(Theo van Doesburg, Perspective with final colour design, Shopping arcade with bar-restaurant, Laan van Meerdervoort, The Hague, 1924 © Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut/Collection Van Eesteren-Fluck & Van Lohuizen Foundation, Amsterdam)
The Dutch currently hold the presidency of the Council of the European Union. The occasion is being marked by an exhibition devoted to the pioneering modernist and internationalist Theo van Doesburg.
A painter, poet, typographer, art theoretician, and interior architect, Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) was the key figure in a number of groups, including the influential movement known as De Stijl, which also included artists such as Bart van der Leck, JJP Oud, Vilmos Huszár, Gerrit Rietveld, Georges Vantongerloo, and Piet Mondriaan. Its members sought to bring about a radical, international reformation of art in interaction with society, science, and technology. To that end, they developed a distinctive, abstract, geometric formal idiom that made use of horizontal and vertical lines and primary or neutral colours.
In this exhibition, all kinds of artistic disciplines are represented – from visual art to film, architecture, design, typography, and graphic design. The items on display come from major Dutch museums such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, as well as from international collections such as the Guggenheim in Venice and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. They aren’t all by Van Doesburg himself: many are by his artistic friends and contemporaries. The curator, Gladys C Fabre, has put together an exhibition on a thematic and chronological basis, based on her assessment that Van Doesburg was, again and again, the right man in the right place.
(Theo van Doesburg. Axonometric projection of the Maison Particuliere, perspective view from above, 1923 © Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam on loan from Van Eesteren-Fluck & Van Lohuizen Foundation, The Hague)
During the First World War, when his country was neutral, Van Doesburg founded De Stijl in Leiden. In 1920, in Paris, he got involved in the international art collective known as La Section d’Or, and in Berlin he associated with the Dadaists Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter. In 1921, he moved to Weimar, where he set out to infiltrate the Bauhaus movement. A year later, at the Congress of Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf, he came into contact with the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, and the Belgian painter Karel Maes. A year after that, he was back in France again, where in 1930 he founded the Art Concret group. A dynamic, even brash figure, Van Doesburg often clashed with his fellow artists.
THEO VAN DOESBURG. A NEW EXPRESSION OF LIFE, ART, AND TECHNOLOGY
26/2 > 29/5, Bozar, www.bozar.be
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