SikkensFoundation

Sikkens Prize

1959 GERRIT RIETVELD — For his entire oeuvre insofar as he contributed in this to the realization of the synthesis between space and color. — Rietveld was an ideal choice for the first Sikkens Prize. It was a choice like a manifesto, with which the measure and weight of the prize were calibrated. He was also a choice in terms of the programme, a gesture to the inspi- rational past as a starting point for new ideals. In those years, admiration for De Stijl was not yet a generally and internationally accepted phenomenon as it is now, but there was interest in this avant garde movement in a specialist circle. This was reflected, amongst other things, in a number of exhibitions and recent studies: in 1951 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam devoted a re- trospective exhibition to De Stijl and in the following year this was repeated in the Museum of Modern Art in New york. In 1956, Hans Jaffe, the deputy director of the Ste- delijk Museum and later Professor of Art History at the University of Amsterdam, published his monograph on De Stijl; in 1958, the art historian Theodore Brown did a doctorate on a study of Rietveld’s furniture. The visionary power of this avant garde artist – by defnition a periphe- ral phenomenon in his own time – was therefore taken seriously. Back to index Download text as pdf