Theo van Doesburg

description

Dutch artist who practiced painting, writing, poetry and architecture. The founder and leader of “De Stijl” (“Style”), a Dutch artistic movement also known as Neoplasticism. As a poet he wrote under the pseudonym I. K. Bonset, and as a philosopher – the pseudonym Aldo Kamini.

Van Doesburg was an architect by profession; he learned painting on his own. The artist created his works after long and careful calculation, using mathematical formulas. According to the theory of “Style”, compositions were to be constructed in accordance with the proportional relations between the geometric fragments that are included in their composition.

The universal mindset of the artist made him treat all art as a whole. He preferred the synthesis of architecture, painting and design.

Doesburg’s conceptions of outer space, based on the addition of the third dimension to the picture, are relevant to this day.

Key ideas:

– The basis of van Doesburg’s artistic philosophy was an attempt to bring the objective harmony of artworks, in all their forms, towards certain geometric elements.

– The artist asserted that geometric and sculptural architecture were diametrically opposed to our perception of their images.

– Doesburg believed that modern culture contains the greatest evil, because it seeks to compare the world to humans, while the world, in fact, has no outward appearance.

– The artist claimed that the universe, and absolute perfection, can be shown only by the use of the basic laws of numbers.
He said that the Divine necessarily excludes all that is intimate, everything that is connected with the feelings, thoughts and perceptions of an individual.

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1883

1916

1917

1924

1931

The birth of the artist

The Artist was born on the 30th of August in 1883 in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Doesburg created the art group “Sphinx” in Leiden

Doesburg created the art group “Sphinx” in Leiden. However, it was short-lived.

“De Stijl”

Doesburg met Mondrian, with whom he founded the group and magazine “De Stijl”. The members of the group worked independently, and some of them did not even know each other well. All of them were united by an acquaintance with Doesburg and faith in the theory of elementalism. “De Stijl” united artists and architects and propagandized a “radical renewal of art”. The magazine was a tribune for the “creation of a single international module in Life, in Art, in Culture” through “the purely plastic work of art”.

“Fundamental principles of Neoplasticism.”

Publishing house Bauhaus published his first theoretical work entitled “Fundamental principles of Neoplasticism”. The original edition was released in Amsterdam (1919). Later on six copies of it would be published in Munich.

The split between friends

The artist often argued with his friend and colleague Mondrian. Mondrian never accepted diagonals, whereas Doesburg insisted on the dynamic aspects of diagonals. Finally, this led to a split. In the same year, Doesburg founded Elementarism, a concept characterized by diagonal lines.