yve -- de stigl idea

7/29/2019 Yve -- De Stigl Idea

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Painting asModel

Y V E - A W N BOIS..

An OCTOBER RookTh e MIT PressCam bridge, MassachusettsLondon, E ngland


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IS90@ 1990 Massachusetts Institu te of TechnologyFigures 1-11 and 8 8 copyright 199 0 Successio n H. Matisse/ARS N.Y. Fig ures 12, 14 , 17, 19-21,23-24, an d 26 copyright 1990 ARS N.Y./SPADEM. Figures 29-30 .34, an d 63-64 copy right 19 91Estate of Piet Mon drian, d o Estate of Har ry Holtz man , New York, N.Y. Fig ures 66-81 copy rightAnnalee Newman.MI r ights reserved. No p an of th is book may be re produ ced in any form by an y e lec t ro n ic o rmechanical mea ns ( including photocopying, recording, or information s torage and re tr ieval)without permissio n in writ ing from the publisher .This book was se t in ITC Garamond by DEKR Corporation and prin ted and bo und in the UnitedStates of America.Library of C ongre ss Cataloging-in-Publication DataBois, Yve Main.Painting as m odel / Yve-Main Bois.

p . cm.An Octo ber book.Includes b ib l iographical referencesISBN 0-262-02306-71. Painting-Philosophy. I. Title.

ND1140.B59 1990750'.1---dc20


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The De Stijl Idea

There are three ways of defining De Stijl, and all three are used simultaneouslyby Theo van Doesburg in his 1927 retrospective article on the movement:' De Stijlas ajournu f, De Stijl as agrou p of artists assembled around this publication, and DeStijl as an idea shared by the members of this group.

The first definition is the most convenient, for it is derived from a definite cor-pus: the first issue of the journal appeared in Leiden in October 1917,the last in 1932,as a posthumous homage to van Doesburg shortly after his death in a Swiss sana-torium. Yet the very eclecticism of the journal, its openness to all aspects of the Euro-pean avant-garde, could lead one to doubt that De Stijl had any specific identity asa movement. According to this definition, everything that appeared jn ~e ~ t i j ls "DeStijl." But to rank the dadaists Hugo Ball, HansArp,and Hans Richter, he Italian futur-ist Gino Severini, the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky, and the sculptor ConstantinBrancusi among the "main collaborators" of De Stijl, as van Doesburg does in hisrecapitulatory chart of 1927 (not to mention the inclusion of Aldo Camini and I. K.Bonset, that is, van Doesburg himself under a futurist and a dadaist guise), is to missentirely what made the strength and the unity of the Dutch avant-garde group.Z

Indeed, it is the second definition, that of De Stijl as a restricted group, that isthe most commonly accepted. It establishes a simple hierarchy, based on historicalprecedence, between a handful of Dutch founding fathers and a heteroclite detach-ment of new cosmopolitan recruits who joined at various times to fill the gaps leftby defecting members. Generally speaking, the founding fathers are those whosigned the Firsf Manifesto of De Stijl, published in November 1918:the painters PietMondrian and the Hungarian-born Vilmos Huszar, the architects Jan Wils and Robertvan't Hoff, the Belgian sculptor Georges Vantongerloo, the poet Antony Kok (whopublished little), and of course van Doesburg, the bornme-&ewe, the only reallink between the members of the group and mainspring of the movement. To those


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I1 Abstraction I 104

27. Bmf yan der lack, Composition 1916,no . 4 (Mine Triptych) [Mijntriptiekl 1916.Oil onc a q 13 X 222.3 (44V2 X 87'/2 in.).Diensf Vkxpreide RghcoIIekties, on loan to theGenwerttemusacrn,7beHague. Photo SedeIgk Musacm.

Although only Mondrian managed to fully translate this principle into practice, withthe elaboration of his neoplastic oeuvre from 1920 on, both van de r Leck and Huszarcontributed to its formulation.

It is known that van der Leck wasthe first to elementarize color (Mondriancredited his own use oft he primary colors to him)? but he was never able to achievethe 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 almostreached 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, anempty container that exists prior to the inscription of forms. Thus it is not surprisingthat van der Leck left the movement in 1918 to "return" to figuration (the ostensiblereason he gave for his desert ion, that is, the invasion of the journal by architects, wasonly a pretext): once the other painters had solved the problem of the ground, vander Leck found that he no longer spoke the same language.

