Clarity, structure, abstraction: these were the radical principles by which the modernists sought to reimagine design, and no single object represents them more forcefully than the Red/Blue Chair of the Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld. He was a key member of De Stijl (simply meaning “The Style,” a title that already suggests its ambitions of definitiveness) the avant garde movement that also counted among its advocates Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, Rietveld sought to develop a universal formal language, composed of the bare essentials: primary colors plus white and black, pure geometries. This was meant as nothing less than a final resolution of design history, like a solved equation. Yet Rietveld’s work also has an expansive and surprising quality; each of his objects and buildings still vibrates with a sense of discovery. This is certainly true of the Red/Blue Chair itself, which has come to be emblematic of his work and De Stijl as a whole. It is composed of four planes , seat, back, and two arms , all held in a lattice of square-sectioned dowels. These are colored yellow on their ends, as if marking imaginary cuts from an endless grid (a similar principle was present in Mondrian’s paintings of, which often featured lines that would stop just before the edge of the canvas). The oblique angles of the seat and back, however, play off this rigid orthogonal structure, literally making space for the human form. This particular realization of the design, which can be compared to examples at the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the V&A, among other institutions, is one of the few made close to the date of the design that is still in private hands.