13 Facts About De Stijl

De Stijl, Dutch for "The Style", known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden.

Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colors.

De Stijl is the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg that served to propagate the group's theories.

De Stijl writes, "this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour.

The De Stijl movement posited the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, and the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetricality; the predominant use of pure primary colors with black and white; and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and lines.

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Name De Stijl is supposedly derived from Gottfried Semper's Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten oder Praktische Asthetik, which Curl suggests was mistakenly believed to advocate materialism and functionalism.

The "plastic vision" of De Stijl artists, called Neo-Plasticism, saw itself as reaching beyond the changing appearance of natural things to bring an audience into intimate contact with an immutable core of reality, a reality that was not so much a visible fact as an underlying spiritual vision.

In general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms.

In music, De Stijl was an influence only on the work of composer Jakob van Domselaer, a close friend of Mondrian.

De Stijl first met Piet Mondrian at an exhibition in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

At its height De Stijl had 100 members and the journal had a circulation of 300.

Works by De Stijl members are scattered all over the world, but De Stijl-themed exhibitions are organised regularly.

Museums with large De Stijl collections include the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, where many works by Rietveld and Van Doesburg are on display.