THE FATHER OF
“DE STIJL”
WHO IS HE?
Theo van Doesburg, pseudonym of
Christian Emil Marie Küpper (born
August 30, 1883, Utrecht, Netherlands—died March 7, 1931, Davos,
Switzerland) Dutch painter, decorator, poet, and art theorist who was a
leader of the De Stijl movement.
and he also founded the avant-garde art review De Stijl (a publication
that was continued until 1931).
Among the artists involved with De
Stijl was the Dutch architect J.J.P.
Oud, for whom van Doesburg first
designed stained-glass windows
in 1916. His collaborations with
Originally van Doesburg intended to architects continued throughout
pursue a career in the theatre, but
his career, as he went on to design
he turned to painting about 1900.
more stained glass, as well as floor
He worked in Post-Impressionist
tiles and overall colour schemes.
and Fauvist styles until 1915, when
he discovered Piet Mondrian’s
Van Doesburg turned his attention
work, which convinced van Doesaway from painting around 1920,
burg to paint geometric abstracfocusing instead on the promotion
tions of subjects from nature. His
of De Stijl in Germany and France.
paintings, with their strict use of
He lectured at the Weimar Bauhaus
vertical and horizontal shapes and from 1921 to 1923, and his De Stijl
primary colours, closely resembled theories subsequently influenced
Mondrian’s until about 1920. In 1917 the Modernist architects Le Corvan Doesburg was instrumental in
busier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig
forming the De Stijl group of artists, Mies van der Rohe. While in Ger-
many, van Doesburg developed an
interest in Dada art after meeting
the artist Kurt Schwitters; using
the alias I.K. Bonset, van Doesburg
exhibited as a Dadaist in Holland
in 1923 and published the Dada art
review Mechano.
Van Doesburg returned to painting around 1924, at which time he
decided to introduce the diagonal
into his compositions to increase
their dynamic effect. He named his
new approach “elementarism,” and
in 1926 he published a manifesto
explaining it in De Stijl. Mondrian
so disapproved of the concept that
he rejected the De Stijl movement.
In 1931 van Doesburg was involved
in the formation of the Abstraction-Création association, a group
of artists who advocated pure
abstraction.
“DE STIJL”, or how the art cured
the trauma of the FisrtWorld War
De Stijl (Dutch:
“The Style) group of
Dutch artists in Amsterdam in 1917, including the painters
Piet Mondrian, Theo
van Doesburg, and
Vilmos Huszár, the
architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud,
and the poet A. Kok;
other early associ-
ates of De Stijl were
Bart van der Leck,
Georges Vantongerloo, Jan Wils, and
Robert van’t Hoff.
Its members, work-
ing in an abstract
style, were seeking
laws of equilibrium
and harmony applicable both to art and
to life.
De Stijl’s most outstanding painter was Mondrian, whose art was rooted
in the mystical ideas of Theosophy. Mondrian eliminated all representational components, reducing painting to its elements: straight lines,
plane surfaces, rectangles, and the primary colours (red, yellow, and
blue) combined with neutrals (black, gray, and white). Van Doesburg,
who shared Mondrian’s austere principles, launched the group’s periodical, De Stijl (1917–32), which set forth the theories of its members. By
ostensibly removing the individualism of the artist in favor of precision
and universal harmonies, the De Stijl group believed they were laying
the groundwork for a future utopia. Look to De Stijl and you’ll find all
the tenets that modern designers deal in and celebrate: minimal simplicity, establishing tension and balance between solid and empty space,
the grid, etc.