Gerritt Reitveld

Gerritt Reitveld

Red and Black

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, born in Utrecht, Holland, in 1888.

One of the members of the De Stijl movement, along with Mondrian and others, Rietveld felt a chair should not be used to retire from the world or get away from thought. "We must remember," he said, "that sit is a verb too." 

One of the functions of Rietveld's chairs, with their hard seats and backs, is to focus our senses, to make us alert and aware.

Rietveld was not interested in conventional ideas of comfort (the 19th century armchair that relaxes you so much that you spill your coffee or fall asleep over your book).

He wished to keep the sitter physically and mentally "toned up."

• Aesthetic Realism taught me that the only way to be truly comfortable is by thinking about and liking our relation to the world.

Schroder House Netherlands 1924 - 1925"...We didn't avoid older styles because they were ugly, or because we couldn't reproduce them, but because our own times demanded their own form, I mean, their own manifestation.

It was of course extremely difficult to achieve all this in spite of the building regulations and that's why the interior of the downstairs part of the house is somewhat traditional, I mean with fixed walls.

But upstairs we simply called it an 'attic' and that's where we actually made the house we wanted."

Piet Mondian

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.QuickTime™ and a

TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressorare needed to see this picture.

In the late 1920s architecture in the Netherlands focused on the

idea of "dematerialization". This idea influenced a series of terrace houses with which Rietveld was involved.

Born  May 28 1885,  Zaandijk,  Netherlands. Died  1977,  WassenaarPiet Zwart (Zaandijk, 28 May 1885 – Wassenaar, 24 September 1977) was a Dutch photographer, typographer, and industrial designer.

He started his career as an architect and worked for Jan Wils and Berlage.As a designer, Zwart was well known because of his work for both the Nederlandse Kabelfabriek Delft (the Dutch Cable Factory in Delft) and the Dutch Postal Telegraph and Telephone, and as a pioneer of modern typography. He did not adhere to traditional typography rules, but used the basic principles of constructivism and "De Stijl" in his commercial work. His work can be recognized by its primary colors, geometrical shapes, repeated word patterns and an early use of photomontage.

He created a total of 275 designs in 10 years for the NKF Company, almost all typographical works. He resigned in 1933 to become an interior, industrial and furniture designer.Piet Zwart died at the age of 92 in 1977.

Typography

Piet Zwart

The New ConsciousnessFollowing WWI, artists realized that their work must be inspired by the new conditions of life, and that they had to reshape the world around them to reflect the consciousness of their day and age. He and many of his contemporaries held a constructivist view that a new world order would arise from the devastation of the Russian Revolution and World War I.

There, art would be based on technology, universality, abstraction, and functionalism. Zwart wrote in 1919: "Our time has become characterized by an enthusiastic desire for change, born out of a growing discontent over social conditions, determined and guided by new means of production new spiritual insights and new ideals." Zwart's reading of Marx and Hegel further crystallized his socialist philosophy on the responsibilities of the artist toward society.

Zwart referred to his method as "Functional" typography, whose purpose was to "establish the typographic look of our time, free, in so far as it is possible, from tradition; to activate typographic forms; to define the shape of new typographic problems, methods, and techniques."

The reality of the machine age meant that reading was a time consuming activity in a world where people had less and less time to spare.

Always concerned with both attracting the attention of the viewer, and respecting their experience, Zwart designed his work so that function always came first, the essential elements were separate from the accessory elements, and the viewer could easily and quickly grasp the central message, and then decide to read further.

(Dutch Cable Factory). In the subsequent 10 years, Zwart would produce 275 advertisements and the publication Sterkstroom (Strong Current). Essentially typographic, these advertisements constitute Zwart's major contribution to Dutch typography.

1937

Posters

Posters 1930

At the end of his work with NKF in 1933 there was an abrupt change in Zwart's work, and his attention turned more toward industrial, interior, and furniture design, where it remained for the remainder of his life. Piet Zwart died in 1977

Constructivism

Constructivism

• Constructivism was an invention of the Russian avant-garde that found adherents across the continent.

• The artists mainly consisted of young Russians trying to engage the full ideas of modern art on their own terms. They depicted art that was mostly three dimensional, and they also often portrayed art that could be connected to their Proletarian beliefs.

• Theory of constructivism is derived from Russian Suprematism, Dutch Neo Plasticism (De Stijl) and the German Bauhaus. Germany was the site of the most Constructivist activity outside of the Soviet Union to Walter Gropius's Bauhaus, a progressive art and design school sympathetic to the movement, same as other art centers, like Paris, London, and eventually the United States.

• They wanted to renew the idea that the apex of artwork does not revolve around "fine art", but rather emphasized that the most priceless artwork can often be discovered in the nuances of "practical art" and through portraying man and mechanization into one aesthetic program.

ALEXANDERRODCHENKO, Moscow, 1891-1956

In 1921-22 he did illustrative work in theater, films, typography and advertising, and continued throughout the 1920s to provide cover designs for a remarkably wide range of publications - from the poet Mayakovsky's books (1925-29) to scientific and technical literature for Moscow publishers.

He also designed the cover of Kino-Fot, a periodical of the Russian Constructivists which began in 1922 and in which Rodchenko was regularly published.

Also involved in the film world, Rodchenko shot a newsreel series directed by Dziga Vertov, originally called Kino-Pravda and later called One-sixth of the World, which was begun in 1922.

Between 1927 and 1930 he was "constructor-artist" of the films The Woman Journalist, Moscow in October, Albidum, The Puppet Millionaire and What Shall I be?. He also directed the documentary The Chemicalization of the Forest. Seemingly unlimited in his versatility,

Rodchenko was also involved in theater, designing the costumes and props for Glebov's Pendulum and The Bed Bug in 1929, and was one of Russia's foremost painters, collagists and poster artists.

Book Covers

Posters

Posters

Photos

•A Constructivist, Rodchenko was one of the earliest photo-collagists. Some of his favorite themes were sports, the circus, festive processions and the Soviet way of life. He successfully experimented with close-up photography, and "the lens of his camera discovered objects of unusual architecture, rhythm, and plasticity" in objects removed from their usual surroundings.

• "The viewer who sees only a study in the picture of the glass jug illuminated from behind fails to appreciate the masterly composition, the noble purity of the lines, the rich plasticity of the form and consequently also the poetry and beauty of the picture, and still more important, its specifically photographic qualities" (Karginov, Rodchenko).

During his first and only trip abroad Rodchenko was awarded four silver medals at the Paris Exhibition of March 1925.

In 1932 began working in photomontage.