The De Stijl Idea ‘There are three ways of defining De Stijl, and all three are used simultaneously Theo van Doesburg in his 1927 retrospective article on the movement:! De Stijl = journal, De Stijl as a group of artists asseinbled around this publication, and De esl as an idea shared by the members of this group. ‘The first definition is the most convenient, for itis derived from a definite cor- oes the first issue ofthe journal appeared in Leiden in October 1917, the lastin 1932, “ss 2 posthumous homage to van Doesburg shortly after his death in a Swiss sana- secium. Yet the very eclecticism of the journal, its openness to all aspects of the Euro- eean avant-garde, could lead one to doubt that De Stil had any specific identity as “= movement, According to this definition, everything that appeared in De Stijl is “De Ses” Burto rank the dadaists Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, and Hans Richter, the Italian futur- = Gino Severini, the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky, and the sculptor Constantin Scancusi among the “main collaborators” of De Stijl, as van Doesburg does in his -sccapitulatory chart of 1927 (not to mention the inclusion of Aldo Camini and I. K. Sonset, that is, van Doesburg himself under a futurist and a dadaist guise), is to miss - cezirely what made the strength and the unity of the Dutch avant-garde group.” Indeed, itis the second definition, that of De Stijl as a restricted group, that is Se most commonly accepted. It establishes a simple hierarchy, based on historical scecedence, between a handful of Dutch founding fathers and a heteroclite detach- Seat of new cosmopolitan recruits who joined at various times to fill the gaps left ‘+ defecting members. Generally speaking, the founding fathers are those who sgned the First Manifesto of De Stijl, published in November 1918: the painters Piet siondrian and the Hungarian-born Vilmos Huszar, the architects Jan Wils and Robert can't Hoff, the Belgian sculptor Georges Vantongerloo, the poet Antony Kok (who cublished litle), and of course van Doesburg, the homme-orchesire, the only real Sak between the members of the group and mainspring of the movement. To thoseI Abstraction I 102 names one must add that of the painter Bart van der Leck (who had already left De Stijl before the publication of this manifesto), and that of the architects Gerrit Riet- veld andJ.J. P. Oud (the former had not yet joined the group at this point, although. he had already produced an unpainted version of the Red and Blue Chair, which— in its painted form—was to become the landmark of the movement; the latter never signed any collective text), The new recruits, with the exception of the architect Cor- nelis van Eesteren, all pursued careers independently from De Stijl and were only briefly associated with the movement when it was already approaching the end of its course. For example, the American musician George Antheil, who got his degree in avant-gardism with his score for Fernand Léger's film Ballet mécanique; the cre: ators of reliefs, César Domela and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart; the architect and sculptor Frederick Kiesler; and the industrial designer Werner Graff. But despite its usefulness, this second definition turns out to be only slightly more precise than the first, based as itis on what seems to be a purely circumstantial criterion of inchu- sion. It cannot explain, for example, van der Leck’s defection from the movement uring its first year, or Wils's and van't Hoff’s during the second, Oud's during the fourth, Huszar's and Vantongerloo’s during the fifth, and finally that of Mondrian in 1925, ‘There remains therefore the third definition, De Stijl as an idea: “it is from the De Stijl idea that the De Stijl movement gradually developed,” writes van Doesburg in his retrospective article. Although this definition seems the most vague of the three, it turns out, by its conceptual nature (as opposed to the purely empirical char- acter of the two others), to be the most restrictive. Moreover, itis the only one that can take into account that “De Stil” means not only “the Style” but even more ambi- tiously “The style.” What follows is an attempt at a brief presentation of this “idea.” De Suijl was a typically modernist movement, whose theory was grounded on those two ideological pillars of modernism, historicism and essentialism. On his- toricism, because on the one hand De Stijl conceived of its production as the logical culmination of the art of the past, and on the other because it prophesied in quasi Hegelian terms the inevitable dissolution of art into an all-encompassing sphere ('life” or “the environment"). On essentialism, because the motor of this slow his torical process was an ontological quest: each art was to “realize” its own “nature” by purging itself of everything that was not specific to it, by revealing its materials and codes, and in doing so by working toward the institution of a “universal plastic language.” None of this was