Ian Latham reviews Richard Hollis’ biography of a pivotal but often neglected figure in design history

‘Henry van de Velde: the Artist as Designer’ by Richard Hollis (Occasional Papers, 268pp, £20)

‘Pivotal’ is an apt descriptor for Henry van de Velde (1863-1957), the prolific Belgian designer whose life spanned the decades of seismic change between Delacroix’s death and Ai Weiwei’s birth. First an artist, van de Velde broke rank and launched himself into a cross-disciplinary trajectory as designer, architect, writer and teacher, but his greater legacy is in his efforts to reconcile artistic endeavour with the modern age. This complex and contradictory figure has long deserved contemporary scrutiny, and notwithstanding Klaus-Jürgen Sembach’s scholarly biography of 1989, Richard Hollis has done precisely that.

Van de Velde in his Weimar atelier, 1910 (ph: Louis Held). Above: Entrance perspective of van de Velde’s initial design for the Kröller-Müller museum of 1923 (ph: Kröller-Müller, Otterlo).

Though he found moderate success as a painter in Antwerp and Paris – affected by Seurat’s pointillism and van Gogh’s dynamism – van de Velde was drawn by the ideals of Morris and Ruskin to create work of social value. His shift to the applied arts wasn’t so much a volte face as a “change of medium”, says Hollis, and in this respect the painterly origins of his lifelong maxim that “a line is a force” are clear.

Havana cigar shop, 1899 (ph: Dekorative Kunst).

Van de Velde later came to repudiate his dalliance with the Jugendstil that briefly flowered across fin-de-siècle Europe, even though his first success had been in designing fashionably curvilinear furniture and interior installations for Siegfried Bing’s Paris shop that gave l’Art Nouveau its name.

While Art Nouveau earnestly sought to dispense with outmoded historical styles, merely substituting them with organic and abstract motifs meant it soon fell from fashion. But the underlying reforming ideals, partly inherited from the Arts & Crafts movement, were promoted by the likes of van de Velde, Otto Wagner and Peter Behrens, setting a path towards modernity.

The Werkbund Theatre at the 1914 Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne was praised for it sculptural use of concrete, even though, like Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, it was constructed in brick, steel and render (ph: La Cité).

Van de Velde’s big break came in 1900 when he was appointed to advise the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach on reforming its craft industries, and in 1907 he founded Weimar’s Applied Arts School, which would later evolve into the Bauhaus. As a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, the state-sponsored initiative founded by Hermann Muthesius in 1907 to integrate craft and mass production (and enhance Germany’s international competitiveness), van de Velde was invited to design a theatre for its 1914 Cologne exhibition. Its moulded forms, albeit devoid of ornament, made the structure both less potent and portentous than Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion or Gropius and Meyer’s Model Factory. At the exhibition Muthesius famously called for the adoption of product ‘types’ for mass production rather than constant reinvention, clashing with van de Velde and others who held out for the supremacy of artistic creativity.

Despite his evident talents, van de Velde’s architectural output alone wouldn’t assure his place in history – no single work fully embodies his ideals. His own house, Bloemenwerf, built in a suburb of Brussels in 1895, is primarily of note as an internal Gesamtkunstwerk of its era. In contrast, however, the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo, designed in 1923 but not completed until 1938, has a self-effacing character that has stood the test of time.

Hollis – himself a distinguished graphic designer, teacher and writer – has succeeded in his aim to explore the tension between van de Velde as an artist – the “free spontaneous creator” – and as a designer, whose work “springs from the single source of reason”. The book has been a slow burner – it’s 60 years since Hollis first encountered van de Velde’s work at an exhibition in Zurich. He has both written and designed the book; something that would have met with van de Velde’s approval. The result is a satisfyingly dense amalgam in which the story unfolds in mini-essays that invite serendipitous reading without detracting from the whole. Hollis depicts Henry van de Velde as a consummate designer who acknowledged no borders in his life – he lived in Berlin, Hannover, The Hague, Antwerp, Brussels, Weimar and Paris – nor in his art. It’s a story that should resonate with our times.

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