De Stijl

About

De Stijl ('The Style') began in 1917, when Theo van Doesburg launched a magazine of that name in Leiden. The circle, which included Piet Mondrian, Bart van der Leck, Vilmos Huszár and the architect J. J. P. Oud, imagined a universal visual language that could bring order to a Europe broken by war.

Mondrian called his version Neo-Plasticism. From about 1920 his canvases use only horizontal and vertical black bands, rectangles of red, yellow and blue, and white and grey, as in Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930). The same grammar moved into furniture and buildings. Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue Chair, designed around 1918 and painted a few years later, and his house for Truus Schröder in Utrecht (1924) break volumes into sliding, coloured planes. When Van Doesburg introduced diagonals in the mid-1920s, Mondrian broke with him. The ideas passed into Bauhaus teaching and modern graphic design.