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The Housden Collection of furniture by Gerrit Rietveld The following collection of thirteen works represent a complete survey of Gerrit’s Rietveld’s most significant furniture designs. The importance of the collection is three-fold. Firstly, it was supplied on Rietveld’s own instruction following meetings directly between Gerrit Rietveld and the British architect Brian Housden and his wife Margaret, in Holland. Secondly, it is the only collection of this scope and early date of post-war commission that was delivered to a private client. Finally, these graphic, constructivist furnishings were to guide the design of Housden’s own Modernist home, 78 South Hill Park, Hampstead, London, constructed 1963-1965, and now recognised with Grade II listing as a pioneering and important masterpiece of its type. The Housden’s appreciation of Rietveld’s architecture and furniture was pioneering for the 1950s, with the importance of the architect having by then been largely forgotten outside of the Netherlands. It would take another decade, and the exhibitions of the late 1960s, to which many of the works from the Housden’s collection were loaned, before Rietveld’s singular importance would be more broadly appreciated.Having graduated from the Architectural Association in the early 1950s, Housden had resisted the prevailing climate of Le Corbusier-inspired developments to instead discover inspiration from the early Modernist masters of the European pre-war avant-garde. Crucial amongst these were Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroder Huis, Utrecht, of 1924, and Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, Paris, 1929-1931, both of which Brian and Margaret visited in the 1950s, meeting with Truus Schroder and then with Annie Dalsace, the latter recorded in interview with Housden. Whilst the graphic structure and the spatial, open orientation of the inner spaces of both houses, together with the employment of certain specific features, to include the distinctive glass bricks of the Maison de Verre, were to influence Housden’s own home, it was the fortuitous encounter with Gerrit Rietveld while visiting the Schroder Huis during the mid-1950s that yielded the important collection now presented. An immediate friendship was formed – Rietveld offered to both review Housden’s initial plans for 78 South Hill Park, and generously promised them a collection of the furniture that they had both so admired. Subsequently the Housdens received a total of fourteen original pieces, the first of which was a Red-Blue chair, made for them on Rietveld’s instruction by van der Groenekan, and with the entire collection that followed being gifted to them at the cost only of the materials and transportation. It is presented for sale here for the first time, and its appearance is an exceptionally rare opportunity to examine and acquire fully-provenanced works documented to the designer. After lunch Rietveld turned to my wife who was sitting in a Red Blue chair and said “Do you like that chair Mrs Housden?” My wife replied “Yes I do, it’s a jolly nice chair Mr. Rietveld”. “Then you had better have one”, he said. “I like all your furniture Mr. Rietveld”, my wife replied. “Then you had better have it all”, he said. Brian Housden, 'Jolly nice furniture, a note on the work of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld’, 1986

GERRIT THOMAS RIETVELD (1888-1964)

A rare 'Elling' sideboard, designed 1919, executed circa 1962-1965

Details

GERRIT THOMAS RIETVELD (1888-1964)
A rare 'Elling' sideboard, designed 1919, executed circa 1962-1965
stained and painted beech, stained beech-veneered plywood
executed by Gerard van de Groenekan, De Bilt, the Netherlands
41 x 78 ¾ x 17 ¾ in. (104 x 200 x 45 cm.)

Provenance

Mr & Mrs Brian Housden, London, supplied directly by the designer;
Thence by descent to the present owners.

Literature

This lot illustrated:
D. Housden, De Stijl, the other face of tradition, Design, March 1968, p. 29;
T. Dyckhoff, ‘Rough Diamond’, The Guardian Space, 19 October 2000, p. 11;
E. Heathcote, ‘Dutch Courage’, Wallpaper Magazine, no. 146, May 2011, pp. 146, 151;
T. Brooks, ‘The Curious Case of Brian Housden’, AA Files, no. 66, Architectural Association, London, 2013, n.p.
Other examples illustrated:
P. Vöge, The Complete Rietveld Furniture, Rotterdam, 1993, pp. 15, 53, no. 30;
I. van Zijl, Gerrit Rietveld, New York, 2010, pp. 34, 162;
L. Dosi Delfini, The Furniture Collection Stedlikj Museum Asterdam, Rotterdam, 2004, p. 296 for the 1951 replica created for the Stedlijk Museum.

Exhibited

2D/3D – art and craft designed and made for the twentieth century, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1987;
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld 1888 – 1964, Bede Gallery, Jarrow, 1990;
Rietveld, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, 1990;
Rietveld Furniture and the Schroder House, travelling exhibition 1990-1991, Mead Gallery, Arts Centre, Coventry; The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester; Collins Gallery, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow; Southampton City Art Gallery and Royal Festival Hall, London.

Special notice

This lot will be removed to Christie’s Park Royal. Christie’s will inform you if the lot has been sent offsite. Our removal and storage of the lot is subject to the terms and conditions of storage which can be found at Christies.com/storage and our fees for storage are set out in the table below - these will apply whether the lot remains with Christie’s or is removed elsewhere. Please call Christie’s Client Service 24 hours in advance to book a collection time at Christie’s Park Royal. All collections from Christie’s Park Royal will be by pre-booked appointment only. Tel: +44 (0)20 7839 9060 Email: cscollectionsuk@christies.com. If the lot remains at Christie’s it will be available for collection on any working day 9.00 am to 5.00 pm. Lots are not available for collection at weekends.

Brought to you by

Jeremy Morrison

jmorrison@christies.com +44 (0)20 7752 3274

Lot Essay

For an additional image of this lot please see page 2.

The Elling cabinet belongs to a brief yet explosively creative chapter in Rietveld’s development as an architect and designer. Together with the now-iconic ‘Red-Blue’ chair, these works capture the intellectual and artistic tumult of a world now in change. Both these works present as if inversions of their expected type – just as the substance of a chair is merely traced by the delineations of the frame, so too the cabinet reveals the interior as exterior, the components identified, exploded and now held static in time, space and volume.

The unique first example of this cabinet was exhibited in 1920 and was soon acquired by the architect Piet Elling. That example is now lost, destroyed in a fire, and no other pre-war examples were executed. Of this original example, only a single drawer survived, and this fragment together with the original 1919 drawing formed the basis for an exact reconstruction created by Rietveld together with his dedicated cabinetmaker van de Groenekan, for the Stedelijk Museum in 1951, where this example remains exhibited. There is no evidence that any further Elling cabinets were executed between the 1951 Stedelijk replica, and the Housden example listed on 1962 correspondence with van de Groenikan. The conclusion that this is only the second to be executed is reinforced by van de Groenekan’s uncertainty over costing, and by improvised features of construction that are since refined by 1968, which is the date of one of the earliest cabinets believed to have been produced after Rietveld’s death in 1964. This latter example, commissioned by architect Tjeerd Deelstra, was sold Christie’s London, November 2015, and is now retained in the collection of the Kirkland Museum, Denver.

The present example is therefore almost certainly only the second Elling cabinet to have been reconstructed, both this and the Stedelijk example being the only two to have been commissioned directly from Rietveld and during his lifetime.

This lot is accompanied by photographic copies of original invoices and correspondence 1962-1965 between Brian Housden and Gerard van de Groenekan, detailing costs and progress. Also included, is a photographic copy of the entry page of the 1990 South Bank Centre, London, exhibition Rietveld Furniture and the Schroder House, signed by van de Groenekan 6th April 1991, confirming that the collection of Rietveld designs were executed by him 1955-1963.

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