Word: doesburg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mondrian was not the only Dutch artist to pursue the dream of social renewal through ideal abstraction-though he was the most gifted one. What of his less renowned colleagues, painters like Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leek and Georges Vantongerloo, architect-designers like J.J.P. Oud or Gerrit Rietveld? Though they all used much the same language of geometrical shapes, primary colors and rectilinear layout, their variety as artists is faithfully rendered in the show...
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...