LAST autumn, the auction house Tennants held the Harlequin Sale. Advertised as ‘bursting with colour’, it contained contents from the estate of Michael Raw, a history teacher at Sedbergh School in Cumbria, who had previously written for the Cambridge Footlights and Not the Nine O’Clock News. He was a collector of modern 20th-century art and design and a vast proportion of the 193 lots was made up of furniture inspired by the De Stijl movement, in its signature colours of red, yellow and blue.
‘They saw it as an opportunity to shake up Holland’s stuffy and conservative culture’
Described variously as ‘an early 20th-century artistic movement celebrating simplicity and purity in colour and form’ or ‘the most important art movement you’ve never heard