particularly original, although De Suij’s formulation of this modernist theory developed quite early on. The specificity of De Stijl lies elseTe De Suifl Idea 103 ‘where: in the idea that a single generative principle might apply to all the arts without promising their integrity, and moreover, that it is only on the basis of sucha prin- ple that the autonomy of each art can be secured. Although this principle was never explicitly formulated as such by any of the Sovement's members, I would say that it involves two operations that I would like © call elementarization and integration. Elementarization, that is, the analysis of =2ch practice into discrete components and the reduction of these components to = few irreducible elements. Integration, that is, the exhaustive articulation of these ements into a syntactically indivisible, nonhierarchical whole. The second oper- ‘sion rests upon a structural principle (ike the phonemes of verbal language, the ‘sual elements in question are meaningful only through their differences), This cinciple is a totalizing one: no element is more important than any other, and none spust escape integration. The mode of articulation stemming from this principle is sot additive (as in minimalism, for example) but exponential (hence De Stijl’s blan- ‘ket rejection of repetition)? : This general principle rapidly displaced the ontological question—the “What §s the essence of painting or architecture’—by leading artists to consider the ques- ‘son of delimitation, of what distinguishes a work of art from its context, As a result, all of the De Sul painters were interested in playing with the frame and the polyprych format: see for example Mine Triptych (Composition 1916, no. 4) by van det Leck (Sg. 27), oF Composition XVIII in three parts, by Theo van Doesburg (1920, Dienst \Verspreide Rijkskollecties, The Hague) The logic of this shift goes something like this: as a constitutive element of every form of artistic practice, the limit (frame, boundary, edge, base) must itself be both elementarized and integrated; but its inte- zation will remain incomplete as long as the inside and the outside (which the limit articulates) lack a common denominator, that is, as long as the outside itself has not also been subject to the same treatment. Thus, De Sti!’s environmental utopia, how- ever naive it may seem to us today, was no mere ideological dream, but a corollary of the movement's general principle. However, this utopia, which is an essential motif of Mondrian’s writings, did not prevent him from treating his paintings as iso- lated objects, as independent entities (and the same can be said for Rietveld’s fur- niture), For the general principle had first to be realized within each individual art form, before they could be joined together and then integrated into the larger world. De Stijl was initially a congregation of painters, to which the architects later joined (according to legend, it is this addition that compelled van der Leck to flee), and it was the painters who laid the foundation for De Stijl’s “general principle.”U1 Abstraction I 104 27, Bart van der Leck, Composition 1916, no. 4 (Mine Triptych) [Mijntriptiek} 7916. Oi! on canuas, 113 X 222.3 (442 x 87¥/2 in.) Dienst Verspreide Rijkscollekties, on loan to the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Photo Stedelijle Museum. Although only Mondrian managed to fully translate this principle into practice, with the elaboration of his neoplastic oeuvre from 1920 on, both van der Leck and Huszar contributed to its formulation. It is known that van der Leck was the first to elementarize color (Mondrian credited his own use of the primary colors to him); buthe was never able to achieve the integration of all the elements of his canvases. As “abstract” as some of his paint- ings may seem (and through the direct influence of Mondrian on his work he almost reached total abstraction in 1916-18), he never relinquished an illusionistic con. ception of space. The white ground of his paintings behaves like a neutral zone, an ‘empty container that exists prior to the inscription of forms. Thus it is not surprising that van der Leck left the movement in 1918 to “return to figuration (the ostensible reason he gave for his desertion, that is, the invasion of the journal by architects, was only a pretext): once the other painters had solved the problem of the ground, van der Leck found that he no longer spoke the same language. As for Huszar, a handful of compositions —among them, the 1917 cover design for De Stijl and a 1919 canvas entitled Hammer and Saw (the only painting ever to be reproduced in color in De Stijl) —reveal his one pictorial contribution to the ‘movement, namely the elementarization of the ground, or rather of the figure ground relationship, which he reduced to a binary opposition. In one of his mos:Te De Stijl Idea 105 successfull works, a black and white linocut published in De Stil (fig. 28), itis impos- sble to discern the figure from the ground, Unfortunately Huszar stopped