AMSTERDAM— Marking a sea change in its mission, the venerated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, famed for its masterpieces by Vermeer and Rubens, has jumped to the 20th century with a major acquisition of Dutch-made design icon Gerrit Rietveld’s White Chair. Acquired for an undisclosed sum from Leigh Keno, the storied American furniture specialist (and familiar face on the Antiques Roadshow), the rare monochrome chair, designed in 1918 and hand-made by Rietveld in 1923 as a commission from avant-garde writer and De Stijl art-movement aficionado Til Brugman, is already on view at the museum (through October 4), along with another recent acquisition, a 1963 Zero Group abstract relief by Jan Schoonhoven.
Keno, an avid collector of European Modernist furniture, including works by Arne Jacobsen and Carlo Mollino, acquired the chair at Christie’s Amsterdam in May 2007, paying a record €264,000 ($355,724; est. €50-80,000), and kept it in his Manhattan apartment until the fall of last year, when the Rijksmuseum approached him.
"I saw it in an ad from Christie’s," said Keno in a phone interview, "and I just decided to buy it." In Keno’s view, the chair, with its rectilinear frame, which is as much a work of painted sculpture as a piece of furniture, "changed the way people think about furniture" and is "the quintessential 20th century chair."
What is most remarkable about the chair and its allure is the Brugman provenance, including the piece's appearance in a 1923 photograph of the writer’s music room in The Hague, which Vilmos Huszar, the de Stijl artist and co-founder of the movement, re-designed to form a striking "space-color composition" in gray, black, and white.
Brugman was a close friend of Piet Mondrian, the star of the de Stijl movement, and was close with other Dutch avant-garde artists and architects of the 1920s. She also had an affair with German Dada artist Hannah Hoch. When it was sold at Christie’s, the catalogue entry described the chair as a "White-lacquered Red-Blue Chair," referring to the decidedly more common and still mass-produced Rietveld chair painted in those primary colors.
"There is no such thing as a 'red-blue chair,'" said Ludo van Halem, the Rijksmuseum curator of 20th century art who initiated the acquisition. "The easy chair that Rietveld made could be ordered in different kinds of wood and any desired color." According to the curator, the use of the more familiar name for Rietveld’s creation came about because, "there is no other 'red-blue' easy-chair which has this well-documented link to the international avant-garde. It’s a chair many of the star artists of the 1920s sat upon."
In van Halem’s estimation, there are about 25 known and documented Rietveld chairs executed prior to 1940 and only three or four can be exactly dated. One resides in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a second is in the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, and the third is now in the Rijksmuseum.
"This is by far the best-documented chair I’ve ever come across of Rietveld’s," said Marcel Brouwer, a specialist at Amsterdam’s Gavelers auction house who handled the negotiations on behalf of the museum, and coincidentally took in the consignment of the White Chair when it sold in 2007 at Christie’s. "It embodies the de Stijl Movement."
Unlike its better-known, brightly painted cousin, the White Chair has a rather spartan and decidedly unadorned look to it. Leigh Keno joked that "anyone who would have come into my place to rob it, they would have taken the $10 stereo and stepped on the chair to get to it."
But Keno was dead serious about proving its importance. Before a group of Rijksmuseum curators and conservators came to Keno’s Manhattan gallery — now the new headquarters for Keno Auctions — last fall to inspect the chair (at the same time the museum’s famed Vermeer "Milkmaid" painting opened at the Metropolitan Museum in a rare loan), Keno already had the paint tested at Winterthur in Delaware by Jennifer Mass, its chief scientist. The tests confirmed its age and identified a second coat of paint had been applied in the 1940’s.
"Everything came out with flying colors," said Keno of the sophisticated testing. The dealer declined to say what price he sold the chair for, though he noted, "I didn’t get rich and that wasn’t the intention. I’m just happy it went to the museum because I’ve always felt this chair is a national treasure." By price comparison to other Rietveld chairs that have sold at auction, the White Chair reigns supreme. A Dutch oak ZigZag chair by Rietfield, dated 1932-40, sold at Christie’s Amsterdam in March for €43,000 ($58,122; est. €10-15,000). Asked if the museum would continue its acquisitions of 20th century design, van Halem said, "this is our first Rietveld chair, but certainly not the last."
source: Artinfo, article by Judd Tully
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