Birgit Schulte & Klaus-Jurgen Sembach - Henry van de Velde - 1993

Henry van de Velde

See photo 4 for content.

Publication accompanying the exhibition at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Kunstmuseum zu Weimar, Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Museum of Applied Arts, Ghent, Museum of Design Zürich and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, from 1992 to 1994.

An important and comprehensive monograph!

Hundreds of illustrations, many of which are in color (see photos)

In good condition except for two non-intrusive creases on the front and back plate (see photos)

Packed carefully with tr&trace and insurance for shipment.

Good luck with the bidding!!

Henry Clemens Van de Velde was a Belgian painter, designer, decorator and architect. Together with Victor Horta, Van de Velde is regarded as one of the most important representatives of Art Nouveau. He is also known as the "apostle of functionalism".
"Henry van de velde" is a book by Birgit Schulte & Klaus-Jurgen Sembach. It is published by Pandora. This edition appeared in 1995. This work has 464 pages. It is written in Dutch.

Henry Clemens Van de Velde (Antwerp, 3 April 1863 – Zurich, 15 October 1957) was a Belgian painter, designer, and architect.
Together with Victor Horta, Van de Velde is regarded as one of the most important representatives of Art Nouveau. He is also called the "apostle of functionalism." From the early years of the 20th century he played a leading role in architecture and the decorative arts, especially in Germany.

Life course
Boekentoren (Ghent University Library)
Henry van de Velde as a painter
Van de Velde studied painting with Karel Verlat at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and with the painter Carolus-Duran in Paris. He was deeply influenced by Paul Signac and Georges Seurat and painted in a Neo-Impressionist style (pointillism).
When he was twenty-two, he moved to the remote Wechelderzande. The landscape and its inhabitants would be the subject of his canvases for four years. His aversion to the academism of Antwerp artists and his visit to the French artist colony of Barbizon led him to choose the countryside. In doing so he followed in the footsteps of painters such as Isidore Meyers and Adriaan Joseph Heymans, and he moved to the Noorderkempen. It was the latest gathering place for young artists, full of "Sturm und Drang".
Wechelderzande had not yet been opened up by a steam tram and the main road. Henry Van de Velde found shelter in gasthof De Keizer, in the shadow of the Wechelse church. Because of the influx of artists, the farm with its inn was converted into a lodging house. The inn gained a second floor with bedrooms and a painter's studio. Van de Velde painted his Woman at the Window from the open window on the south side. This canvas is one of a series of eight that depict impressions of village life.
The inn as of 2019 is a brasserie-restaurant named The New Emperor. Not much remains of the artists' days of yore. The artist's studio has disappeared; only on the north side is the round-arched studio window still visible.
In 1889 Van de Velde became a member of the artists’ group Les XX in Brussels. After Vincent van Gogh had exhibited a few works at the annual Les XX exhibition, Van de Velde was one of the first painters to be influenced by Van Gogh. During his honeymoon to the Netherlands, he visited Theo van Gogh’s widow, the brother of the recently deceased Vincent van Gogh. He gained a good sense of almost the entire oeuvre of the painter and realized that he would never reach this overwhelming level. For him, this marked the end of his career as a painter.

Henry van de Velde as designer and architect
From 1892, Van de Velde left painting, and devoted himself to the applied arts: (jewellery and metalwork, porcelain and cutlery, fashion design, carpet and fabric design) and also to architecture, including the construction of his own house in Uccle, Bloemenwerf. In his house, the interior and design formed an organic whole. In 1895 he designed interiors and furniture for the influential art dealership L'Art Nouveau, run by gallery owner Samuel Bing in Paris. Van de Velde's work also stood in Bing's pavilion at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Van de Velde was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement with John Ruskin and William Morris, and was one of the first architects and furniture designers to work in an abstract style with curved lines. He opposed copying historical styles and decisively chose an original form. He wanted to banish banality and ugliness from the mind of man.

In 1899 he settled in Germany. Here he received several commissions, including for the Folkwang Museum and the Hohenhof villa in Hagen and for the Nietzsche House in Weimar. Together with Harry Kessler he became the founder of the Kunstgewerbeschule and the academy in Weimar, the precursor of the Bauhaus, which would be further developed by Walter Gropius in Dessau. He also maintained a close connection with the Deutscher Werkbund.

Portrait of Maria Sèthe, the later wife of Van de Velde, 1891, by Théo Van Rysselberghe. It was through the painter that Van de Velde and Maria Sèthe met each other.
During the First World War, Van de Velde stayed in Switzerland and in the Netherlands. Commissioned by Helene Kröller-Müller, he designed a caretaker's house and a workers' house in Schipborg (construction permits dated 1921), next to the farm De Schepbord designed in 1914 by architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage. Van de Velde ultimately designed the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, which opened only in 1938. In 1925 he was appointed to the Higher Institute for Art History and Archaeology at Ghent University, where from 1926 to 1936 he taught architectural history and applied arts. In 1933 he was commissioned there to design the university library; the Boekentoren. Construction began in 1936, but the finishing work took place only after World War II and, for budgetary reasons, not entirely according to the original plans. For example, the floor of the reading room was made of marble rather than black rubber as Van de Velde had actually wished. Van de Velde was also involved in the construction of Ghent University Hospital.

In Leuven he built his last building on Diestsestraat between 1936 and 1942—a technical school—that between 1997 and 2000 was restored and renovated by architect Georges Baines into the Municipal Library and City Archive, De Tweebronnen. The original building served in 1997 as the setting for a choreography with minimal music by the group Rosas, led by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, for the dance film Rosas danst Rosas.

Contrary to what is often believed, Van de Velde was not the designer of the logo of the National Railway Company of Belgium; the famous letter "B" in a horizontal ellipse was conceived by Jean de Roy. As the NMBS's then artistic advisor, Van de Velde, however, did persuade the management to choose this design. Additionally, he designed the interior of the first Belgian electric multiple units (AM35) and a number of passenger cars. Van de Velde also left his mark on the Blankenberge station.

After World War II, Van de Velde was accused of collaboration. It never led to a trial, but Van de Velde did go into voluntary exile; he withdrew to Oberägeri in Switzerland, where he wrote his memoirs, which would appear posthumously in 1962 under the title Die Geschichte meines Lebens.

Van de Velde died in 1957 at the age of 94 in Zurich and was buried in Tervuren, near Brussels.