there and ren regressed, for, like van der Leck, he was incapable of integrating other pictorial slements into his work. Having begun with the latter's illusionistic conception of, space (see Huszar’s 1917 painting Composition Il, Skaters, in the Gemeentemuseum of The Hague), he returned to it in his mediocre figurative works of the 1920s, These are too often antedated by dealers, though having nothing whatsoever to do with the principle of De Stijl. Having perfectly assimilated the lessons of cubism while he was in Paris in 1912-14, Mondrian was much faster than the other members of De Sul to resolve she question of abstraction; thus he was able to devote all his attention to the issue of integration. His first concern, after the choice of primary colors, was to unite figure and ground into an inseparable entity, but without restricting himself to a binary solution, as Huszar had done, for this would jeopardize the possibility of a full play of color. The evolution that led him from his cubist work to his three first break- through canvases of 1917 (the “triptych” mentioned in note 4: Composition in Color 4, Composition in Color B, and Composition with Black Lines), and from there to neoplasticism is too complex to be analyzed here in detail Let us simply note that, Mondrian managed to rid his pictorial vocabulary of the “neutral ground” @ fa van der Leck only after he had used a modular grid in nine of his canvases (1918-19; see fig 29). The problem Mondrian faced was the elementarization of the division of his 28. Vilmos Huszar, Composition 6, 1918. Linocut, printed in De Stijl 1, no. 6 (April 1918), 11.4 X 144 0m (4¥2 X 5¥9in.). anIL Abstraction I 106 ZS NVNZANZNIAD ANNAN) NZNZNZNZN ANANS A VAIS VA WSVA | aN N WY y 29, Piet Mondrian, Lozenge with Gray Lines {Losangique met griize linen} 1978. Ot! on canvas, diagonal 121 em (47% in), Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Photo of the museum paintings, that is, finding an irreducible system for the repartition of his colored, planes, a system grounded on one single element (hence the use of the modular grid, the module being of the same proportions as the surface of the very painting itis dividing)’ Mondrian very quickly abandoned this device, which he found regres- sive because it is based on repetition and privileges only one type of relationship between the various parts of the painting (univocal engendering), But in passing the modular grid allowed him to solve an essential opposition, not considered by the other members of De Sti, that of color/noncolor. Back in Paris by mid-1919, he spent the next year and a half ridding the canvas of the regular grid: the first truly neoplastic painting is Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue (fig. 30), which dates from the end of 1920, \Van Doesburg, on the contrary, needed the grid throughout his life; for him it constituted a guarantee againstthe arbitrariness ofthe sign. Despite appearances and despite his formulations that sometimes bear “mathematical” pretensions, van Does- burg remained paralyzed by the question of abstraction: if a composition must be had to be “justified” by “mathematical” computations, its geometricalThe De Sul Idea 107 30, Pet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue [Com- position met rood, geel and blauw), 1920. Oil on camas, 51.5 61 cm (20%2 X 23% in.) Stedelie Musewem, Amsterdam. Photo of the museum. configuration had to be motivated. Before he artived at the grid formula (through his work in decorative art, especially stained-glass windows), this obsession made him hesitate for a long time between the pictorial system of Huszar (see van Does- burg's Composition IX—Cardplayers of 1917, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague) and that of van der Leck (Composition X1, 1918, Guggenheim Museum). Then it led him toa concern with the stylization of natural motifs (a cow, a portrait, a still life, or a dancer as, for example, in Rhythm of @ Russian Dance (1918), for which all the sketches remain in the Museum of Modern Art in New York). He even tried forashort period to apply this type of “explanation” to his modular works (as in the absurd presentation he made, in 1919, of his Composition in Dissonances as an abstraction from “a young woman in the artist's studio” (fig. 31)).* But this was a false trail, for if van Doesburg was seduced by the system of the grid, it was for its repetitive and further for its projective nature (since it is decided beforehand and applied onto the picture plane whose material characteristics are of no importance). That is, for the very reason that led Mondrian to consider this system foreign tothe De Stijl idea, thus to abandon it? Hence the famous quarrel about “Elementarism” (the extremely inap-IT Abstraction I 110 32. Theo van Doesburg, Counter-composition XVI in Dissonance, 1925, Oil on canvas, 100 X 180 cm (39¥s X 70% in.). Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Photo of the museum. propriate word chosen by van Doesburg to label his introduction of the oblique into the formal vocabulary of neoplasticism in 1925, as for example in his Coznter-com- position XVI in Dissonance of the same year [fig. 32]). As is well known, itis this quar- rel that led Mondrian to leave De Stijl in 1925. But if Mondrian violently rejected van Doesburg's “improvement,” as the latter referred to it, it is not so much because it disregarded the formal rule of orthogonality (which he himself had broken in his ‘own “lozangique” canvases, as he called them) as because in a single stroke it destroyed all the movement's efforts to achieve a total integration of all the elements ofthe painting, For as they glide over the surface of the canvas, van Doesburg's diag- nals reestablish a distance between the imaginary moving surface they inhabit and the picture plane, and we find ourselves once again before van der Leck's illusionist space. For an evolutionist like Mondrian, it was as if the clock had been turned back eight years. In short, although van Doesburg's achievement in painting is very inter- esting, it does not partake of the general principle of elementarization and integra. tion that characterizes De Stijl. However, there are two areas in which he did work much more efficiently toward the elaboration of this principle, that of the interior as art, and that of architecture.The De Stil Idea m ‘The importance given o the interior by the De Stijl artists stems both from their questioning of the limits of painting and from their distrust of any kind of applied art. The common view of De Stijl as a movement that applied a formal solution to ‘what is now referred to as “design” is erroneous: decorative art in general did not interest the De Stijl artists, with the temporary exception, in the case of van Doesburg, and Huszar, of stained glass (which Rietveld judged moreover as “ignominious”)."” Ifthe arts were to remain faithful to the principle of De Stijl, then they could not sim- ply be applied to each other, but would eventually have to join together to create an indivisible whole. The stakes were quite considerable, and almostall the movement's internal quarrels resulted from a power struggle between painters and architects, over precisely this issue. The invention of the interior as a hybrid art form was not ‘easy; it developed in two moments, in two theoretical movements. ‘The first movement: only when an art has defined the limits of its own field, only when it has achieved the greatest possible degree of autonomy and discovered the artistic means specific to itself, that is, only through a process of self-definition and of differentiation from the other arts, will it discover what it has in common with another art. This common denominator is what allows for the combination of the arts, for their integration, Thus the members of De Stijl thought that architecture and painting could go hand-in-hand today because they share one basic element, that of planarity (of the wall and of the picture plane). As van der Leck wrote in March 1918 (and one could cite many similar declarations from the same period by van Does- burg and Mondrian, as well as the text Oud published in the first number of De Stil: Modern painting has now arrived at the point at which it may enter into a collaboration with architecture, It has arrived at this point because its means of expression have been purified. The description of time and space by means of perspective has been abandoned: now it is the flat sur- face itself that transmits spatial continuity... . Painting today is architec- tural because in itself and by its own means it serves the same concept as architecture—space and the plane—and thus expresses “the same thing” but in a different way." From this first movement stems the totality of van der Leck’s mostly unrealized inte- rior coloristic projects, the first interiors of Huszar and van Doesburg (see fig. 33), Mondrian’s Paris studio and his Projet de Salon pour Madame B..., @ Dresde of 1926 (fig, 34). These works share a conception of architecture as static: each room is treated in isolation, as a sum of walls, a six-sided box, which is explicable by the fact that in each case the artist was working within the confines of an already existing architecture,The De Stijl Idea 13 ‘The second movement is the consequence ofa collaborative enterprise turned sour, the first genuine collaboration between a painter and an architect of the De Stijl gr0up, that is, van Doesburg and Oud’s teamwork for the De Vonk vacation house of 1917 (at Noordwijkerhout), and later for the Spangen housing complex at Rot- terdam (1918-21). If this collaboration resulted in divorce (Oud refusing the last coloristic projects of van Doesburg for Spangen), it is because, despite van Does- burg’s heroic attempt to integrate color into architecture (throughout each building, both inside and out, doors and windows are conceived according to a contrapuntal color sequence), the mediocrity of the architecture itself (fig, 35) led the painter to plan his color scheme independently