De Stijl (The Style)

(1916-1931)
The De Stijl (literally, "the style") art movement was founded by the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg in Leiden in 1917. It encompassed a new type of style in modern art and architecture. This movement used the artistic talent of the artists by designing homes, buildings, and furniture.

Founder members of the group included the painter Mondrian, the sculptor Vantongerloo, the architect J.J.P. Oud and the designer and architect Rietveld. They were eager to develop a new aesthetic consciousness and an objective art based on clear principles. Their work and research extended to the fine arts, city and town planning, the applied arts and philosophy.

A magazine called De Stijl, published between 1917 and 1932, presented the movement's works and theoretical foundations to an international readership. In the magazine Mondrian wrote, "The pure plastic vision should build a new society, in the same way that in art it has built a new plasticism." Hiss article, "The New Plastic in Painting", best expresses their ideas for reduction of form and simplistic abstraction: "The new plastic art...can only be based on the abstraction of all form and color, i.e. the straight line and the clearly defined primary color" (Lemoine, 1987, p.29).

Art was seen as a collective approach, with a language that went beyond cultural, geographical and political divisions. The depersonalization of the artwork was carried through into the execution which was anonymous and impersonal. The artist's personality took a back seat to a conscious and calculated working process. The key ideas underpinning the movement could not be separated from Mondrian's aesthetic theory of Neo-Plasticism. This theory was aimed at scaling down the formal components of art - only primary colors and straight lines. A painting was derived from the features of the surface, although many De Stijl paintings were abstractions of natural phenomena, such as van Doesburg's "Rhythms of a Russian Dance" (1918).

While Mondrian's work adhered to the strict principles of Neo-Plasticism, Van Doesburg sought to broaden the movement's research projects into architecture, reconceiving the entire living environment. A De Stijl picture represented a fragment of a larger project concerning space: the house as an interior space, and the city as an assembly of houses. The austere forms of De Stijl were well suited to the geometric structures favored by the International Modernist movement, while the primary colors favored by the painters could be used as decorative elements to articulate an otherwise plain facade.

The principles of De Stijl art and design exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus Style in Germany in the 1920s, and after Mondrian's immigration to New York in 1940, the U.S.A.