De Stijl

de stijl El Paso Museum of Art January 18-May 2, 2014

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e Stijl, which is Dutch for “the style” was an art movement founded during the turmoil of World War

I in the Netherlands. The Dutch artists, who later

become known as founders of De Stijl, wanted to make changes everywhere in contemporary life—in

industrial production and in the organization of politics and trade unions. Paris was the center of

the art world, but that city was unreachable to these Dutch artists due to

German forces occupying the city. As a result, they were forced to stay in the Netherlands and collaborate with each other. De Stijl art is largely non representational. The tulips and dykes of the Dutch landscape are so beautiful that it is strange that De Stijl portrays it in such an abstract way that it becomes unrecognizable. The abstraction element can be traced back to the Dutch Calvinist ancestry in which they destroyed any representation of religion; they claimed that it was a detraction from the absolute sanctity of God. Many De Stijl artists felt the same way about depicting nature. They felt like any “representation of a natural object was, for them, a distortion of the divine purity of the laws of creation.”

The artists restricted themselves only to using the basic colors of red, blue, and yellow and the neutral colors of black, grey and white. Also, by just using vertical and horizontal lines, they limited themselves to squares and rectangles. These artists had an influence in the arts, not only in painting, but also in graphic design, architecture and furniture design. The artist Theo van Doesburg founded the movement with other artists like Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszar, Gerrit Rietveld, contributing to its look.

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|Theo van Doesburg, cover for De Stijl, 1922

Theo an Doesburg Theo van Doesburg was a painter, writer, poet, and architect. He also co-founded the journal called De Stijl. Van Doesburg edited and ran the publication using his own resources to spread the philosophy of the movement. Aside from the journal, van Doesberg helped design the coverofGrundbegriffederneungestaltenden(BasicConceptsofForm-making) which examined and explained the process of De Stijl in graphic design.

The book cover contains the same type of balance with primary colors in different-sized rectangles. Outlining the shapes are bold, black lines and appropriately placed text that has a good flow both vertically and horizontally. Other van Doesberg works include a 1922 cover for De Stijl which consists of well balanced type in rectangular form held together with red characters. They are positioned in a way that allows one’s eye to flow around the page. The letters “N.D.” behind “De Stijl” are in red which helps emphasize them, and is an abbreviation in Dutch for New Images. This particular issue emphasizes new paintings and architecture of De Stijl. Van Doesberg also designed announcements made solely of text with rectangles separating each section of text. The open spaces of the bars unify the page and set the theme. The sans serif typography is consistent not only in this advertisement, but with other De Stijl designs.

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Theo van Doesburg and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, book cover, 1925

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De Stijl has much Cubist influence to it, and van Doesberg was a Cubist artist previously. One can see this in an exhibition poster from 1920 that van Doesberg created for an exhibition on Cubists and Neo-Cubists.

Comparing the advertisement and the exhibition poster, both of them reference the square—the main component of De Stijl. The shapes of the text frames give order and organization. By eliminating any curves in the design and letterforms the design are limited to verticals and horizontals.

The limited color palette also allows one to focus more on the design.

Theo van Doesburg, exhibition poster, 1920 }

Theo van Doesburg, advertisements and announcements from De Stijl, 1921 €

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Piet Mondrian Another important artist of the De Stijl movement was painter Piet Mondrian who expressed his artistic theory in his own published writings called De Nieuwe Beelding in de Schilderkunst: “I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness.

Nature inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something.”

His work Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue shows use of limited color and shapes, the thick blacklines, the red square, blue and yellow rectangles.

Here, Mondrian accomplishes a good sense of balance between colors and attention to detail and basic line drawing. It depicts a flat surface inspired by a three-dimensional landscape, clearly an abstraction of a Dutch landscape. Mondrian’s style evolved and in his Composition with

Piet Mondrain, Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1922

Piet Mondrain, Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red, 1939

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Yellow, Blue, and Red he puts more black lines vertically and horizontally, which make more squares in different sizes. Mondrian only colored in two of the squares—a yellow one off to the upper left side, and a red one towards the bottom. A blue line seems to be behind two of the black lines, even though with this there is no sense of depth perception, so it still consists of a flat surface. Another of Mondrian’s works is Broadway Boogie Woogie. It depicts New York City and its restless motion with checkerboard lines in red, blue, yellow, and different shades of gray.

Piet Mondrain, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1942

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ilmos HuszÁr Vilmos Huszár was another painter and designer of the De Stijl movement.

He created some De Stijl journal covers and also designed a De Stijl logo with an open grid square technique creating a rectangular shape in the center of the page. His other cover designs follow the same format text and logo that consist of squares and form a rectangle when put together. Huszár’s work is a typical example of De Stijl graphic design.

| Vilmos Huszar, title page

Vilmos Huszar, title page for De Stijl, 1918 }

| Vilmos Huszar, Cover design for De Stijl, 1917

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Gerrit Rietveld was a De Stijl architect and designer. One of the buildings he designed for De Stijl is the Shröder House built in 1924, in Utrecht. This building resembles a De Stijl painting and interprets the movement beyond paper or canvas. The building consists of rectangular panels that appear to hover off its walls. The windows are also rectangular which allow the building to resemble Mondrian’s works. The house is painted in the basic De Stijl colors so as not to take away from the building’s design. In addition to architecture, Rietveld also designed the Red/Blue Chair made of De Stijl geometric shapes and colors. Its support bars represent the black lines in one of Mondrian’s paintings. Rietveld served to bring De Stijl into the three dimensional realm.

Gerrit Rietvald, Red/Blue chair, 1918 ~

Gerrit Rietveld, The Rietveld/ Schröder House, restored 1974 }

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LegacY De Stijl was a revolutionary movement that still inspires today. The band The White Stripes released an album called De Stijl, in reference to their music’s simplicity. The album cover consists of the abstract element of rectangles and lines in red, white, and black with even the band members wearing DeStijl-inspired outfits. The fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, realized the plain dresses he was designing were ideal for the block colors that Mondrian had painted before, with black lines and red, blue, and yellow, squares on them. Each dress was designed to show different concepts of the lines and colored squares.

De Stijl may appear simple, but the movement and the meaning behind it meant so much more to the artists, as well as to the era.

| Yves Saint Laurent, Mondrian Dress, 1965

~The White Stripes, De Stijl, 2000

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