In the middle of WW1 carnage, he had the utopian belief that art could transform life by resolving all conflicts. He aimed for pure abstraction with a framework of formal geometric patterns that became objects of contemplation on the cosmic order.

Berlin Chair by Rietveld, 1925

De Stijl
National Gallery of Australia

How comfortable was this pared-back, no upholstery chair?

What made De Stijl immediately recognisable was that these Dutch artists and architects shared a collective passion for primary col­ours and black and white, and for the geometric forms of the square, the rectangle and the straight line. They were full of idealism, but idealism based on pure geometric abstraction. And on a strong asym­metricality.

Rietveld’s Berlin chair (see photo above) was designed for an art exhibition in Berlin in 1925. Note this was Rietveld's first asymmetrical chair. And note that each element was painted in a single colour, black, white or grey.

De Stijl's design language all sounded very familiar to me. The Arts and Crafts movement (c1870-1914) advoc­at­ed economic and social reform; ideology and practicalities were more important than a desire to create top-end, expensive decorative art objects. The designers wanted to avoid industrialised objects that demeaned traditional craftsmanship, so handcrafted work became val­uable in its own right. Arts and Crafts theorists valued the concept truth to materials.. with respect to the profound and innate characteristics of materials. In seeking essence and simplicity, the Arts and Crafts movement rediscovered the valuable qualities in simple and common materials.

Morris Chair, c1890
The design was adapted by William Morris & Co.

Arts and Crafts

Not only did machine-made products demean the craftsmen; machines also created mass-produced, poor quality substitutes of the hand­crafted arts. Yet handcrafted work was slower and therefore more expensive than machine­-made work. So it is ironic that Arts and Crafts designers found they were pricing themselves out of the very family market they had so keenly aspired to.

The Morris chair (see photo above) had a seat with a hinged reclining back and high armrests. The reclining angle adjusted through a row of pegs and holes in each arm. Or it could be controlled by a metal bar set in hooked back racks. In a design where comfort and versatility were paramount, this chair was most popular in c1890.

Depending on your perspective, the Bau­haus movement (1919-1933) also either gave birth to, or nourished modern design, a de­sign style recognised by its clean, simple lines and truth to mater­ials. The honest and integral design style allowed Form to Follow Function in the design process. So normally hidden materials such as steel had be exposed, and not covered, within the interior framework of furniture.

Bauhaus designers realised that most objects in the post-WW1 era were going to be machine-made. So they adapted the form of the objects to modern industrial processes and materials. The forms in the Bauhaus chairs (see photo below) were expected to be simple and light without decorative addit­ive, giving the sitter comfort, versatility and a fair price. Modern materials like steel, glass, bent wood and serviceable leather were preferred over richer, heavier mahogany etc.

Wassily Chair, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925.
Bauhaus 

Note the modern chrome-plated tubular steel frame.

In the end I needed to pull these three separate but seemingly overlapping movements together. The director of Bauhaus Walter Gropius decided that his academy had to generate simple, rational designs for mass-production that would be available to ordinary working families. He wanted designers like Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whose thinking already incorporated existing modernist movements like De Stijl, and who saw the machine as a force for aesthetic and social good. Bauhaus designers created prototypes for industrial production, their work based on simple geometric shapes and primary colours.