De Stijl Movement

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Theo van doesburg We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.

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STIJL Dutch for “The Style,” the De Stijl movement was founded in 1917 and is also known as Neoplasticism. The main painters of this movement were Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszár, and Theo van Doesburg. These painters sought to express spiritual harmony and order, but advocated pure abstraction by reducing elements to their basic form and color. These simplified visual compositions highlight vertical and horizontal directions and primary colors with black and white. In general, De Stijl proposed for simplicity and abstraction through the rectangular forms present in the work, which avoid symmetry and aesthetic balance.

Composition IX, Opus 18: “Decomposition” of The Card Players 1917

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Theo van

Influenced by Cubism, and the ideals of geometric forms in regards to “the perfect straight line,” the De Stijl movement would go on to influence the Bauhaus, Dada, and international style movements as discussed below.

Theo van Doesburg, founder of the De Stijl

Arithmetic Composition 1929-1930

movement, was a Dutch artist born in 1883. From as early as 1912, van Doesburg published numerous articles, where he revealed his self-consciousness as an artist and engaged as a dialogue between theory and practice. After reading Wassily Kandinsky’s Rückblicke in 1913, van Doesburg realized there was a more spiritual level in painting that originates from the mind rather than every day life. Hence, he believed that abstraction was the only outcome.

Because the Netherlands was neutral during World War I, Dutch artists could not leave the country after 1914 and were thus isolated from the international art world. During this time, painter Theo van Doesburg started looking for other artists to set up a journal and start a new art movement.

In 1915, Van Doesburg met with Piet Mondrian at an art exhibition and in 1917, he met with Vilmos Huszár. Together, they formed an avant-garde art review called “De Stijl” that continued publication until 1931. They continued to work together to represent their common aims and utopian vision, which included a universal aesthetic language based on the rejection of decoration of Art Nouveau in favor of a simple, logical style that emphasized

Composition XXII 1922

Simultaneous Counter Composition 1929-30

Composition XIII, Woman in Studio 1918

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Composition VIII, The Cow, 1918

Composition II 1918

construction and function. So they simplified visual compositions to just the vertical and horizontal directions and implemented only primary colors and black and white as their color schemes. While working with these color-schemes, he also became involved with the Dada movement, including the publication of four magazine issues.

Of all the artists linked to the De Stijl movement, many created their own alphabet, but it was van Doesburg’s that was the most influential to the movement. First used in 1919, he drew a sans-serif modular alphabet that is constructed entirely of evenly weighted strokes. Each character was created on a square divided into a raster of 5x5, which made some characters (K, R, and X) so unconventional that they were almost unreadable to many readers.

Simultanous Counter-Composition 1929-30

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Van Doesburg was such an influential artist of the time, as he was the one who took the flat geometric painting of the De Stijl group and then burst it into the third dimension and even tried to create a forth. He created

Contra-Construction Project 1923

axonometric projections of ideal houses along with the young architect, Cornelis van Eesteren. Their 3-D models were amazing, but not as striking as the original drawings because the models were too literal and in the drawings, the perspective is ambiguous, which makes them that much more interesting. In these drawings, walls are not supporting structures, but floating, intersecting planes of primary color; rooms are not static boxes, but conceptual spaces hovering in the air. The sheer volume of these buildings seem to explode from the inside, as though expanding into a third dimension and heading toward van Doesburg’s elusive forth dimension.

In 1920, van Doesburg turned his attention away from painting and instead began focusing on promoting the De Stijl movement in Germany and France and thus participated in lectures at the Weimar Bauhaus until 1923. While in Germany, van Doesburg also became highly interested in the Dada movement and exhibited as a Dadaist in Holland for a short period of time.

The German period lasted for almost two years of writing, publishing, lecturing, and organizing.

He returned to painting in 1924, when he decided to place more diagonal lines into his horizontal- and vertical-based compositions to create a more dynamic effect. He called these compositions “counter-compositions” and the approach “elementarism,” which he discusses in a published manifesto.

Piet Mondrian and many of van Doesburg’s other De Stijl companions were disappointed with the turn to Bauhaus and Dada in the movement and were disappointed with van Doesburg for taking it there. So, they rejected both De Stijl and van Doesburg completely and sought a different companion. Van Doesburg worked modestly alone for the rest of his life, which ended on March 7, 1931 in Switzerland due to heart failure.

Composition VII, The Three Graces 1917

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