Henry van der Velde 1863-1957
By Patrick Heath
Henry van de Velde, La Veillée d’anges (The Angels’ Watch), 1893. Silk embroidery on wool appliqué, 55 1/8 × 91 3/4 in. (140 × 233 cm). Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich. Collection of Applied Art, ZHdK.
Henry Clemens van der Velde (3 April 1863 – 15 October 1957) was a Belgian painter, designer, architect, interior designer, and art theorist. He is remembered for his international contribution to the Art Nouveau movement. Under the influence of William Morris and other Arts and Crafts designers, Van der Velde advocated for the incorporation of sinuous lines in the architecture of 20th Century Europe. His artistic output was largely focused in Weimar, making him a prominent character in the German Jundenstil; however, van der Velde also worked extensively in Paris and his native Brussels, earning official appointments in each city respectively. Van der Velde’s passion for individualism and his Morris-esque promotion of design as the antidote to the degeneration of the world seat him filmy within the emerging modernism of the fin de siècle period.
Henry van der Velde was born in 1863, the son of a family of apothecaries living in Antwerp. He studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts under the instruction of the Belgian watercolourist, Charles Verlat. After three years at the Academy (1881-1884), van der Velde pursued a career in painting; during the period between 1884 and 1892 he became a member of the Brussels based Les XX collective of artists. Through the collective, van der Velde was exposed to the work of van Gough, Monet, and Seurat among others, and his own work was essentially mimicry of his contemporary masters. The pointillism and neo-impressionistic styling in his 1890 work ‘Girl Mending’ could easily be found in Seurat’s oeuvre; whereas in 1892, in works such as ‘Jardin À Kalmthout’, van de Velde adopted the short, winding brushstrokes that have defined van Gough’s paintings in the late 1880s. Tom Wilkinson has adroitly noticed that the plagiaristic elements present in the genesis of van der Velde’s artistic career are ironically contradictory to his later championing of individualistic creative precedence.
Due to waning interest and limited success, van der Velde abandoned his painting career in 1892 and began to focus on design and architecture exclusively. His first major (and independent) creative project was the construction of his own house, Bloemenwerf, at Uccle near Brussels in 1895. Van der Velde was an untrained architect giving him boundless creative freedom, the subsequent building was heavily inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement propounded by Ruskin and Morris. Its mock-tutor facade and bowed windows contribute to the neo-feudalistic design traits expounded in Ruskin’s essay On Art and Life; furthermore, van der Velde designed the entirety of the interior himself, he chose materials and fabrics that would complement his wife, Marie Sèthe’s wardrobe, a living embodiment of the fin de siècle impulse to coalesce lived experience and artistic expression.
In the same year as the construction of Bloemenwerf, van der Velde worked in collaboration with Samuel Bing to create the furniture for the L’Art Nouveau gallery in Paris. He used techniques developed in his essay ‘Déblaiement d’art’ (1892) commending the cultivation of a new art, one that would be both moral and vital, inspired by historical craft movements but adopting contemporary modes. The resulting furniture used long sweeping lines, departing from the pervasive adherence to naturalistic forms that had been so prominent in design up until that point.
After gaining few other commissions in Paris, van der Velde moved permanently to Germany in 1900; his most lasting contribution in the period was the construction of the School of Applied Arts in Weimar from 1904 to 1906. This imposing, warehouse looking building would become the first home of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus. Van de Velde would be the director of the preliminary school up until the outbreak of war in 1914. During his tenure in Weimar, van der Velde designed and sold all manner of Objet d’Art from book bindings to earrings, dresses, ceramics, tableware, and furniture all in the style of the growing Art Nouveau. Van der Velde was responsible for bringing a new lease of energy into staunchly classical Weimar in the pre-war period, he advocated heavily for the encouragement of Jundenstil, all the time cohering to his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, a comprehensive harmonisation between artistic detail and its surroundings. Van der Velde was pushed out of Weimar in 1914 due to growing xenophobic sentiments in Germany, his artistic production drastically slowed in the years after the war. In 1925 he accepted a teaching role at the University of Ghent in Belgium where he lectured architecture and applied arts from 1926 to 1936. Van der Velde was instrumental in the design of the University of Ghent’s library, a glass and concrete rectilinear monument, and the long-gestated Kröller-Müller museum in The Netherlands. However, after being accused of collaborating with the Germans during the occupation, he moved permanently away from civilisation to the Swiss Alps, where he wrote his curmudgeonly memoirs, and where he died in 1957.
Bibliography
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia, ‘Henry van de Velde’. Encyclopedia Britannica, 21 Oct. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-van-de-Velde [Accessed 25 March 2021].
Harmsen, Olga, ‘Henry van de Velde (1863-1957)’, Architects, About Art Nouveau, 2nd April 2013, https://aboutartnouveau.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/henry-van-de-velde-1863-1957/ [Accessed 26/03/2021].
Hollis, Richard. Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, (New Haven, 2006).
Wilkinson, Tom, ‘Henry van de Velde (1863-1957)’, Reputations, The Architectural Review, 19th March 2015, https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/reputations/henry-van-de-velde-1863-1957 [Accessed 26/03/2021].