from the constructive structure of the building, This color scheme was conceived in relation to the entire building, the wall no longer being the basic unit, and in opposition therefore to individual architectural elements. There is a paradox here: it was precisely because Oud’s symmetrical, repetitive architecture was absolutely antithetical to the principle of De Sj that van Doesburg was drawn to inventa type of negative integration based on the visual abo- lition of architecture by painting. (With the exception of his Project for the Purmer- end Factory of 1919 [fig, 36), strongly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, Oud’s early ‘work is characterized by repetition and symmetry; his contribution to De Stil is thus limited to a few theoretical pieces in the journal).*3 “Architecture joins together, binds—painting loosens, unbinds,” van Doesburg ‘wrote in 1918." Thus, the “elementarist” oblique, which appears for the first time in 2 1923 van Doesburg color study for a project for a “university hall” by van Besteren 36.11.P, Oud, Project of a Factory in Purmerend, 1919. Pencil and watercolor on paper, 37.1 X 642 om (14% X 25% in.) Nederlands Documentatiecentrum voor de Bowukunst, Amsterdam. Photo of the museum,II Abstraction I 14 37. Cornelis van Eesteren, with color by van Doesburg, Interior Perspective of a University Hall, 1921-23. Ink, tempera, and collage on tracing paper, 63.4 X 146 om (25 S7V4 in), Van Beseren-Fluck & van Lobuizenstichiing, Amsterdam. (Gig. 37), a year later in van Doesburg’s design for a “flower room" in the villa Mallet- ‘Stevens built in Hyéres, and finally, ona grand scale, in the 1928 Café Aubette in Stras- bourg, is each time launched as an attack against a preexisting architectural situation, ‘While the oblique contradicted De Stijl’s integration principle within the realm of painting, it fulfilled that principle in the new domain of the abstract interior. There, it is not “applied”; rather, itis an element with a function (ironically, an antifunc- tionalist one), that of the camouflage of the building’s horizontal-vertical skeleton (its “natural,” anatomical aspect). Such camouflage was, for van Doesburg, absolutely necessary if the interior was to work as an abstract, nonhierarchical whole, But the oblique was not the only solution to his new integrative task, as Huszar and Rietveld demonstrated in their extraordinary Berlin Pavilion (1923; fig, 38): the articulation of architectural surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling) could itself be elemen- tarized by using the corner as a visual agent of spatial continuity. In this interior, col- cored planes painted on the walls do not stop where the wall surfaces meet, but overlap, continue around the comer, creating a kind of spatial displacement and obliging the spectator to spin his body or gaze around, Stretching to the utmost its own possibilities, painting solves a purely architectural problem—circulation in space. Conversely, as the architectural space was not preexisting, this project of a pavilion marked the birth of an architectural problematic that would become proper to De Suil (itis harclly coincidental that this is a piece of exhibition architecture.I Abstraction I 116 engaged explicitly in demonstrating its own modernity). No better proof could have been provided of the proposition that the union of the arts can be achieved only when each has arrived at the greatest degree of autonomy. De Sti’ contribution to architecture is quantitatively far less important than is generally believed: the two little houses Robert van't Hoff built in 1916 (before the foundation of the movement) are amiable and talented pastiches of Wright;Jan Wils's constructions flirt somewhat with art deco (it is not by chance that he leaves the ‘movement almost immediately); as for Oud, his most interesting architectural work, executed after he had broken with van Doesburg, partakes much more of the Neue Sachlichkeit so-called International than of De Stijl (one could even say that its func- tionalism annuls whatever superficial features it might have of De Suil’s idiom), De Stil’s architectural contribution consists in fact of the projects exhibited by van Does- burg and van Eesteren in Galerie del Effort Moderne, (see fig, 39) directed by Leonce Rosenberg (Paris, 1923), and in the work of Gerrit Rietveld as a whole.