Richard Riemerschmid

(b Munich, 20 June 1868; d Munich, 13 April 1957). German designer, architect and painter. The son of a textile manufacturer, he studied painting at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Munich (1888-90); he painted primarily at the beginning and end of his career, and he was a member of the Munich Secession. In 1895 Riemerschmid designed his first furniture, in a neo-Gothic style, for his and his wife's flat on Hildegardstrasse in Munich. In 1897 he exhibited furniture and paintings at the seventh Internationale Kunstausstellung held at the Glaspalast in Munich. Immediately following the exhibition, the committee members of the decorative arts section, including Riemerschmid and Hermann Obrist, founded the Vereinigte Werkst?tten f?r Kunst im Handwerk. In 1898 Riemerschmid was commissioned to design a music room for the Munich piano manufacturer J. Mayer & Co., which was subsequently exhibited at the Deutsche Kunstausstellung exhibition in Dresden in 1899. The armchair and side chair, with its diagonal bracing, designed for this room, are some of his most original and best-known designs. In 1900 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris he exhibited another interior, the Room of an Art Lover, with a frieze and door surrounds of elaborate interlacing plasterwork. For the Dresden Workshop, founded in 1898 by his brother-in-law, Karl Schmidt (1873-1948), Riemerschmid designed (c. 1905) his innovative and influential set of machine-made furniture. Available in suites of living room, bedroom and kitchen furniture and in a range of prices, the individual components were machine-made and then assembled by hand. Shown for the first time at the third Deutsche Kunstgewerbeausstellung in Dresden (1906), it was hailed by critics for its simplicity of style and purpose. In 1907 Riemerschmid was one of the founder-members of the DEUTSCHER WERKBUND in Munich. It was established to promote German design and many of its ideals were taken up later by the Bauhaus. At the Werkbundausstellung of 1914 Riemerschmid exhibited a living room.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Riemerschmid was an important designer in bridging the gap between the underlying principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement and a commitment to modern design principles in an industralized society as espoused by the Deutscher Werkbund (of which he was a founder member in 1907 and later, in 1920, a director). He worked for a number of manufacturers in a wide range of media including furniture, ceramics, metalware, glass, carpets, and linoleum and his mature designs were generally characterized by simple forms and a respect for materials. After designing his own house in 1895 he went on two years later to become one of the founders of the arts and crafts-inspired Munich Vereinigte Wekstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (United Workshops for Art in Craftwork), for which he designed furniture and interiors. Although the earlier phases of his career revealed influences from Art Nouveau, this had waned by the late 1890s as evidenced by the clarity and restraint of his designs for a Music Room shown at the German Art Exhibition in Dresden in 1999. He also exhibited a Room for an Art Lover at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and a Room for the Rector of an Academy of Art at the St Louis Exhibition of 1904. He went on to design machine-made furniture, including furniture and interiors for ships such as the light cruiser SMS Danzig in 1905. However, it should be remembered that such machine-made designs still required a significant involvement of hand finishing and assembly. Riemerschmid also showed machine-made furniture at the Dresdener Werkstätten in 1905, with further significant contributions to a number of other exhibitions including the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1910 and the Deutscher Werkbund in Cologne in 1914, for which he designed a living room. From 1912 to 1924 he was director of the Munich School of Applied Arts and from 1926 to 1931 head of the Industrial School in Cologne.