Do you ever imagine yourself as an artist limiting yourself
to just two or three colours? Or imagine painting only squares and straight
lines? For a group of Dutch artists in the early 20th century,
this type of art is called De Stijl.
De Stijl began in 1917 under the Dutch painter and architect
Theo van Doesburg. It included a number of international artists, architects
and designers. De Stijl’s artists and designers wanted to give importance to
peace and harmony. They also had one goal in mind. This was to make art simple
and basic as possible. As a result to this, composition and balance played a
huge part in their work, making De Stijl art movement influential in the modern
design and architecture. De Stijl was influenced by Cubism, Expressionism,
Futurism, the Bauhaus and The Constructivists.
Theo van Doesburg, the chief founder of De Stijl,
established the De Stijl journal as well. The typographic elements of the
journal cover and pages are works of art themselves. Also, Van Doesburg was
more successful as an art writer than as an independent artist.
Another important figure from the De Stijl movement is
Gerrit Rietveld, a Dutch furniture designer and architect. He stated, “The
scaling of undefined space to human proportions may be achieved by a line drawn
on a road, a floor, a wall, a covering surface, a combination of vertical and
horizontal planes, curved or flat, transparent or massive. It is never a
partitioning or closing off, but always a defining element of what is here and
there, above and below, between and around.” His most important architectural
work is the Rietveld-Schroder House in Utrecht in Netherlands.
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| Rietveld-Schroder House |
The Red and Blue chair, designed in 1917, was one of the
first three-dimensional designs of the De Stijl movement. Rietveld believed that the form always took over the material. The colour scheme used is – red, blue, yellow and black – the traditional
De Stijl colours.
Verner Panton’s 1960 “S” chair is considered
to be influenced by Rietveld’s zigzag chair from 1934. They both contain
oblique lines and express the cantilever principle in a clear and clean form.
The Zigzag chair is made out of wood, while the Panton chair is made out of
plastic and available in various bright colours. Influenced by the De Stijl, Panton believed that “choosing colours should not be a
gamble. It should be a conscious decision. Colours have a meaning and a
function.”
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| Verner Panton Chair |
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| Gerrit Rietveld Zigzag Chair |
Today, this movement has inspired the modern and the idea of
‘colour blocking’. And while some creations like Yves Saint Laurent took direct
inspiration from De Stijl, it’s no longer only about straight vertical and
horizontal lines; it could be about zigzags, concentric circle, indescribable
shapes, and just plain patches of colour and to boot, the colours used in
modern day De Stijl, are no longer primary colours, they come in all hues from
rich hues to pastels.
References:
- Design is History, N/A. De Stijl [online] available at:http://www.designishistory.com/1920/de-stijl/
- Blog, N/A. De Stijl Movement: Theo van Doesburg & Gerrit Rietveld [online] available at: http://designhistorymashup.blogspot.com/2008/04/de-stijl-movement-theo-van-doesburg.html
- EmptyEasel, 2014. The De Stijl Art Movement [online] available at: http://emptyeasel.com/2007/10/23/the-de-stijl-art-movement-also-known-as-neo-plasticism/
- WordPress, N/A. The De Stijl Influence [image online] available at: http://stylesyllabus.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/the-de-stijl-influence/
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