Word: doesburg
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...most urgent job would be the search for hidden biological and chemical weapons. Special-forces teams from the Navy SEALs, the Air Force, the Marines and the Army's Delta Force would hunt down and secure such sites. Major General John Doesburg, who heads the Soldier Biological and Chemical Defense Command, which trains the forces that will decontaminate the sites, says his goal would be to secure all suspect weapons sites for inspections, rather than blow them up and risk spreading toxins in the air. "Our experience from the first Gulf War was that Saddam Hussein mixed things...
...architecture came to be known as the International Style. Of its many partisans--among them Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany, Theo van Doesburg in Holland--none was better known than Le Corbusier. He was a tireless proselytizer, addressing the public in manifestos, pamphlets, exhibitions and his own magazine. He wrote books--dozens of them--on interior decoration, painting and architecture. They resembled instruction manuals. An example is his recipe for the International Style: raise the building on stilts, mix in a free-flowing floor plan, make the walls independent of the structure, add horizontal strip...
There is all the difference in the world, for instance, between a work like Mondrian's Composition with Line (Pier and Ocean), 1917, and Van Doesburg's Countercomposition V, 1924. One is a reduction of atmosphere and light, the twinkling and palpitation of reflections on the flat sheet of the northern sea that Mondrian used to gaze at, hour after hour, during his walks at Scheveningen; it is transparent and delicate, reaching stability through addition. By contrast, the Van Doesburg throws an almost physical blast of color from its surface; the tilted red square is both monumental...
...artists of De Stijl wanted to submerge their personalities in the collective. "Although we differ individually," wrote Van Doesburg in 1919, "we all live for the same cause. We should concentrate solely on that. Then attention is automatically diverted from our own personality." The cultural aim of these reductions and renunciations? In four words: to change the world. To a very small extent, the Stijl group succeeded in this, since its theory of design helped banish ornament from all objects of everyday use, egg-cups to architecture...
...Stijl was not far from a religious movement-Dutch Calvinist piety in the realm of art. Its name, first used as the title of the group's magazine when Van Doesburg started it in 1917, and later transferred to the artists themselves, meant The Style-the last one, the one and only, suggesting some final mutation of art and thus the end of art history itself...