De Stijl and Dutch modernism

by Michael White

The name De Stijl, title of a magazine founded in the Netherlands in 1917, is now used to identify the abstract art and functional architecture of its major Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Van der Leck, Oud, Wils and Rietveld. De Stijl achieved international acclaim by the end of the 1920s and its paintings, buildings and furniture made fundamental contributions to the modern movement. This book is the first to emphasize the local context of De Stijl and explore its relationship to the distinctive character of Dutch modernism. It examines how the debates concerning abstraction in painting and spatiality in architecture were intimately connected to contemporary developments in the fields of urban planning, advertising, interior design and exhibition design. The book describes the interaction between the world of mass culture and the fine arts.

Genres: Art

196 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2003

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Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The magazine "De Stijl" was founded in 1916 by Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, J.J.P. Oud, Gerrit Rietveld and others. Michael White's main focus in this book is on De Stijl urbanism and architecture, and how they interacted with Dutch culture and society. At its core is his account of how De Stijl influenced the expansion of Amsterdam in the early twentieth century, particularly in the field of housing. The earliest new public housing projects in Amsterdam had been built by architects of the Amsterdam School (Berlage, De Klerk and Kramer) in a picturesque idiom that searched for a utopia that could offer a sense of belonging by referring to tradition. Oud denounced this folksy decadence and insisted on a much more radical vision, out of his conviction that the way to create a revolutionary working class was to intensify, not mask, the experience of capitalist alienation. He therefore adopted a tough functionalist aesthetic based on prefabrication, unrelieved flat facades, and interminably long, straight streets. Inside the flats, he suppressed all individual expression and imposed an abstract decor of primary colours, for which he hired Van Doesburg as his consultant. But even that was not radical enough for Van Doesburg; he wanted to paint everything black, and to decompose Oud's straight facades into a completely abstract idea of the city as a formless continuum with no streets at all; at that point the two went their separate ways.

Van Doesburg found a new "sparring partner" (as White wittily calls him) in Cor van Eesteren. Together these two developed their vision, exhibited in Paris in 1923, as a complete dissolution of space, dispersing the city over vast territories in a totally abstract, dehumanised flux. By 1927 Van Doesburg had become otherwise preoccupied and van Eesteren, Oud, Mondrian, and others moved from De Stijl to an even more extreme artistic avant-garde called i10. Here, Mondrian further developed the idea of urban and domestic space as a seamless continuum; announcing that "Home Sweet Home must be destroyed" he envisaged the revolutionary city as an endless grid in which everything would be the same, without hierarchies or nodes.

In 1928 a left-wing coup ousted Berlage and the Amsterdam School. Van Eesteren, now appointed City Architect, began immediately to implement the De Stijl idea of dispersion and dissolution of the city. This policy continued to be put into effect during the decades that followed; Michael White's account describes van Eesteren's achievement as we now experience it today as a semi-urbanised continuum that extends all the way from Amsterdam to Rotterdam.

Moving on to a discussion of interior design and architecture, the book includes a valuable detailed essay about one of the key buildings of the entire modern movement: Gerrit Rietveld's iconic Schröder house. Truss Schröder, who was living unhappily with her Catholic husband in a large apartment in Utrecht, wanted to bring up her children on Montessori principles, in different surroundings. She and Rietveld worked together, initially remodelling a single room in the family flat and then, after her husband died, decided to design a whole house as "a new place in which a new way of life could be discussed and experienced". She and Rietveld had disagreements about what this meant, but in the end their collaboration produced the completely flexible open space both were looking for that completely dissolved all barriers between inside and outside.

Other chapters deal with graphics, advertising, and exhibition design, moulding White's huge scholarship into a very readable account. By restricting himself deliberately to Holland, he necessarily leaves out the Bauhaus, America, and De Stijl's international influence on everyone from Wright to Scarpa. But within those limitations, this is a major contribution. De Stijl is endlessly fascinating and there seem to be new books about it all the time; this is one of the best.