Rietveld and Van Baaren Collection
photo: Ernst Moritz
The gallery contains furniture by dutch architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888-1964) and a selection of art works from the Van Baaren collection.
The furniture by Rietveld dates from the period 1915-1942. In 1919 Rietveld became a member of De Stijl and under the influence of this artistic group he began to paint his designs in the primary colours, red, yellow and blue, combined with black, white and grey. He also experimented with asymmetric forms. Although Rietveld relinquished his workshop in 1924, he continued to design furniture. The typical De Stijl elements gradually disappeared from his work. He used metal – a novel material at the time – allowing him to produce simple and affordable pieces that could be machine-made. Sketches and annotations from the period give us a glimpse of how he worked and what he envisaged. A small selection of these documents, preserved in the Rietveld Schröder Archive, is displayed in another Gallery, Expo 6.
The Van Baarens had conservative tastes, but added more modern works in the 1950s after deciding that the collection should remain intact after their deaths. They bought mostly from the dealer J.G. Nieuwenhuizen Segaar in The Hague, who had counted Bremmer as a loyal client and had therefore gained their trust. They added three abstract gouaches by Herbin and two gouaches by Severini to the collection. The painting by Albert Bitran, Lambertus’s last acquisition in 1962, is an odd addition. There are a remarkably large number of works by Lydia Radda, pseudonym of Julie Maistre-Florent, one of Bremmer’s less successful discoveries. These acquisitions gave the collection an unexpected new direction.
