The success of Marcel Breuer’s first experiments with tubular steel furniture in 1925-1926 inspired various architect-designers to have a go at this alluring new material. Until then, Rietveld had worked almost exclusively with wood. Presumably his first attempt to develop a metal chair was an armchair for Dr. A.M. Hartog which can be dated before 1927 and which shows Rietveld’s inexperience with the new material, using gaspipes and T-fttings which mimicked the straight posts and rails and traditional joints found in his wooden chairs. In 1927, Rietveld developed the Beugel chair (Beugel meaning bracket), composed of two bracket-shaped tubular steel frames that supported a fibreboard seating shell. In June of the same year, both Mart Stam and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe showed their first cantilever tubular steel chairs at the now legendary Weissenhof exhibition. It is not known whether Rietveld developed the Beugel chair before or after that date, but it is clear that his chair did not exploit the flexible characteristics of tubular steel which made the chair of Mies van der Rohe such an instant success. In October 1927, the Beugel chair was exhibited in Rotterdam alongside Mies’ chair and a tubular steel armchair by Dutch designer and entrepreneur W.H. Gispen.
The real innovation in Rietveld’s Beugel chair however was not found in the frame but in the undulating seat and backrest. Arguably, Rietveld was the first modern designer to develop a one-piece seating shell, predating Alvar Aalto’s experiments. For the initial prototypes of the Beugel chair, Rietveld used solid steel rod for the frame and seat sections out of Vulkanfber: an industrial fibreboard that could be shaped after being soaked in water and (more or less) kept its form when dried. Given his interest for unconventional materials in cabinet making, Rietveld immediately saw the potential of this fibre composite that was mainly used for the production of cheap imitation-leather suitcases. In 1928, the Beugel chair made its international debut in Stuttgart at the ‘Der Stuhl’ exhibition where it was picked up quickly by the international press, which commented on the groundbreaking seating shells. But it was not until 1930-1931 that the Beugel chair was taken into production by the avant-garde department store Metz & Co, in a version with tubular steel frames and plywood seat sections such as the present lot.

Rob Driessen
March 2017