De Stijl

De Stijl

The De Stijl movement was launched by the Netherlands in the late summer of 1917. Its founder and guiding spirit Théo van Doesburg was joined by painters Bart Anthony van der Leck and Piet Mondrian and Vilmos Huszár the architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, and others. Mondrian believed true reality in visual art “is reached through active movement in equilibrium, established through the equilibrium of unequal but corresponding oppositions. The explanation of equilibrium through plastic art is of a great importance for humanity. It is the task of art to reach a clear vision of reality.” Working in an abstract geometric style, De Stijl artists sought universal laws of balance and harmony in art, which could then be a prototype for a new social order. The theorist M. H. J. Schoenmakers influenced Mondrian’s thinking, by defined the horizontal and the vertical as the two most important opposites shaping our world, and called red, yellow, and blue the three principal colors.

Similarly to what Pablo Picasso and all the other cubists had done in the beginning after they started moving away from the academic way of representing figures and set their eyes on the simple primitive African masks, Mondrian had decided to simplify detailed and elaborate form into simpler ones. He had had to move to New York City where he would remain for the rest of his life due to the rise of fascism in Europe. There he became inspired with the way the city looked from a bird’s eye view and through a series of studies he managed to simplify the once elaborate sketch of the city’s map into an oil painting composed of lines.

Furthermore, he had personally stated that he preferred using primary colours to all others because they were the root of all other hues, further sparing the viewer the observation of different shades.

This artist advocated paintings without an initial view point and many of his compositions have no clear point on which the eye can rest and the edges and the middle are equally important. The horizontal and vertical lines repeatedly advocate a stillness and suspension, ascending from two mutually divergent forces holding each other steadily. Mondrian was confident that his work revealed the essential arrangement and organization which supports the world as we experience it. Mondrian’s impact extended well beyond the fine arts, his work and philosophies predisposed artists who backed the Dutch magazine De Stijl, and the Constructivists, all who were looking for new forms for the modernizing world. These groups included particularly those accompanying with the Bauhaus. When Mondrian moved to the United States in the 1940 he inclined the abstract Expressionists who held comparable views about a psycho-spiritual order behind human presence. 

Piet Mondrian, oil on canvas,

Composition with Red, Yellow, and

Blue, 1927.

Théo van Doesburg and Laszlo

Moholy-Nagy, book cover, 1925.

The essence of D .

Théo van Doesburg, cover

for De Stijl, 1922. Type is asymmetrically

balanced in the four corners

of an implied rectangle. De Stijl is

combined with the letters N and B,

which indicated Nieuwe Beelden

Bibliography:

•        Stephen Little, …isms Understanding Art, 2011, Herbert Press, London
•        Jesse Bryant Wilder, Art History for Dummies, 2007, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis
•         Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey