What Characterizes the Art and Design of the Dutch Art Group Known as De Stijl

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DE STIJL

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OVERVIEW
	De Stijl compages offers dynamic conceptions of spatial relationships in reaction to conventionally static, grounded compages from the showtime of the 20th century. Spatial innovation, based on principles adult by the De Stijl painter and writer Piet Mondrian from the philosophical-mathematical writings of M.H.Schoenmaekers, is clearly axiomatic in three iconic De Stijl projects from the mid-1920s: Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren's Maison d'Artiste and Maison Particuliére and Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House in Utrecht, the Netherlands. These modernist touchstones represent the synthesis of ideal universal projections of space and everyday manipulations of life embedded within art. Architecture proved to exist the ideal art form to correspond De Stijl through its ability to transform space, surface, universal ideas, particular situations, exterior, and interior. De Stijl as a collective modernist movement remains difficult to formulate. Begun as a virtual assemblage of avant-garde artists based in holland, it was founded and controlled by the painter, writer, and architect Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931). To characterize De Stijl as a truly united group or schoolhouse of artists and architects is to misrepresent the vicissitudes of a movement whose members were never in the aforementioned place at the same fourth dimension. Van Doesburg, the proselytizer for De Stijl, presented it to the world equally a close-knit, advanced collaborative unit of measurement of agreeing individuals with common goals. The work of De Stijl was disseminated primarily through its periodical, De Stijl, published irregularly from 1917 to 1929 and in 1932 every bit a memorial issue for van Doesburg. Van Doesburg, as its editor, published art, architecture, graphic blueprint, essays, and manifestos for an increasingly international audience. De Stijl as a collection of various projects coalesced under van Doesburg in a desire to accomplish international unity through "the sign of fine art. The clearest way to distill De Stijl is to examine its ideas fabricated evident in painting, sculpture, graphic blueprint, and, well-nigh significantly, architecture. Mondrian and van Doesburg strove to achieve an platonic unity through projecting the tension of opposites—a dialectical formation on its way to achieving synthesis through articulating and then annulling problems of the private versus the universal, nature versus spirit, particular versus general. This was to be achieved through reform of past cultural conditions via Nieuwe Beelding, or new forming (Neoplasticism). Van Doesburg attempted radical change through De Stijl, derived from the international conflicts of Earth War I. He strove for universal synthesis rather than Dutch nationalism, as evidenced in "Manifesto 1 of 'De Stijl,' 1918," published in Dutch, French, German, and English every bit "De Stijl," "Le Styl," "Der Stil," and "The Style" De Stijl set out to negate the concept of style in a universal language through communicative art and architecture, and the concise format of the manifesto was its primary textual vehicle. Van Doesburg contended that art (including architecture) embodies the spiritual force of life. He scrutinized the historical evolution of art as culminating "inevitably" in De Stijl as "The Manner," to synthesize all previous styles into a homogeneous purity. His ideological construct, looking simultaneously back into history and frontward to a new fine art, codified polar opposites to create beauty in tension and synthesis. His manner of carrying out this procedure demanded collective work in all the arts, an ultimately unfulfilled desire. The painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was De Stijl's spiritual leader, providing its philosophical foundation (Neoplasticism) and language for representing pure relations of contrasts via horizontal-vertical oppositions and utilizing the primary colors cerise, blue, and yellow with the noncolors black, white, and grey. Beyond his neoplastic painting, Mondrian projected spatial architectural compositions and created rigorous interior designs for his own studio spaces in Paris and New York. Mondrian championed the development of De Stijl compages, typically praising most congenital and unbuilt projects. An early on, perchance the first, De Stijl piece of work of compages, actualization in its magazine in 1919, was the Villa Henny in Huis ter Heide, holland, by Robert van't Hoff (1887–1979), designed in 1915. This oft published reinforeed-concrete firm was inspired by the residential architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, whom van't Hoff visited in the United States in 1914. The rectilinear, flat-roofed house features white planar surfaces with grayness bands of trim, standing aloof from its natural setting. Interior rooms project symmetrically off a fundamental space, a theme afterwards transformed by van Doesburg. Other early on De Stijl projects typically involved interior alterations of existing rooms, such as a children's bedroom by Vilmos Huszár from 1920 and a doctor's clinic by Gerrit Rietveld from 1922, demonstrating a procedure of re-forming the past on the mode to ideal De Stijl architecture. The formal debut of De Stijl architecture took place in 1923 under van Doesburg at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L' Effo rt Fashion rne in Paris. This exhibition, Les Architectes du Groupe "de Styl," displayed drawings, photographs, and models past van Doesburg, Cornelis van Eesteren, Vilmos Huszár, Willem van Leusden, J.J.P.Oud, Gerrit Rietveld, Jan Wils, and (surprisingly) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who contributed a photograph of his 1922 Glass Skyscraper model. This grouping of De Stijl architects (which at this time besides included the Russian artist-architect El Lissitzky) indicates the expansive assembly of international members for the motility. Two projects alluring great attending from critics and later widely disseminated through publications and other exhibitions were the Maison d'Artiste (Artist's Firm) and the Maison Particulière (Private House). Both were developed by van Doesburg in collaboration with van Eesteren (1897–1988) specifically for the Paris exhibition. The Maison d'Artiste and the Maison Particulière, to be congenital of "iron and glass" and "concrete and drinking glass," respectively, provided literal and figurative models for future construction. As siteless, dynamic, spatial objects, each contains asymmetrical volumes rotated about central voids, projecting primary-colored planes as floors, walls, and ceilings into surrounding space. Van Doesburg constructed a model of the Maison d'Artiste and photographed it from below as an object suspended in space to display its power to confront infinite and time and to expose its "6th facade." Van Doesburg prepared axonometric "counter-construction" drawings for the Maison Particulière. These drawings emphasize the oblique relationships betwixt pure planes and convey the abstract qualities of infinite extension without grounding them to a fixed vanishing bespeak as in perspective. These axonometric constructions sought to liberate space and surface from earthly associations, or, as van Doesburg wrote in point ten of his manifesto "Towards Plastic Architecture," "This aspect, and so to speak, challenges the strength of gravity in nature." The piece of furniture maker and architect Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), an early De Stijl participant who contributed a jewelry store design and assisted as a model architect for the Paris exhibition, produced the about significant piece of work of De Stijl architecture, the Schröder House in Utrecht, completed in 1924. Rietveld'southward Ruby-red Bluish Chair, initially produced without colour in 1918, successfully mediated the transfer of De Stijl principles from painting to architecture. This seemingly simple wood chair, painted in the principal colors plus black in 1922 or 1923, is simultaneously articulated and constructed and allows space to flow through it uninterrupted. Information technology, as well as the 1923 Maison Projects, inspired the De Stijl principles demonstrated in the Schröder Firm. This tiny two-story structure provides rich flexibility in its contrasting relations of elements and sliding partitions, allowing for closed or open living arrangements. As a house of options, or a chiffonier to alive in, it functions pragmatically and abstractly, attached to a serial of row houses and opened broad to the surrounding environment. Although constructed primarily with traditional timber frame and brick in-fill, it appears as an a-fabric, innovative, anti-box in its exterior photographed images and its projecting pinwheel plan. Its innovatively detailed connections and built-in furnishings emphasized the house as a total work of art. Rietveld drifted abroad from his associations with van Doesburg and De Stijl after the Schröder House just continued a long career edifice throughout the Netherlands past developing architectural relationships from De Stijl. J.J.P.Oud (1890–1963), an urban architect practicing in Rotterdam, published essays and projects in the periodical De Stijl but held a tenuous human relationship to De Stijl and van Doesburg later 1921. Van Doesburg