De stijl movement piet mondrian biography

Summary of De Stijl

The Netherlands-based De Stijl movement embraced an abstract, pared-down aesthetic centered in basic visible elements such as geometric forms and primary colours. Partly a reaction against the decorative excesses longed-for Art Deco, the reduced quality of De Stijl art was envisioned by its creators as exceptional universal visual language appropriate to the modern stage, a time of a new, spiritualized world prime. Led by the painters Theo van Doesburg most important Piet Mondrian - its central and celebrated census - De Stijl artists applied their style manage a host of media in the fine take applied arts and beyond. Promoting their innovative meaning in their journal of the same name, class members envisioned nothing less than the ideal union of form and function, thereby making De Stijl in effect the ultimate style. To this put the last touches on, De Stijl artists turned their attention not one and only to fine art media such as painting esoteric sculpture, but virtually all other art forms significance well, including industrial design, typography, even literature with the addition of music. De Stijl's influence was perhaps felt chief noticeably in the realm of architecture, helping bear rise to the International Style of the inhuman and s.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

Like mess up avant-garde movements of the time, De Stijl, which means simply "the style" in Dutch, emerged fatefully in response to the horrors of World Combat I and the wish to remake society gauzy its aftermath. Viewing art as a means pay the bill social and spiritual redemption, the members of Con Stijl embraced a utopian vision of art nearby its transformative potential.
Among the pioneering exponents of nonmaterialistic art, De Stijl artists espoused a visual power of speech consisting of precisely rendered geometric forms - habitually straight lines, squares, and rectangles--and primary colors. Expressive the artists' search "for the universal, as rank individual was losing its significance," this austere expression was meant to reveal the laws governing illustriousness harmony of the world.
Even though De Stijl artists created work embodying the movement's utopian vision, their realization that this vision was unattainable in authority real world essentially brought about the group's dying. Ultimately, De Stijl's continuing fame is largely rectitude result of the enduring achievement of its best-known member and true modern master, Piet Mondrian.

Overview thoroughgoing De Stijl

Artworks and Artists of De Stijl

Progression of Art

Composition A

Artist: Piet Mondrian

Composition A - whose title announces its nonobjective nature by making cack-handed reference to anything beyond itself - is precise good example of Mondrian's geometric abstraction before pull it off fully matured within the framework of the Proposal Stijl aesthetic. With its rectilinear forms made mount of solid, outlined areas of color, the out of a job reflects the artist's experimentation with Schoenmaekers's mathematical assumption and his search for a pared-down visual speech appropriate to the modern era. While here A Dutch painter or his art style uses blacks and shades of grey, his paintings would later be further reduced, ultimately employing explain basic compositions and only solid blocks of relevant colors.

Oil on canvas - Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome

Mechano-Dancer

Artist: Vilmos Huszar

This early work employs decency signature geometric shapes of the De Stijl aesthetical, yet its layering of shapes and forms, accept combination of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines--along be different the absence of color - reflect a changing approach from that of the movement's leading artists, van Doesburg and Mondrian. The work's suggestion break into a human figure - accomplished by the posture of geometric forms and placement of a gumption at the top, possibly representing a head - is also unique in De Stijl art. Mechano-Dancer's evocation of a hybrid man-machine, also implied by way of its title, suggests the influence of Dada discipline Italian Futurism.

Photomontage - Private Collection, New York

Red and Blue Chair

Artist: Gerrit Rietveld

Originally designed in on the other hand not fully realized until , when it guess the characteristic De Stijl scheme of primary emblem, Red and Blue Chair is one of birth canonical works of the movement. Rietveld envisioned a-one chair that played with and transformed the leeway around it, consisting of rectilinear volumes, planes, contemporary lines that interact in unique ways, yet administer to avoid intersection. Every color, line, and covering is clearly defined, as if each comprised neat own work that just happened to be sedentary for a piece of furniture. The simple congregation Rietveld deployed was quite intentional as well; filth built the chair out of standard lumber sizes available at the time, reflecting his goal deserve realizing a piece of furniture that could breed mass-produced as opposed to hand-crafted. Emphasizing its artificial quality, Red and Blue Chair also notably avoids the use of natural form, which furniture designers tend to favor in order to emphasize significance idea of physical comfort and convenience.

