Influencers

Influences.

A major influence on De Stijl can be found in the form of cubism, the avant-garde movement started in France by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Gorges Braque (1882-1963) in 1906. Both Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg experimented with cubist approaches to painting in the time shortly before the formation of De Stijl. It can be argued that De Stijl was a logical step following cubism, a movement which deals with the abstraction of form into blocky, disjointed shapes while keeping the original image readable. De Stijl takes abstraction further, removing natural form all together to create perfect clean abstract compositions.

The Futurist movement, which had been started just eight years before De Stijl in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), had similar ideas about the abandonment of natural form and decoration and was undoubtedly an influence. In van Doesburg's essay "The New Movement in Painting" (1916) he wrote "Without this expression the art history of our time would be incomplete futurism is the plastically formulated, urgent demand to revise completely the principles of traditional art."

Another apparent influence is that of the famous architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) which had recently been published in Europe as the Wasmuth Portfolio (1910-1911) and was introduced to the De Stijl artists by one of the founding members, the architect and furniture designer Robert van't Hoff. He was a great fan of Wright's work and had visited several of his houses. However, Wrights personal ideas were somewhat of a contradiction to those of the De Stijl group. While many of his designs were blocky and functional he was an advocate of organic architecture, such close ties between the works and nature do not sit with theDe Stijl school of thought.

Hendrik Berlage (1856-1934), one of Holland's principal architects in the late 19th and early 20th century, was responsible for buildings such as the Amsterdam Stock Exchange (1903) and the Municipal.

During the fifteen-year lifetime of the De Stijl group the participants gained little acclaim and the group and its cause was not well known, however the existence of De Stijl has been hugely influential long after its own demise. One of the most notable things to draw inspiration from the forms and colours of De Stijl was the famous German design school, the Bauhaus (1919-1933). Bauhaus principle was that of leaving behind history, as De Stijl left behind nature. They believed that studying what came before would give the students preconceptions of how things should be and that only by looking at problems from the most original viewpoints could new and better solutions be created. This marries well utopia. De Stijl's ideas of a new Bauhaus design also bore similarity to De Stijl in its tendency towards geometric shapes and a limited colour pallet.

As well as the Bauhaus, De Stijl also had a profound influence on individual artists. The Dutch typographer, photographer and Industrial designer, Piet Zwart (1885-1977) started his career as an architect, working for Jan Wits (1891-1972) and Hendrik Berlage. As a designer, Zwart was renowned for his work for both the Nederlandse Kabelfabriek Delft, (the Dutch Cable Factory in Delft) and the Dutch Postal Telegraph and Telephone. Zwart followed the basic De Stijl principles, as well as developing his own typographic technique and his work can be recognised by its primary colours, geometric shapes and an early use of photo montage. Zwart profiled himself as the first Industrial

Fig 8. The White Stripes Album cover "De Stijl" (2000)

designer in the Netherlands, although he referred to himself as a form engineer or form technician rather than a designer. Zwart owes his reputation to his design for the Bruynzeel kitchen in 1938 and his progressive graphic designs for companies like PTT.

De Stijl is also consistently tributed and referenced in modern works as well, the style is one that can be easily adapted and applied too a multitude of different artefacts. One example is that of an early album cover for The White Stripes, a rock band formed in 1997 in America. The cover of the album titled "De Stijl" featured the two band members surrounded by rectangles of red, white and black. The cover draws obvious inspiration from the 20th century movement, the rectangles forming an abstract composition. However the inclusion of the two band members, organic forms, is somewhat atypical of original De Stijl work.

De Stijl also had great influence on architectural development. While teaching at the Bauhaus Theo van Doesburg was able to impart his ideas on Neo-Plasticism on the people there, affecting some of the most influential European architects of the age such as Mies Van der Rohe and Walter Groupius. While the Rietveld-Schroder house was the only truly De Stijl structure to be constructed (excluding the Cafe De Unie facade) the legacy of such ideals; the blocky nature, the emphasis on space and function as well as the large structural windows can be seen in a myriad of 'modern' architecture.