** As for the Rosenberg projects, a somber argument over attribution initiated by van Eesteren has confused the issue for too long. Attribution here is a wrong ques- tion, or a question badly asked: what is essential is that there is a striking formal dif- ference between the first project (an elegant H6te! particulier that anticipates the International Style by several years) and the last two (a Maison particuliére and Mai- son dartiste), For the difference is the direct consequence of the intervention not of the painter (who worked on all three), but of painting: the model of the first proj- ect is white, the last rwo are polychrome. The starting point of those last projects was indeed the possibility of conceiving simultaneously their coloristic and spatial artic- ulation, And van Doesburg's inflated yet enigmatic claim that, in these projects, color becomes “construction material” is not simply rhetorical: it is color indeed that allowed the wall surface as such to be elementarized, culminating in the invention ofa new architectural element—the indivisible unit of the screen. The entire archi- tecture of the last two Rosenberg projects, as the groundbreaking axonometric draw- ings van Doesburg executed for the show demonstrate (fig. 40), stem from the limitation of the constructive vocabulary to this new element, the screen. For the screen combines two contradictory visual functions (in profile it appears like a van- ishing line, frontally itis a plane that blocks spatial recession), and this contradiction promotes the visual interpenetration of volumes and the fluidity of their articulation. ‘Thus, the desire to integrate painting and architecture, to establish a perfect coin- cidence between the basic elements of painting (the color planes) and architecture (the wall), led to a major architectural discovery—walls, floor, ceiling as surfacesThe De Stijl Idea 9 ‘without thickness that can be duplicated, or unfolded like screens and made to slide Past one another in space (see fig. 41). Once invented, the screen had no further need of its chromatic origins: thus, the only genuinely De Stil element in the white studio-house van Doesburg built for himself at Meudon just before his death is arec- ‘angle that completely masks the stairway leading to the first-floor entrance, and that becomes a second skin for the facade it almost entirely repeats Van Doesburg was not mistaken when he claimed that Rietveld’s Schroder House (1924; fig. 42) was the only building to have realized the principles theoret. ‘cally laid down in the last two Rosenberg projects, with the provision that the Screen fs used there in a much more extensive way, for Rietveld managed to ele. entarize what had remained a béte noire for van Doesburg, that is, the bullding’s ‘ame itself The Rosenberg projecs treat the frame from a constructive perspective (for which van Besteren claims responsibility). That is, the frame is still treated as “natural,” anatomical, motivated, and above all functional. While the elementariza. tion of the wall surface had led van Doesburg and van Eesteren to make intensive use of overhanging horizontal planes (the cantilever is one of the most distinctive ‘ormal features of the Rosenberg projects), Rieweld’s invention was to displace the cantilever to the level of the frame itself. In doing so, he ironically subverted, most ofthe time bya minimal transformation, the opposition supporting/supported upon which every constructive frame is based, The Schréder House is full of those inver- sions that continually pervert the functionalist ethic of modernist architecture—the Gictum that would have one meaning per sign (the most famous is the comer win. — 1931; Visions of Utopia, ed. Mildred Friedman (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1982], p.59). 5. Inthe lastissue of De Sif ("Dernier numéro,” January 1932, p. 48); English tr by Martin james and Harry Holtzman, The New Art—The New Life The Collected Writings of Pet Mondrian (Bossom GK Hall, 1986), p. 183, 6 GE. Joop Joosten, “Abstraction and Compositional Innovation,” Arforum 11, no. 8 (Agee 1973), pp. 55-59, and We-Alain Bois, “Du projetau proces,” in Melier de Mondrian, ed. Bois (Pare ‘Macula, 1982), pp, 26-43, 7. __Arthe time of the first publication of this essay, Sjarel Ex discovered photographs of a fee ‘modular grids by Huszar, dating from the end of 1918, one of them particularly close to Mondetax > so-called Checkerboard Composition in Dark Colors and in Light Colors, dated slightly iatex == ‘quotes a letter from Mondrian to van Doesburg speaking of his surprise at Husear's arrival a same solution as his. Unlike Mondrian, however, Husaar was not able to integrate what he a= earned from the grid in his later practice and soon returned to. strong hierarchization of the fisare 8 opposed to the ground. ronicaly, it isa grid painting of Huszar rather than by Mondrian thar a> Doesburg chose t0 discuss in De St, pointing to the way in which, although pesfeclly modiul= = exhibited a “constant changing of position and dimension,” thus contrasting with the simple pla composition to which its compared ("Over het zien van de nieuwe schilderiunst”[On Looking ‘New Painting), De Sui 2, no. 4 [February 1919], pp. 42-44; English tr. in Jaffé, De Stijl, pp. 127-25. Unuil Ex’s discovery, Huszar’s only published grid, now lost, was thought to be either a unicum = his pictorial production or a sketch for a stained-glass window; furthermore, it was supposes we derive from Mondrian’s grid canvases. Cf. jarel Ex, “Vilmos Huszar,” in Carel Blotkamp, ed. oe beginfaren van De Sif! 1917-1922 (Utrecht: Reflex, 1982); English te, Charlotte and Arthur Lass as De Sul: The Formative Years (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986); see especially pp. 97-102 Ct Theo van Doesburg, "Van Natuur tot Kompositic” [From Nature to Composition), De Hae | landsche Revue 24 (1919), pp. 470476. The transformation of the "young woman” into 2 module _stid proceeded in eighr stages. One cannot refrain from thinking that ths isa post factamn comm struction and that, starting from the grid, van Doesburg gradually distorted its geometrical amma 10 obtain the figurative “point of departure.” 