De Stijl

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For the 2000 indie rock album by The White Stripes, see De Stijl (album).

Image:Rietveld Schroederhuis Utrecht.jpg

De Stijl (in English generally pronounced duh-STILE; from the Dutch for "the style" – Dutch pronunciation: IPA /də stɛil/) was an artistic movement in the 1920s. The movement is also known as neoplasticism — the new plastic art (or Nieuwe Beelding in Dutch).

Proponents of de Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — they simplified visual compositions to vertical and the horizontal directions, and used only primary colors of red, blue and yellow along with black and white.

In many of the works under this movement, the vertical and the horizontal lines slide past each other and do not intersect. This feature exists in some of Mondrian's paintings, the Rietveld Schröder House and the Red and blue chair.

The neoplatonic philosophy of the mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers influenced the de Stijl movement.

Piet Mondrian, the group's best known artist, published their manifesto titled Neo-Plasticism in 1920, though he first coined the term in 1917 in Dutch, Nieuwe Beelding. The painter Theo van Doesburg published a journal named De Stijl from 1917 to 1928, spreading the theories of the group. De Stijl artists also included the sculptor George Vantongerloo, and the architects J.J.P. Oud and Gerrit Rietveld.

The works of de Stijl influenced the Bauhaus style and the architectural international style, as well as clothing and interior design.

Neoplasticists include:

In addition to the movement's influence on the visual arts, architecture, and design, it also had an effect (though admittedly slight) on the world of music; the Dutch composer Jakob van Domselaer (1890-1960), a close personal friend of Mondrian's since 1912, created a number of musical works based on the principles of Neo-Plasticism beginning in 1913.

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