Word: doesburg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...
When Mondrian set about destroying space, he replaced it with the golden-section grillwork that formed the cornerstone for abstract art. With his friend Van Doesburg he founded the magazine De Stijl, and, as shown here, spread the gospel of color geometries to Germany, Poland, Belgium, France, England, Scandinavia and the U.S. The most brilliant works of the master are missing, but the evolution of his spatial austerity is easily visible in early works and drawings, its potential for beauty stunningly manifest in such artists as Strzeminski, Vordemberge, Schwitters, Nicholson and others. Through...
...Doesburg display, sponsored by the Graduate School of Design and the Boston Institute of Modern Art, was arranged by Mine. Van Doesburg and is its last public exhibition...