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Neoplasticism, or De Stijl (‘The Style’), was an art movement founded by the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg in Leiden in 1917. Founder members of the group included the painter Mondrian, the sculptor Vantongerloo, the architect J.J.P. Oud, and the designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld. In October 1917 van Doesburg started the magazine De Stijl, which took its name from the group. Mondrian\'s article, The New Plastic in Painting, best expresses their ideas for a universal, elemental art divorced from the need to serve representation: ‘The new plastic art … can only be based on the abstraction of all form and colour, i.e. the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.’
Neoplasticism rejected figuration as the goal of art, and replaced it with the pared-down vocabulary of elemental shapes and primary colours, thereby allowing art to express its own ‘plastic’ language free of the concerns of representation. The artist in this environment became less the author of a subjective work than the agent of a universal harmony—a goal that leapt the millennia back to prehistoric artists and conformed with the artistic ideals of ‘primitive’ Greece. The depersonalization of the work of art was carried through into the execution, which was anonymous and impersonal, for example in Mondrian\'s Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1930). Nonetheless, many De Stijl paintings are abstractions of natural phenomena, such as van Doesburg\'s Rhythms of a Russian Dance (1918).
In the 1920s, while Mondrian\'s work adhered to the strict principles of Neoplasticism, van Doesburg sought to broaden the influence of the movement into architecture. The austere forms of De Stijl were well suited to the geometric structures favoured by the International Modernist movement, while the primary colours favoured by the painters could be used as decorative elements to articulate an otherwise plain facade, for instance in Oud\'s Café De Unie in Rotterdam (1925). Likewise, Rietveld\'s Red and Blue Chair (1917), painted in primary colours and revealing its structure, offers itself for analysis like a Mondrian painting.
The principles of De Stijl art and design had considerable influence on the Bauhaus in the 1920s, and, following Mondrian\'s emigration to New York in 1940, in the US. MG PD
Further reading P. Overy, De Stijl. |
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