Word: doesburg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Twentieth century art has been rich in didactic rooms, in which an artist set forth to construct an exemplary environment: Lissitzky's Proun Room, Van Doesburg's project for a university hall, Schwitters' Merzbau, Kandinsky's music room, and so on. Nevelson's palace is of their company. Yet its motives are not didactic; they are closer to folk art, to the "ideal palace" made from junk by the French postman Cheval from 1879 to 1912, or the Watts Towers built by Simon Rodia in Los Angeles. Collection, repetition, unification: these are the elements...
...which it flourished was a traumatized Europe whose ruins and shaken regimes offered a kind of blank tablet: any design for Utopia, once drawn there, might stick. At one end of Europe, constructivism was apolitical; its center was the De Stijl group in Holland, led by Mondrian and Van Doesburg. The bright shuttles of color-red, blue, yellow, white and black, without tints or complementaries or tones-in works like Mondrian's Color Composition A, 1917, or Van Does-burg's majestic but unbuilt design of 1923 for a university hall-refer to no ideology of the state...