collaborated with Oud on several residential projects, adding stained drinking glass and painted colour patterns to Oud's compages. Oud was simultaneously a pragmatist and an experimenter, as evident in his Wright-inspired Purmerend Factory project from 1919, a large industrial con crete volume nestled into an role expanse with a complex shallow-space facade. As a socially minded architect for the urban center of Rotterdam, he designed several expedient public housing projects in that location. His Spangen Housing (1919–21) and Tusschendijken Housing (1921–24), both displayed in the 1923 De Stijl exhibition, achieved efficiency and economy through standardization and use of brick as an everyday outside textile while including horizontal-vertical articulations of corner elements related to spatial De Stijl ideas. His Kiefhoek Housing (1925–29) contained a-material chief-color elements as a type of De Stijl village. His temporary Superintendent'southward Office (1923) for Oud-Mathenesse Housing was a De Stijl folly in primary colors and cubic forms, derived from the paintings of Mondrian and van Doesburg. Oud'southward Cafe de Unie, congenital in Rotterdam in 1925, was bombed during World War II and reproduced at another location in the metropolis in 1986, signifying its architectural stature conveyed through publications. Its facade, a billboard manifesto ad De Stijl, displays a low-relief limerick of primary colors with integrated signage. Later 1924, van Doesburg and Mondrian clashed over appropriation of the diagonal into the rectilinear compositions characteristic of De Stijl painting. Mondrian developed his diamond compositions, rotating the frames of his paintings 45 degrees while retaining the horizontal-vertical relationships of the rectilinear elements themselves to emphasize extension of the boundaries of the artwork beyond the inconsequential oblique frame. Van Doesburg, on the other hand, began at this time to invert Mondrian'south strategy, employing diagonal relationships of lines and planes within an orthogonal frame. Influenced past these interrelated still oppositional developments, van Doesburg reified their spatial implications in two rooms of the Cafe Aubette (dawn), constructed inside an 18th-century building in Strassbourg, France, between 1926 and 1928. The complex commission was carried out in conjunction with Hans Arp and Sophie Täuber Arp, who designed other rooms. This ultimate fusion of art and life using De Stijl ideas in combination with off-the-shelf materials, piece of furniture, and lighting fixtures resulted in an platonic De Stijl forum. By re-forming the spaces of this nightclub with striking manifestations of line and color in relation to the bodily action of dancing and the project of cinema, van Doesburg temporarily accomplished De Stijl synthesis through unity from the tension of opposites. The Small Trip the light fantastic Hall's master-color panels on the walls and ceiling align orthographically with the rectilinear room, resulting in a clear fusion of surface and space. Enacting van Doesburg's transition into "elementarism" and influenced by the oblique "counter-construction" drawings from the Maison Particulière, his Cinema-Dance Hall features diagonal color patterns extending through the room's corners to dismantle the confines of the space. In the Buffet Aubette, reconstructed in 1995, the projection of picture palace and the gestures of bodies in motility establish a kinetic dialogue between art and life. Synthesizing architecture, painting, sculpture, and applied arts as Gesamtkunstwerk, or total piece of work of art, van Doesburg created the ultimate De Stijl space and representation of modernism: a dialectically synthetic avant-garde cafe-salon interiorized every bit spatial art rather than occupying rooms with art hung on the walls. Van Doesburg congenital a simple business firm for himself and his wife, Nelly, in Meudon-Val Fleury, outside of Paris, between 1927 and 1930. Succumbing to tuberculosis, he died in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, in 1931. De Stijl every bit an avant-garde movement unfortunately expired with van Doesburg. Subsequent developments of modernist and contemporary architecture take been crucially reliant on the spatial conceptions of the De Stijl architects, from the works of Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer to Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and MVRDV. De Stijl architecture engaged space and surface in a simultaneously elemental and universal mode, proposing meaning and spirituality inside abstraction and "pure" relations of forms. Marker STANKARD Sennott R.South. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.1 (A-F). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2004.







