de Stijl

The De Stijl group-so named after the journal which was its mouthpiece-produced one of the revolutionary modern artistic movements. Formed in Leiden in 1917, its first members were the painters Mondrian, Bart van der Leck, Vilmos Huszar, and Theo van Doesburg its founder and guiding spirit. Strongly influenced by the Cubists, the group was united in the total abandonment of naturalistic representation in favor of a purely abstract art, dominated by the use of straight lines, right angles, the primary colors, and black, gray, and white. In painting, however, it was only Mondrian who expressed these principles with genius; they came to be far more widely embodied in architecture, J.J.P. Oud and Gerrit Rietveld being the most important of the architects who joined the movement. Although the group broke up on Van Doesburg's death in 1931, it considerably influenced the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, the development of abstract art and of furniture design, and (after 1945) a whole new generation of architects. In this book of extracts from the journal De Stijl, the movement's aesthetic theories, gradually evolved in the course of practical endeavors, are eloquently set forth by the artists themselves and accompanied by illustrations of their finished works and their projects.