Theo van Doesburg

The Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg was arguably most influential as a writer and theorist. After being inspired in 1913 by the high-flown spiritual aspirations of Kandinsky’s paintings, he increasingly abandoned his early Impressionist style. Meeting Piet Mondrian in 1915 completed his journey away from representation towards full-abstraction. Two years later, along with Mondrian and several other artists, he founded the movement and magazine De Stijl. Its aesthetic theory advocated the integration of art, design and architecture, based on the geometrical forms and primary colours of ‘Neo-Plasticism’. After travelling around Europe promoting the group’s ideas, in 1922 he focused his evangelizing efforts (with only partial success) on the Bauhaus School in Weimar. He developed Elementarism in 1926, arguing for the use of the incline, which broke with Mondrian’s strict rules over the use of only horizontal and vertical lines. This ‘betrayal’ so outraged Mondrian that he promptly split from De Stijl.