H. P. Berlage: Total Artist

During the Christmas holiday I spent a few days in The Hague and visited the H.P.  Berlage exhibition at the Gemeente Museum. The museum itself was designed by Berlage, his final architectural commission - he died just before its completion in 1935.  This was a rare opportunity to see the work of an artist in a museum that had been built by the very same artist whose work was being exhibited.

Gemeente Museum The Hague by Berlage

As Mallgrave reports in his Modern Architectural Theory: "In Holland, modernism during this period is more or less synonymous with Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934)". Berlage studied architecture at Zürich's Federal Insititute of Technology (the ETH) but the exhibition revealed his versatility of talent and proves him to have been a Total Artist. Not simply an architect, he was also a maker of furniture, china, glassware, wallpaper and a book designer. The exhibition helped me understand why he was such a dominant influence on Dutch Art Nouveau and why he is remembered as the father of Modernism in The Netherlands.  His rational, spare approach to design and his abhorrence of superfluous decoration left its mark on later developments of Dutch design right up until today. Here is his own working desk, designed when he was still working within the Jugendstil ideals, but you can see that he has pared down decorative details to a minimum. Although heavily influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement Berlage rejected the more floral, decorative Art Nouveau style that was coming from Belgium and gradually developed the taut, constructive style that he considered to be in keeping with Dutch character.

Here is another desk, this time for a boardroom and with chairs. The picture on the wall shows one of the buildings that Berlage designed for the insurance company "De Nederlanden van 1845". The beautiful chairs are an indication of why Berlage is considered to be the harbinger of the new, emerging style, Art Deco.

Berlage was deeply interested in creating the perfect chair.  His admiration for the chairs of ancient Egypt knew no bounds.  He wrote a number of books on chairs and claimed that the Egyptians had never been surpassed. Here is one example of his own Egyptian style chairs.

Here is a design that Berlage made for the collected works of Louis Couperus.  It is for the cover of Couperus' debut novel Eline Vera, a novel that, by coincidence, I happended to be reading at the time of my visit (and that I highly recommend).

Around 1904 and 1905 Berlage worked on a number of wallpaper designs, inspired by the prints of micro-organisms that had appeared in biologist Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur. Berlage based his designs on microscopic patterns found in the natural world. In 1927 a number of these designs were printed by the company R and D (Rath and Doodeheefver), including this one.

Berlage was a towering figure in Dutch design, with convinced socialist, even utopian tendencies.  He strongly believed in community art - creating art projects that would improve society and involve furniture makers, various craftspeople as well as architects. It is ironic therefore that his most famous building was the Amsterdam commodities stock exchange or Bourse.

Beurs van Berlage Amsterdam, now a conference centre