As for Huszar, a handf i~l f compositions-among them, the 1917 cover designfor De Stw and a 1919 canvas entitledHammer n d Saw (the only painting ever tobe reproduced in color in De Stijl)-reveal his one pictorial contribution to themovement, namely the elementarization of the ground, or rather of the figure/ground relationship, which he reduced to a binary opposition. In one of his most


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7;beDe Stiji Idea

successful works, a black and white linocut published in De St# (fig. 28), it is impos-sible to discern the figure from the ground. Unfortunately Huszar stopped there andeven regressed, for, like van der Leck, he was incapable of integrating other pictorialelements into his work. Having begun with the latter's illusionistic conception ofspace (see Huszar's 1917 painting Composition I, Skaters, in the Gemeentemuseumof The Hague), he returned to it in his mediocre figurative works of the 1920s. Theseare too often antedated by dealers, though having nothing whatsoever to d owith theprinciple of De Stijl.

Having perfectly assimilated the lessons of cubism while he was in Paris in1912-14, Mondrian was much faster than the o ther members of De Stijl to resolvethe question of abstraction; thus he was able to devote all his attention to the issueof integration. His first concern, after the choice ofprimary colors, was to unite figureand ground into an inseparable entity, but without restricting himself to a binarysolution, as Huszar had done , for this would jeopardize the possibility of a full playof 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 ColorA, Conzposition in Color B, and Composition with Black Lines),and from there toneoplasticism is too complex to be analyzed here in detaiL6 Let us simply note thatMondrian managed to rid his pictorial vocabulary of the "neutral ground" a h vander Leck only after he had used a modular grid in nine of his canvases (1918-19; seefig. 29). The problem Mondrian faced was the elementarization of the division of his

28. VifmasHcmar , Composition 6, 1918.Linocur, printed in De Stijl I , no. 6 (April1918), 11.4 X 14.4 cm 4'/2 X 5% in.).


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I1 Abstraction I

29. Pier ~tlondrian, ozenge with Gray Lines [Imsangiquemet grijze lijnenl 1918.Oil on canLpas, iizgonaf121 o n (47% in.). Gerneenfernuseum,TbeHague. Pbofoof k museum.

paintings, that is, finding an irreducible system for the repartition of his coloredplanes, a system grounded on one single element (hence the use of the modulargrid, the module being of the same proportions as the surface of the very paintingit is dividing).' Mondrian very quickly abandoned this device, which he found regres-sive because it is based on repetition and privileges only one type of relationshipbetween the various parts of the painting (univocal engendering). But in passing themodular grid allowed him to solve an essential opposition, not considered by theother members of De Stijl, that of color/noncolor. Back in Paris by mid-1919,he spentthe next year and a half ridding the canvas of the regular grid: the first truly neoplasticpainting is Composition nRed, Yellow,andBlue (fig.30),which dates from the endof 1920.

Van Doesburg, on the contrary, needed the grid throughout his life; for him itconstituted a guarantee against the arbitrariness of the sign. Despite appearances anddespite his formulations that sometimes bear "mathematical" pretensions, van Does-burg remained paralyzed by the question of abstraction: if a composition must be"abstract," it had to be "justified by "mathematical" computations, its geometrical


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7 2 ~e StijlIdea 107

30. Pief Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue [Com-position met rood, gee1 and blauwl 1920. Oil on canLwi,51.5 X61cm 20vr X 235/8 in.).Sfedefijk Museum,Amslerdarn.Pbofoofthe museum.

configuration had to be motivated. Before he arrived at the grid formula (throughhis work in decorative an, especially stained-glass windows), this obsession madehim hesitate for a long time berween the pictorial system of Huszar (see van Does-burg's Composition IX- Car& fa~emof 1917,Gemeentemuseum, The Hague) andthat of van de r Leck (CompositionXI, 1918,Guggenheim Museum). Then it led himto a concern with the stylization of natural motifs (a cow, a portrait, a still life, or adancer as, for example, in W t h m of a Rwian Dance [1918],for which all thesketches remain in the Museum of Modern Art in New York). He even tried for a shonperiod to apply this type of "explanation" to his modular works (as in the absurdpresentation he made, in 1919,of his Co?nposition in DLssonarzces as an abstractionjkm "a young woman in the artist's studio" [fig.31]).8But this was a false trail, forif van Doesburg was seduced by the system of the grid, it was for its repetitive andfurther for itsprojectitle nature (since it is decided beforehand and applied onto thepicture plane whose material characteristics are of no importance). That is, for thevery reason that led Mondrian to consider this system foreign to the De Stijl idea, thusto abandon it.Wence the famous quarrel about "Elementarism" (the extremely inap-


