HENRY VAN DE VELDE

Henry Van de Velde, born in 1863 in Antwerp, Belgium, was an architect, designer, and painter that worked in different European countries at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth.14Originally trained as a painter, he joined Les Vingt - an association of Avant-Garde, Belgian artists – which allowed him to create relevant connections that would benefit his career in the following years.15

From 1893, he worked as a professor at the Antwerp Academy. He structured his classes following the English educational model, already showing his predilection and influence by the English Arts and Crafts.16 The impact of Les Vingt becomes crucial in his fondness for the English movement as the group had strong ties with Walter Crane, William Morris’ protégé. Crane guided the group to leave behind their preoccupations in fine art and focus on designing a “whole environment”, a space created in its totality, from the structure to the furniture and the fittings.17

Van de Velde married Maria Sèthe (fig.4) in 1894, who was also a painter and trained by one of his colleagues, through whom they met. She became an essential element in developing his career as an architect and designer; he even mentions in his memories how without the support and encouragement of Maria, he would not have moved away from painting to work on the applied arts.18

Although he started his career as a designer, furnishing and designing a lounge room for his sister-in-law and creating wallpapers, his first entirely architectural work was his own house in Uccle, Belgium, which he called Bloemenwerf.19 Van de Velde designed every detail of the house, following the ideals of creating a “total work of art” that he had adopted from the Arts and Crafts and his association with Les Vingt.20 The house in Uccle would become one of his most known works. Even before it was finished, Samuel Bing - an art dealer who resided in Paris – commissioned him to design the interior of four gallery rooms in Paris after seeing his work in Bloemenwerf.21 Even though these designs were not well received initially, they became relatively successful when van de Velde gained recognition. They are fundamental in spreading his ideas through Europe.22

Although van de Velde made significant contributions to different areas of the applied arts, this chapter will focus on Henry van de Velde and his contribution to female fashion, analysing the correlation of his architectural and fashion ideas and the repercussion Maria had on them. His first venture in women’s clothing is his designs for the clothes that Maria would wear in Bloemenwerf as part of the idea of a “total work of art”, which then is followed by the design of dresses for an exhibition on women’s fashion in Krefeld – showing how the different ideas he had on architecture and art shape his dress designs and his views on fashion.

Arts and Crafts Influence

Since the beginning of his career, Van de Velde showed an interest in the English Arts and Crafts, mainly due to his association with Les Vingt and their connection to the movement. Nonetheless, he was able to better understand its ideals and convictions after meeting Maria Sèthe, who had arranged a visit to England and met William Morris. During her visit, she recollected a series of documents, writings, and photographs that later shared with van de Velde, allowing him to broaden his knowledge on the topic.23

William Morris was a relevant representative of the Arts and crafts movement. He believed that if ordinary working-class people were provided with welldesigned handcrafted products, they could raise their level of culture and improve their lives.24 Although van de Velde shared the same socialist ideas that Morris defended, he was also influenced by the anarchic visions of Tolstoy and Kropotkin, which were equally or more reformist, and led him to take the reform into his own hands.25 On the contrary to Morris, van de Velde did not reject industrialisation in its totality. He admired what machines were capable of doing in mass production and supported its utility as long as the quality of the object was the same as that of the one designed by the craftsman. Additionally, the ability to mass-produce well-designed and crafted things meant that they could be distributed more efficiently to working-class people, bringing them a step closer to eliminating the differences between social classes.26

Van de Velde denounced that the social class division was partially due to the division between the arts and demanded an artistic reform that would benefit the arts and a more significant social and ethical cause. He defended a reform of all applied arts, including Fashion, becoming one of the first artists to recognise it as an art and taking part, thanks to the influence of Maria, in the English Dress Reform that was taking place at the same time. 27

Following the Arts and crafts position on social values, he defended that the single-family house was the key to gradually changing the values of society.28

23.

24. Moffet, Fazio, and Wodehouse, A World History of Architecture, 450.

25. Frampton, Modern Architecture : A Critical History, 97.

26. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, 25.

27. Hollis, Henry van de Velde: The Artist as a Designer, 95.

28. Frampton, Modern Architecture : A Critical History, 97.

Moreover, van de Velde was determined to fight against ugliness, as he believed that “Ugliness corrupts not only the eyes, but also the heart and mind” 29 With these two principles in mind, he prioritised designing an adequate domestic environment where the appropriate values could be developed and which would not include a single thing that was not beautiful or in harmony with the architecture, creating a “total work of art”.

Bloemenwerf - The Total Work of Art

After van de Velde turned to the applied arts, the first project he took on was the design of a domestic environment, his own family house in Uccle, the suburbs of Brussels (fig.5). The project was finished in 1985, it represented the connection between life and art, and it is the perfect expression of his ideas on architecture and art at the time.30

As he had no architectural training, he trusted a significant part of the project’s structure and stability to a contractor, giving the house a strong regional aspect.31 The house is a colourful sight, probably the cause of the many critiques and laughs it received at the time it was being constructed. The outer walls are made with stucco that had a brown tone to it, the roof tiles are a reddish grey, and the front part is decorated with gables painted with deep green and grey stripes. However, the back of the house is much more direct and has a twentieth century look thanks to the long, sharply cut windows.32

The house’s exterior has a closeness with those of the arts and Crafts movement, mainly with William Morris’ Red House. However, it also has a more evident resemblance to the house depicted in the frontispiece of News from Nowhere, Morris’ utopian novel.33 Van de Velde designed Bloemenwerf as an ideal family house that would be adequate for the development of values, and the resemblance with Morris’ idealistic image only reinforces his intentions.

