De Stijl which is Dutch
for “The Style” was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917 in the
Netherlands. De Stijl was not an ‘ism’ like Cubism or Luminism, nor an arts
academy like the ‘Kunstakademie Düsseldorf’ (Dusseldorf
Academy). But it was rather a collective project, organized and promoted by
Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), a Dutch painter, designer, writer, and a
propagandist.
Others involved in the project were
painters Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Vilmos Huszar (1884-1960), Georges
Vantongerloo (1886-1965) and Vart van der Leck (1876-1958), and architects
Cornelis van Eesteren (1897-1988), Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), Jan Wils
(1891-1972), J.J.P.Oud (1890-1963), and
Robert Van Hoff(1887-1979). Many of them barely knew each other, never met even
and there were never any group photographs of the members, which is uncommon in
this day of age where most people have an all-in-one device in their pocket.
Nonetheless, they were often aware of the progress of each other’s work and the
ones that were produced which have stylistic and conceptual characteristics in
common.
The backers(members) of De Stijl
were looking to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order.
They promoted pure abstraction and universality by a lessening to the
essentials of form and colour in the early aesthetics of De Stijl. Which is
simplifying the object’s aesthetics to vertical and horizontal lines, and using
only primary colours along with black and white. As defined by Piet Mondrian,
the horizontal line is a schematic (or diagrammatic) representation of the
earth, the horizon(we learned this in Mr. Ernesto’s class). While the Vertical
line is the effect of man on his environment.
.jpeg)
However, as time goes by most De
Stijl associated artists began experimenting with diagonal elements, removing
the black lines, the use of the colour grey and the inclusion of the secondary
colours.
Van Doesburg introduced the
diagonal elements. In the mid-twenties, he believes that the diagonal
relationships realizes ‘the spiritual’ aspect of De Stijl more because they
opposed the gravitational stability of the natural and material structures of
the horizontal and vertical relationships.
Van Der Leck developed a method of
abstraction which he calls ‘decomposition’. He covered over a figure study with
white paint until it was reduced to a geometric pattern of rectangular elements
that never cross or touch each other. Which are more reductive than early De
Stijl works.
To
conclude, De Stijl is the deconstruction of an objects aesthetics to its
essentials, which is it’s form(shape) and colour. Some works focuses more on
abolishing the form of an object to be abstract while some are more of an
idealistic representation of an object's aesthetics.
Sources:
De Stijl by Paul Overy
No comments:
Post a Comment