GALLERY


	1915, the Villa Henny, Huis ter Heide, the Netherlands, Robert van't Hoff



	1923, Maison d'Artiste, Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren'due south


	1923, Maison Particuliére, Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren's


	1924, Schröder House, Utrecht, the Netherlands, Gerrit Rietveld


	1925, Cafe de Unie, Rotterdam, NETHERLANDS, J.J.P.Oud


	1925-1929, Kiefhoek Housing , Rotterdam, NETHERLANDS, J.J.P.Oud


	1926-1928, the Buffet Aubette, Strassbourg, France, Theo van Doesburg


	1927-1930, van Doesburg's house, Nelly, in Meudon-Val Fleury, FRANCE, Theo van Doesburg


	1917, Red Blue Chair,Gerrit Rietveld







ARCHITECTS
	LISSITZKY, EL OUD, J.J.P. RIETVELD, GERRIT THOMAS VAN DOESBURG, THEO







BUILDINGS
	BUILDINGS 1915, the Villa Henny, Huis ter Heide, kingdom of the netherlands, Robert van't Hoff 1919-1921, Spangen Housing, Rotterdam, NETHERLANDS, J.J.P.Oud 1921-1924, Tusschendijken Housing , Rotterdam, NETHERLANDS, J.J.P.Oud 1923, Maison d'Artiste, Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren'south 1923, Maison Particuliére, Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren's 1924, Schröder House, Utrecht, the Netherlands, Gerrit Rietveld 1925, Cafe de Unie, Rotterdam, NETHERLANDS, J.J.P.Oud 1925-1929, Kiefhoek Housing , Rotterdam, NETHERLANDS, J.J.P.Oud 1926-1928, the Buffet Aubette, Strassbourg, French republic, Theo van Doesburg 1927-1930, van Doesburg's house, Nelly, in Meudon-Val Fleury, FRANCE, Theo van Doesburg Piece of furniture 1917, Red Blue Chair,Gerrit Rietveld







More
	INTERNAL LINKS Lissitzky, El; Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig ; Oud, J.J.P. ; Rietveld, Gerrit ; van Doesburg, Theo FUTHER READING Writings on De Stijl seldom focus specifically on architecture, typically integrating multiple aspects of De Stijl. Many more books and manufactures on De Stijl, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, J.J. P.Oud, Vilmos Huszar, and other De Stijl participants, from the time flow itself to the nowadays, are available in several languages. Barr, Alfred H., Jr., De Stijl 1917–1928, New York: Museum of Modernistic Art, 1952 Blotkamp, Carel, et al., editors, De Stijl, the Formati ve Years, translated by Charlotte I.Loeb and Arthur Fifty.Loeb, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986 Boekraad, Cees, Flip Bool, and Herbert Henkels, editors, De Nieuwe beelding in de architectuur; Neo Plasticism in Curvation itecture: De St ijl, Delft: Delft University Printing, and Den Haag: Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1983 Bois, Yve-Alain, "The De Stijl Thought," Art in America 70, no. 10 (November 1992) De Stijl 1 and De Stijl two (Amsterdam: Athenaeum, 1968). Reprint of the periodical De Stijl, edited by Van Doesburg, from 1917–1929, and 1932. Friedman, Mildred, editor, De Stijl 1917–1931: V isions of Utopia, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Walker Art Center, and New York: Abbeville Press, 1982 Jaffé, Hans Ludwig C, De Stijl, 1917–1931; t he Dutch Contribu tion to Modern Art, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, and London: Tiranti, 1956 Michelson, Annette, "De Stijl, Its Other Face: Abstraction and Cacaphony, or What Was the Matter with Hegel?" Oct 22 (Autumn 1982) Mondrian, Piet, The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Wri tings of P iet Mondrian, edited and translated by Harry Holtzman and Martin S.James, Boston: G.Thou.Hall, 1986 Troy, Nancy J., The De Stijl En vironmen t, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1983