It is a three-storey house, containing a large hall in the centre, in which the only furniture that can be seen is Maria’s grand piano. It is lighted from the top, a characteristic followed in his later vernacular designs.34 He approached the design of the house like a living organism, thinking first of the paths and routes you would take through a functional home, considering circulation diagrams and the essentials it should contain, and then creating the plan of the house, which provoked the appearance of odd-shaped spaces, but which are set-off by the fluidity of the whole floor plan. The result was a polygon that contained all the interlinked areas.35

Indeed, the house is well connected in a highly functional manner. For example, the studio is behind the large window that is on top of the porch, giving views straight to the fields while working (fig.6). In contrast, the opposite wall is a gallery that looks into the central hall, allowing van de Velde to look into the house and keep an eye on the domestic activities.36

Van de Velde was extremely selective with everything that he included in his house, primarily due to his idea of ugliness corrupting the heart and mind, as he said: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”. 37 Everything was carefully designed to be part of the overall composition; he designed the furniture, fittings and even the dresses that his wife would wear in the house, aiming to reach the total work of art that he and his contemporaries proposed. Even the glassware, metalware, and small fittings were carefully examined before taking part in the whole composition.38

Maria’s contribution to the house was also of great importance, as she gave her practical point of view in the design of the house. Likewise, she arranged the garden and collaborated in choosing fabric and wallpapers. However, her most remarkable contribution was in the creation of the dresses that she would wear in the house, as she was not only the model for them but also worked as a seamstress and collaborated in the design.39

Maria influenced van de Velde to include women’s fashion in the reform of all applied arts.40 Towards the end of the 19th Century, a debate on women’s clothes, the Dress Reform, was already emerging in England and the United States, raising later in Germany. Its main aim was to free women from the restrictive clothes that had dominated the fashion world for the past centuries, targeting specifically the corset and voluminous skirts. Parallelly, this movement also had a political dimension as the dress reform coincided with the fight for female suffrage in many countries, and therefore being categorised as a feminist movement.41

The dresses he designed for his wife to wear in Bloemenwerf followed the principles of the Dress Reform, and they were in harmony with the whole design of the house. The textile and colours he used were in synchrony with the house, as well as the rich embroidery that adorned the simple shape of the dresses. The cut of the dresses was a smooth curve that would not limit the movement of Maria, being comfortable dresses to wear at home, but also adequate for when people visited.

Rejection of the Art Nouveau

Henry van de Velde worked in architecture for almost fifty years, and naturally, his style and ideas were subjected to change. Van de Velde himself references this change, explaining how he and his wife were “too much painters” to realise the need to move away from ornament and decoration at their beginnings.42 This change is visible even only a few years after completing his first architectural work when comparing the ornamentation and decoration he added on Bloemenwerf and the writings he published in 1900, in which he condemns Art Nouveau.

He denounced Art Nouveau’s commercialism and its nature-based ornament in his writings. However, Bloemenwerf presents a clear connection to the Art Nouveau style, showing new forms of ornamentation that seemed to be based on natural form, a lack of straight lines, and expressive shapes defined by an abstract character. His contemporaries saw the house as an early representation of the style, and even years after its completion, it is still associated with the beginnings of Art Nouveau.43

Although van de Velde never utilised the term or showed any interest in being related to the movement, he could never leave behind his association with the style, not even after he had shifted to a more modernist approach.44 He expressed his discontent with nature-based ornament and decided to opt for abstract ornamentation that would only be based on the materials and how people perceived them.45 He defended the use of ornament only when it was necessary, distinguishing between ornament and ornamentation. He described ornament as an element that would emphasise the structural forces of an object and therefore have a function; ornamentation, on the contrary, is simply attached to the object to adorn it unnecessarily. Furthermore, he evoked the emergence of a ‘new style’ based on reason and logic, and beauty would emerge from applying these principles, ideas that would be developed in the following years by modernist architects.46

Observing the dresses that van de Velde designed for his wife in Bloemenwerf, particularly the most famous one, the tea gown (fig.), it is visible how his designs for dresses can also be associated with the Art Nouveau with the addition of specific characteristics of the Dress Reform. Although the shape of the dress is simple and comfortable, eliminating the tight part that usually would accentuate the hips, the fall and cut of the designs resembled an ‘energetic serpentine’ that can be related to the representative curves of Art Nouveau. Even though the embroidery aimed to be an abstract addition to the design, it has been constantly associated with nature-based ornament.47 For example, the lower part of the dress is embroidered with a repeated pattern that resembles plant leaves.