Word: rietveld
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...Gaudi Cup, 1972, the intensity of the glazes seems to have literally broken down the form of the ceramic into tiny glowing shards. This sense of color as a veneer on a flat surface gets turned into a form of Cubism, rather as the Dutch Constructivist Gerrit Rietveld in the 1920s abstracted the shape of a chair into a penitential parody of itself. Not only Cubism gets its share of parody, but other styles as well -- Frank Stella's paintings or, in a tiny architectural piece with a tower and a tilted ramp called De Chirico's Bathhouse...
Mondrian was not the only Dutch artist to pursue the dream of social renewal through ideal abstraction-though he was the most gifted one. What of his less renowned colleagues, painters like Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leek and Georges Vantongerloo, architect-designers like J.J.P. Oud or Gerrit Rietveld? Though they all used much the same language of geometrical shapes, primary colors and rectilinear layout, their variety as artists is faithfully rendered in the show...
...piece throughout"-that, certainly, was true of De Stijl design. Its aesthetic was seamless, from painting to furniture to architecture, where it made few concessions to the flabby and imperfect human body. Gerrit Rietveld's penitential chairs, rigidly geometric and painted in their bright, winking primaries, go far beyond the ordinary level of Bauhaus discomfort as practiced in the '20s. Yet one cannot imagine Rietveld's masterpiece, the tiny Schroder house in Utrecht, being furnished with anything else. Such interiors were not open to redecoration: the pattern is absolute, the space a sermon. One would need...
...Rietveld came out of a craft tradition and wanted to take design back into it, achieving a synthesis of "high" art and "low" craft. This never went beyond its prototypes. The Dutch did not want to live in such houses or sit in such chairs. Manufacturers did not want to make them. Finally, the belief in progress and human enlightenment, on which De Stijl depended, encountered the brutal history that came in the '30s and '40s. And so, at this far remove, De Stijl retains its fascination as one of the subtlest tissues of Utopian ideas...
Spreading Word. Verkade wanted to be a commercial artist in advertising, but failed the entrance exam at Amsterdam's Rietveld art academy. After a brief fling with abstract painting, he turned to figurative sculpture at the Royal Academy in The Hague, then started out in a tiny studio near Haarlem. One day last summer, Photographer David Douglas Duncan saw Verkade's bronzes, was impressed, bought some and began telling collector friends about his discovery. Word spread quickly. During one three-week period, Verkade received orders from America for nearly 40 statues...
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