Founded in the early twentieth century, just after the first world war in the Netherlands by abstract artists Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg. The dutch word meaning ‘style’ is modern art that is designed by a strict geometry using a horizontal and vertical grid, right angles and primary colours to create abstract work especially for paintings and furniture in that period.
After that period, De Stijl continued to inspire art such as the international style work in architecture, the Bauhaus style and movements including furniture design and typography.
Dutch Painter Mondrian is best know for his composition of yellow, blue and red. Born in the Netherlands, he studied in art colleges in Amsterdam and in Hague. As well as being part of the De Stijl movement with Van Doesburg, he also created lots of popular landscape paintings and other work. His inspiration for this work stemmed from Picasso and his Cubism movement and George Brauque’s work on exploring perspective in art.
Influenced by Vincent van Gogh’s early work and later on Wassily Kandinksky, dutch author, artist and architect Theo Van Doesburg used a new approach of composition to explore reductive techniques by taking a cow and turning it into geometric shapes in 1917 and later furthered it in 1919 to create a san-serif typeface using geometric shaping. In 1921, he did a lot of typographic work, I think it is so amazing due to its delicate positioning and having created it all by hand.
Other work he created includes the 1906 ‘Self Portrait With A Hat’, 1903 ‘Woman in Landscape’ and 1922 and 1925 Composition and Counter-Composition.
Originating in Russia during 1919, it is used to reflect modern and urban space. Alexander Rodchenko, who I will mention later was one of two who founded this.
Known for his interest in abstract art and contribution post the first world war, Malvich was the founder of the artistic and philosophical school of Supremacism where he expressed his love for supremacist composition and Dynamic supremacism which used shapes and colours to create form and use elements to create expressiveness in the work using arrangement of the abstract pieces.
Malevich is also know for being the first person to create a painting that wasnt of someone or something. The black square was used to create a world of art using form and shaping and how one thing can be interpreted in so many ways. When it was first displayed in the corner of a Museum in St. Petersburg people found it quite strange and I have to agree that today, it is still strange.