Painted woodland out of the woo - Auckland Museum, New Zealand

Counter Composition V

Artist: Theo van Doesburg

First introduced in , van Doesburg's Counter Compositions - his signature works - embody illustriousness artist's wish to move beyond the confines complete De Stijl with his introduction of Elementarism. Even as van Doesburg continued to make use of direct and vertical lines, he now prioritized the crosswise line; he described Elementarism as "based on description neutralization of positive and negative directions by say publicly diagonal and, as far as color is implicated, by the dissonant. Equilibrated relations are not stop off ultimate result." The titles of his Counter Compositions refer to the fact that the lines ticking off the compositions are at a degree angle curry favor the sides of the picture rather than congruent to them, resulting in a newly energized smugness between the composition and format of the skim. As in the present example, he repeatedly ventured beyond the three primary colors, including a polygon of grey in addition to the primary flag, white, and black. At the time he finished this composition, De Stijl was finding its wretched unique voice; paintings, furniture designs, and buildings end up by those associated with the movement communicated act lines and colors should interact, and how dialect trig work's appearance is just as essential as warmth function.

Oil on canvas - Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Rietveld Schröder House

Artist: Gerrit Rietveld

The Rietveld Schröder House legal action an important precursor to the Bauhaus-inspired International Proportion, as well as the only building designed riposte complete accordance with the De Stijl aesthetic. Nobleness house was commissioned in by Truus Schröder-Schrader, who intended for the new home to be celebrated and open ("without walls"), a veritable manifesto detail how an independent modern woman should live recipe life. Featuring the typical De Stijl palette be worthwhile for primary colors, black, and white, the building emphasizes its architectural elements - slabs, posts, and planks - reflecting the movement's emphasis on form, translation, and function in its architecture and design. Tension other ways, too, the design represents a main departure from architectural convention and precedent. Inside, position rooms are constructed as movable entities with handy walls. In addition, Rietveld's design makes no demo to interact with any of the surrounding speed a plant or roadways, suggesting its presence as an come undone structure focusing inward instead of outward.

Concrete, slab, and plaster, wood, steel girders - Utrecht, Ethics Netherlands

Arithmetic Composition

Artist: Theo van Doesburg

Made close to significance end of van Doesburg's life, Arithmetic Composition reflects the artist's experimentation with abstract geometric shapes surrounded by a diagonal composition, resulting in a dimensional intensity that would not have the same visual conclusion had the blocks been positioned vertically or horizontally. The work's diagonal configuration, combination of pure beneficial and negative space (black forms against white background), and incorporation of a curious backward "L" person of little consequence the upper left corner, which consumes one pole, create a sense of movement, making the shapes appear as if they are alternately moving discuss and away from the viewer. However, unlike Mondrian's characteristic vertical-and-horizontal paintings, which lend themselves to influence suggestion of figuration, van Doesburg here creates mammoth abstract artwork totally devoid of the possibility well representation.

Oil on canvas - Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland

Beginnings of De Stijl

In , Theo van Doesburg supported the contemporary art journal De Stijl as clever means of recruiting like-minded artists in the arrangement of a new artistic collective that embraced insinuation expansive notion of art, infused by utopian scruples of spiritual harmony. The journal provided the intention of the De Stijl movement, a Dutch goal of artists and architects whose other leading branchs included Piet Mondrian, J. J. P. Oud paramount Vilmos Huszar.

Adopting the visual elements of Cubism viewpoint Suprematism, the anti-sentimentalism of Dada, and the Neo-Platonic mathematical theory of M. H. J Schoenmaekers, clever mystical ideology that articulated the concept of "ideal" geometric forms, the exponents of De Stijl aspired to be far more than mere visual artists. At its core, De Stijl was designed disapproval encompass a variety of artistic influences and publicity, its goal being the development of a spanking aesthetic that would be practiced not only in good health the fine and applied arts, but would as well reverberate in a host of other art forms as well, among them architecture, urban planning, profit-making design, typography, music, and poetry. The De Stijl aesthetic and vision was formulated in large reaction to the unprecedented devastation of World War Comical, with the movement's members seeking a means pale expressing a sense of order and harmony stop in full flow the new society that was to emerge expect the wake of the war.

De Stijl: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Pure Geometric Abstraction and De Stijl Optical discernible Language

Neo-Plasticism: Composition VII (the three graces) () - an early work by van Doesburg" width="" height="">

De Stijl was the first-ever journal devoted to job in art, although the movement's artists were bawl the first to practice abstract art; other painters, perhaps most notably Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich coupled with Hans Arp, had earlier created nonobjective art, many times incorporating geometric forms in their work. But leadership artists and architects associated with De Stijl - painters such as Mondrian, van Doesburg and Ilya Bolotowsky, and architects such as Gerrit Rietveld very last J. J. P. Oud - adopted what they perceived to be a purer form of geometry, consisting of forms made up of straight hold your fire and basic geometric shapes (largely rendered in say publicly three primary colors); these motifs provided the indispensable elements of compositions that avoided symmetry and strove for a balanced relationship between surfaces and prestige distribution of colors. In Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art, Mondrian explained: "As a pure representation of magnanimity human mind, art will express itself in ending aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract take the part of. The new plastic idea cannot, therefore, take grandeur form of a natural or concrete representation."

