De Stijl (Dutch for The Style) is an art movement and a journal of the same name, founded in the Netherlands in 1917 by the painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. Neoplasticism (from the Dutch Nieuwe Beelding, new image-making) is its painting programme: only horizontal and vertical lines, rectangular planes, the three primary colours (red, yellow and blue) and, alongside them, black, white and grey. It rejects symmetry; balance comes from the tension of opposites. In Edutéka I place De Stijl in the story of art freeing itself, step by step, from copying the world.
The movement was born during the First World War in the neutral Netherlands, at a time when abstraction was seeking geometric purity. While Kazimir Malevich arrived at suprematism in Russia, Mondrian was simplifying trees and landscapes down to a grid of lines. Theo van Doesburg was the movement's chief organiser and edited the journal until his death in 1931. In the mid-1920s Mondrian parted ways with him. Why? Van Doesburg began to promote the diagonal (so-called Elementarism), and that could not be reconciled with Mondrian's strict right angles. A quarrel over a single line.
Besides Mondrian and van Doesburg, the movement included the painters Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszár, the sculptor Georges Vantongerloo and the architects J. J. P. Oud and Gerrit Rietveld. It was Rietveld who carried Neoplasticism into space. His Red and Blue Chair and the Schröder House in Utrecht of 1924 are icons of design, and since 2000 the house has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Mondrian's language even made its way into fashion: in 1965 Yves Saint Laurent designed his famous dresses after Mondrian's paintings, now held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Mondrian's paintings are among the most sought-after works of classic modernism. His auction record is held by Composition No. II of 1930, which sold at Sotheby's New York in November 2022 for 51 million dollars, only slightly more than the previous record of 50.6 million dollars set in 2015. Originals are scarce, though, and a large share of them are in museums. The world's largest collection of Mondrian paintings belongs to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. If you are heading to the Netherlands, do not miss his last work, Victory Boogie Woogie, there, and stop in Utrecht at Rietveld's house too.
— Anna Pulkertová, founder of Art Part Club
Related terms: Abstraction · Suprematism · Modern art · Minimalism · Postmodernism