9. __Atfirst sight, Vantongerloo seems to be in the same category as van Doesburg, claiming tae ‘is paintings and sculprures were the geometric result of algebraic operations, But I belie: arNotes to pages 111-121 295 the "sclentficty” of Vantongerloo's work was pure fantasy. The equations with which he titled his ‘works have no perceptible relation to their formal configurations. As opposed to van Doesburg’s arithmetic schemes, which were relatively simple, Vantongerloo's were much too complex to be «effective (supposing that there is some basis for his claims). We certainly can view his works without taking these schemes into account. In fact, itis precisely this ineffectiveness that leads me to nclice ‘Vantongerloo's work (at least his sculpture) as partaking of the "De Stil idea,” 30. Ct Gerrit Rieweld, “Mondrian en het nieuwe bouwen,” Bowokundig Weekblad, March 15, 1955,p. 128. For him, stained glass was an applied art, an ornament added inthe interstices of archi, tecture, and by its very nature violated De Stif's demands for elementarizaion and integration. In this article Rietveld confirms that he never met Mondrian, which casts some light on the power of van Doesburg as a link between the dispersed members of the movement, a att van der Leck, “Over schilderen en bouwen,” De Sif! 1, no. 4 (March 1918), p.37. See alsovan derLeck's "De nieuwe beelding in de childerkuns,” De Sif 1,no. 1(Oaober 1917), pp. 7,and in the same issuc JJ.P, Oud, “Het monumentale stadsbeeld,” pp. 10-11. Those last two texts are translated into English in Jaffe, De St, pp. 93-96. For a detailed account ofthe position of Mon. Giian during the early years of De Sti. cf Wve Alain Bois, "Mondrian and the Theory of Architecture." Assemblage, no. 4 (October 1987), pp. 103-130. 12 rin exemplary study ofthis collaboration, as well as ofthe whole issue of De Suis abstract interior, cf Nancy Troy, The De Sift Environment (Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 1983), passim 13 aun the factory project, the one Mondrian preferred in Oud!'s oeuvre (though we should father say the one he disliked the least) bears those very characteristics that cast it aside from the De Sil canon (the symmetry of the massive ar deco entrance; the serial repetition ofthe windows) And despite appearances, the 1923 small “semipermanent house’—Oud's most elegant building and his 1925 Café De Unie are absolutely foreign tothe principle of De Sil: the fists entiely sya metrical (a fact concealed by the photographs published at the time); the second, enticely based! on a modular repetition. 1 uot Van Doesbure, “Aanteckeningen over monumentale kunst” [Notes on Monumental Art) De Stijl 2, no. 1 (November 1918), pp. 10-12 (English tin Jae, De Sti, pp. 99-103, 15. _ For a full discussion of the Rosenberg exhibition, f. Nancy Troy, Tbe De Sil Erutronment, Pp. 75-81 and 97-121, and Yve-Alain Bois and Nancy Troy, ‘De Stil et larchitecture a Paris" in De Suite Farcbitecture en France,” ed, Bots and Reichlin (Brussels: Mardaga, 1985), pp. 25-90 (espe- Gilly pp. 36-51). This publication is the catalogue of an exhibition bearing the same title (held at the Institut Francais d'Architecture, Paris, November-December 1985), for which I reconstituted, ith the help of Nancy Troy, the 1923 show in its entiery. 16. Theo van Doesburg, ‘Dada en Feiten,” De St, “Jubilee Number" (1927), p. 56 17, Artists have best understood the antifunctionalist nature of Rietveld’ furniture. Thus I owe ‘8 great deal to the French painter Christian Bonnefor's article “L'inversion de la istbilité," in Hubert Damisch, ec, Modern'Signe (Paris: Corda, 1977), ol. 2, pp. 183268, and to the American sculptor ‘Scott Burton, who proposesa similar interpretation in his “Furniture Journal: Rietveld," Artin Amer ica, November 1980, pp, 102-108, 18, Gerrit Rieweld, "View of life as a historical background for my work” (1957), English tn in ‘Theodore M. Brown, The Work of Gerrit Rieweld (Uicecht: Bruna and Zoon, 1958), p, 162, 19. Cf. Charles Baudelaire, “La morale du joujou” (1853), in Oewures Completes, ed Y-G. Le Dan tec (Patis: Gallimard, 1961), p. 525. 20, _Itis not known if the photograph was made early (published at the instigation of Rietveld himself) although it would be in keeping with Rieweld's insistence on elementarization and (in this case through the standard sizes ofall the wood) on the possibilty of mass production, This pho- ‘ograph is reproduced in Daniele Baroni, Gerrit Thomas Rietweld Furniture (London: Academy Ed tions, 1978), p. 51.