Henry van de Velde

Biography

Not long after Vincent van Gogh’s death, Henry van de Velde went to the Netherlands and called on the widow of his brother Theo. He saw almost everything Vincent had left, and understood that he could not paint at that level. For him this was the beginning of the end of his career as a painter.

He was born on 3 April 1863 in Antwerp, the son of a pharmacist. In 1880–1882 he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and worked in the private studio of Charles Verlat; in 1884–1885 he studied in Paris under Carolus-Duran. What he saw in Paris, above all Seurat and Signac, shaped his early pictures: he painted in the pointillist manner.

At twenty-two, having visited Barbizon and tired of academicism, he moved to the village of Wechelderzande near Antwerp and lodged at the guesthouse De Keizer. He painted rural landscapes and portraits of local people; one picture from that time, “Woman at the Window” (1889), is in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In 1889 he joined the Brussels group Les XX, where Gauguin, Pissarro and Toulouse-Lautrec exhibited and where works by Van Gogh were shown. He was friendly with Théo van Rysselberghe and the sculptor Constantin Meunier. In 1890 he noted in his diary that in the society of the future there would be no place for anything that was not useful to everyone.

Around 1892 he abandoned figurative painting. For several months he stayed with an aunt, an embroiderer, in Knokke to learn her craft, and made the wall hanging “Angel Watch”. Then he turned to silver, porcelain, cutlery, designs for clothing, textiles and wallpaper. It seems to me that failure in painting alone did not decide the matter: in those same years he met Maria Sèthe, whom he married in May 1894. Together they made wallpapers and women’s dresses. Bloemenwerf (“Flower Yard”) in Uccle, which Van de Velde built for the family, was his first architectural work. Its façade recalled William Morris’s Red House, and the garden was laid out by Maria Sèthe.

In 1895, through the critic Julius Meier-Graefe, he received a commission from the Paris dealer Siegfried Bing: interiors and furniture for the gallery Maison de l’Art Nouveau, which gave the new style its name. Bing’s rooms were later shown in Dresden in 1897, and after that exhibition Van de Velde became known in Germany. He also showed work in Bing’s pavilion at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. At the same time he wrote articles, designed covers for books and periodicals, and made furniture for editorial offices.

Around 1900–1901 he moved to Germany. He received commissions for interiors in Berlin; in 1900–1902 he designed the interior of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, then the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, Villa Esche in Chemnitz (1902–1903) and a house for Karl Ernst Osthaus in Hagen. Harry Kessler and William Ernest, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, made him artistic adviser at court. In Weimar he founded workshops and a school of applied arts, built the school’s building and directed it until 1915, and built a house for himself, Hohe Pappeln. In 1907 Van de Velde became one of the founders of the German Werkbund, an association of artists and industry. At the Werkbund meeting in Cologne in 1914 he argued with Hermann Muthesius: Van de Velde upheld the creative individuality of the artist, while Muthesius demanded standardization.

The war broke this position. As a citizen of Belgium, which Germany had occupied, he was a foreigner, was forced to leave his post, and in 1917 received permission to go to Switzerland. As his successor at the head of the school he proposed Walter Gropius. In 1919 the school merged with the Weimar Academy of Art, and the Bauhaus came into being.

In the 1920s he returned to work in the Netherlands and Belgium. He built for Helene Kröller-Müller, in 1925 was appointed professor at Ghent University, and until 1936 lectured there on the history of architecture and applied arts. In 1926 he took part in founding, in Brussels, the Higher Institute of Decorative Arts, known as La Cambre. In 1933 he was commissioned to design the university library in Ghent: construction of the Boekentoren began in 1936 and was finished after the Second World War, and for budgetary reasons not everything was carried out to the original design. The floor of the reading room, for instance, was laid in marble instead of black rubber. His last building was a technical school in Leuven (1936–1942). He had been designing the Kröller-Müller Museum near Otterlo since the 1920s, and it opened in 1938; its glass wall looks out on a park with sculpture.

After the Second World War Van de Velde was accused of collaboration with the occupiers, but the case was quickly dropped and never came to trial.

In 1947 he settled in Switzerland, in Oberägeri, where he wrote his memoirs; they appeared after his death, in 1962. Van de Velde died on 25 October 1957, aged ninety-four. He was cremated in Switzerland and buried in Tervuren.