The Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld is revered for his reductive furniture of the 1910s to 1940s. He was also responsible for many seminal buildings in the Netherlands, including the Schröder House in Utrecht as well as other housing developments and an art academy in Arnhem. Rietveld learned cabinetmaking in his father’s workshop before turning to architecture. He is most closely associated with the de Stijl (The Style) movement and journal that was founded by the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg in 1917. The journal reflected the new art that centered on flat, geometric planes rendered in primary colors with straight vertical and horizontal lines. Members of the movement came from all artistic disciplines and included painters, sculptors, graphic designers, and architects, among others. Rietveld became involved with de Stijl in 1919 and began designing furniture with its principals in mind that year.

 

Originally created in 1932, the Zig-Zag chair’s functionalist form was a response to the cantilevered chairs conceived by German architects such as Mart Stam, Heinz and Bodo Rasch, and Marcel Breuer in the 1920s. In 1932 Rietveld designed the first of what would be his experiments with the zig-zag form out of tubular steel for Metz & Co., a Dutch department store.¹ At this early date, Rietveld was unable to achieve a continuous cantilevered structure solely in wood; instead he could only achieve the form in tubular steel.² However, the welds where the legs crossed were not strong, so the model was not pursued.³ Over the subsequent years, he designed further prototypes, including those made with sheet steel under plywood, and some of those examples were displayed at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1934. Of those chairs, Mart Stam said, “[Rietveld] is thinking of metal, of vulcanized fibreboard. He knows that the old way of working is no good any more; he knows that what he needs to do is find new materials with another and more simple form of assembly.”⁴ By 1935 Rietveld had inserted a series of screws, dovetail joints, and reinforcing wedges to structurally support the all-wood design, making it far more complicated than he had originally intended.

 

The Zig-Zag chair was produced by Metz & Co. as well as by Rietveld’s master craftsman, Gerard Van de Groenekan. Variations on the model exist, including painted examples, those coated with white pipe clay and varnish, chairs with pierced backs and arms, and models in different woods until the 1950s. The Museum’s pine example dates from the earliest years of production. Because of its iconic status, the chair was again put into production in 1971 by the Italian form Cassina. —Cindi Strauss