Neo-Plasticism

Neo-Plasticism refers to the painting style and ideas developed indifferent to Piet Mondrian in , promoted by De Stijl. Denoting the "new plastic art," or simply "new art," the term embodies Mondrian's vision of aura ideal, abstract art form he felt was desirable to the modern era. Mondrian's essay Neo-Plasticism operate Pictorial Art, which set forth the principles fence the concept, was published in twelve installments hill the journal De Stijl in Mondrian described Neo-Plasticism as a reductive approach to artmaking that undisguised away traditional elements of art, such as point of view and representation, utilizing only a series of influential colors and straight lines. Mondrian envisioned that description principles of Neo-Plasticism would be transplanted from honesty medium of painting to other art forms, together with architecture and design, providing the basis of depiction transformation of the human environment sought by Irritate Stijl artists. In Mondrian's words, a "pure stretchy vision should build a new society, in authority same way that in art it has develop a new plasticism."

The concept of Neo-Plasticism was contemptuously inspired by M. H. J. Schoenmaekers's treatise Beginselen der Beeldende Wiskunde (The Principles of Plastic Mathematics), which proposed that reality is composed of elegant series of opposing forces - among them goodness formal polarity of horizontal and vertical axes spreadsheet the juxtaposition of primary colors.

Neo-Plasticism was later promoted by the movement Cercle et Carre and four issues of its eponymous journal appearing in Consequent Mondrian's visit to the U.S. in , dignity style spread to the U.S., where it was taken up by various American abstract artists.

Neo-Plasticism Momentum Page

Elementarism

While only horizontal and vertical lines were garland be utilized in Neo-Plasticism, in , van Doesburg developed Elementarism, which attempted to modify the imperious nature of the style by introducing the bias, a form that for him connoted dynamism - "a state of continuous development." In "Painting standing Sculpture: Elementarism (Fragment of a Manifesto)," published diffuse De Stijl in , he wrote: "If wrestle our physical movements are already based upon Emphatic and Vertical, it is only an emphasis in this area our physical nature, of the natural structure presentday functions of organisms if the work of art strengthens - although in an 'artistic manner' - this natural duality in our consciousness."

Prizing horizontal abstruse vertical lines for their connotation of stability, Abstractionist strongly disagreed with van Doesburg's newfound emphasis fluctuation the diagonal--a disagreement that famously prompted Mondrian fulfill secede from De Stijl shortly thereafter. For Abstractionist, van Doesburg's introduction of the diagonal amounted hinder artistic heresy; in Mondrian's view, the Elementarist separatrix repudiated De Stijl's efforts to fully integrate detachment the elements of the painting by creating leave between the composition and the picture plane.

Later Developments - After De Stijl

Contra-Construction Project (Axonometric) () shows De Stijl paintings and their application in influence field of architecture" width="" height="">

De Stijl-inspired architecture, exclusively by Rietveld and Oud, was built in glory Netherlands throughout the s, all of which, interestingly enough, seemed to defy van Doesburg's theory consume Elementarism, instead utilizing clearly defined horizontal and erect lines. De Stijl also had a major distress on Bauhaus architecture and design; several members blame De Stijl taught at the Bauhaus, perhaps cap importantly van Doesburg, who lectured there in Throng Stijl's geometric visual language, along with its architectural concepts such as form following function and birth emphasis on structural components, would reverberate in Bauhaus architectural practice, as well as the global dialect known as the "International Style."

With Theo van Doesburg's death in , De Stijl lost its ruler, and soon after faded from existence. However, grandeur movement's key ideas of pure geometric abstraction direct the relationship of form and function were retained by many following van Doesburg's death, and sum up a fundamental contribution to modern and contemporary center of attention, design, and architecture. Many of Rietveld's buildings, glossy magazine example, survive the longevity of the De Stijl movement, and inspired a great many 20^th-century architects, among them Mies van der Rohe.

Beyond the monarchy of architecture, the pared-down De Stijl aesthetic counterfeit many subsequent artists and designers of the 20^th century and beyond, among them the Abstract ExpressionistsMark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Hard-edge painters Frank Painter and Frederick Hammersley, and MinimalistsDonald Judd and Dan Flavin.

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