DE STIJIL
Based in the Netherlands, The De Stijl movement was characterized by an abstract, pared-down aesthetic based on basic visual elements like geometric forms and primary colors. The reduced output of De Stijl art was imagined by its founders as a common visual language suitable to the contemporary period, a moment of a new, spiritualized world order, partly as a backlash against the architectural excesses of Art Deco. De Stijl artists, led by painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, extended their style to a wide range of media in the fine and applied arts, as well as beyond. The founders of De Stijl dreamed nothing less than the perfect convergence of form and function in their journal of the same name, effectively making De Stijl the supreme style. To this end, De Stijl artists focused not only on fine art media like painting and sculpture, but also on nearly all other art styles, such as industrial design, typography, and also literature and music. De Stijl's influence was most noticeable in the field of architecture, where it aided in the creation of the International Style of the 1920s and 1930s.
COMPOSITION OF RED BLUE AND YELLOW. BY PIET MONDRIAN
In 1930, Piet Mondrian produced “Composition of Red Blue and Yellow.” It represents a slight shift in his distinctive, individual painting style, which he coined Neo-Plasticism. His visual voice emerged from a constant, meticulous pursuit of total abstraction, which he saw as a means of expressing universal perfection through the plastic arts. Mondrian created his first grid paintings in 1920, the same year he published his book Le Néo-Plasticisme, which included the black horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular fields of pure color for which he is now best known.
Mondrian experimented with various colors and tones early on in his discovery of this unusual place, as well as a vast range of arrangements for both his canvases and the forms within his compositions. He had arrived at a fantastically deep and mature vision by the time he died in 1944, as embodied by his masterpiece, "Broadway Boogie Woogie." He painted “Composition of Red Blue and Yellow” in the midst of this evolution. It may not be immediately apparent that this work is noteworthy or represents a significant turning point. However, there are certain elements of it that distinctly distinguish it from so many of Mondrian's other works, and which signal a point in his development when Mondrian himself was becoming transformed.
RED AND BLUE CHAIR BY GERRIT RIETVELD
Since it redefined conventional conceptions of shape and space within the confines of a functional household item, the Red/Blue Chair is probably the most prominent and familiar furniture style of the twentieth century. The lines between painting, sculpture, and architecture became blurred in this design. Rietveld removed the object's separation in space and provided movement to static form by restricting form to a set of planes and boundaries delineating space but not containing it. His use of primary colors obliterated the material's natural nature and objectified it as a whole. Neoplasticism was a significant tenet of the De Stijl movement in Holland in the early twentieth century, and it is often referred to as neoplasticism.
THEO VAN DOESBURG COMPOSITION VIII (THE COW). C. 1918
Composition VIII by Theo van Doesburg is made up of just fourteen rectangles. Thirteen rectangles in various proportions circle a virtually ideal yellow square in the center: four orange, three blue, four purple, and two red. They're equally spaced around the canvas, not overlapping (though two pairs are close together), and carefully matched with the rectangular white canvas's edges. This seems to be an early and strong example of what is known as "abstract art," or art that has little subject matter or visual similarity to real natural objects.
However, the title also declares the job to be a cow in what seems to be a ludicrous parenthetical statement. Indeed, van Doesburg has a variety of preliminary studies that can support that subtitle.