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31. Tbeovan Doesburg, Studies, 1919. 7?9issequencewasfirstpub[irhedby an Doesburgin De Hollandsche revue 24, no. 8 (1913)as illustration or one of his artkles, entitled"Van 'mf uu r' ot 'bmpositie"' [FromNature to Composition].t was again djmen by himasan illustration or thefitst qmputhti c and lengtky st& am- aoted to De Sf$ (Fried-ricbMarkusHuebner, "Die HolliindAcbe SQl-Gmppe," Das Feuer2, no.5 (Oct.-Na?13-31),pp. 267-278; each of the ei@t imagesbears the caption '~ f l i d d ' zrn atelier"[Yozcng Woman in the Studio]).n3e last image of the sequence & Composition in Disso-nances [Compositie in dissonanrenl 1918. Oil on canLao, 63.5 X 58.5 cm (25 X 23 in.).OeflentIilicFM KmlSammlurzg,LkwBasel 7 2 ~linensio?zsand u ~ a b o u l ~ftbeSLYstudiesareul2knouw.

blany uo rk by VanDoeshzrrg dated from 1917 to I920 ureacknozc)ledged(y awdon studiesj-om mature, graa'zra[b "abstracted"But am7 afier hebad abandoned tl~3p1-0-CN under t lx injluezce of Afondrian, be retained in the publications of his earlier uorkstlx '~dagogica l"e~vce f t lx linear sequence stat?ingh.fi.om plwtograph and endinguith a geomehicalpaitzting. He used itas late as in his Bauhaus book (Grundbegriffe de rNeuen Gesteltenden Kunst Olunicb:Albert h n g m , 1925;English h.Janet Seligtnan, Prin-ciples of Neo-PlasticArt [London: und Humpln-ies, 19G8]),where he "explained n such amanner the elaboration of Composition Vll l (The Cow), 1917 (hIu.oeum of modern An,New York).


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32. 7 2 % ~nn Doesbttrg, Counter-composition XVI in Dissonance, 1925.Oil on cantus, 1100X 180cm 3% X 70% in.).Gemeentmusatm, n?Je Hague. horo of tbemuseum.

propriate word chosen by van Doesburg to label his introduction of the oblique intothe formal vocabulary of neoplasticism in 1925,as for example in his Counter-com-position XV I knDksonance of the same year [fig.321).As is well known, it is this quar-rel that led Mondrian t o leave De Stijl in 1925.But if Mondrian violently rejected vanDoesburg's "improvement," as the latter referred to it , it is not so much because itdisregarded the formal rule of orthogonality (which he himself had broken in hisown "lozangique" canvases, as he called them) as because in a single stroke itdestroyed all the movement's efforts to achieve a total integration of all the elementsof the painting. For as they glide over the surface of the canvas, van Doesburg's diag-onals reestablish a distance between the imaginary moving surface they inhabit andthe picture plane, and we find ourselves once again before van der Leck's illusionistspace. For an evolutionist like Mondrian, it was as if the clock had been turned backeight 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 cwo areas in which he did workmuch more efficiently toward the elaboration of this principle, that of the interioras art, and that of architecture.


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I1 Abstraction I 11 2

--- 33. T h o ~ a noesburg Example of Color-istic Composition in an Interior [Proeve vankleurcompositie in interieurl 1919. Pub-IiFhed (in black and uyhite) in De Stijl3, no.12 (No ~w ber 920). The colors of th& nte-rior composition (realired or the anarchrSIphilosopher Ball de Li't, u&h urniture byRienleld)ulere orange, green, and blue.H o u ~ w ,hen Lnn Doaburgpthlished thbphotograph it2 color (in L'Architecturevivante 3, no. 9 [I9251*cia[ hue on DeStij) he comected the color scheme so as tomuch the red, blue, andyellou~ eophticorrhodap'.

34. Pier Mondrian, Salon de Madame B . . . ,Dresden, 1926.Inkandgotlache onpaper, 3 7 . 5 X 57 cm (14/16X 22X6 in.).Slaatliche Kum~rnrnlungmz, raden.

35.J.J.P.Oud, De Vonk Noordu~zjk&out,1927-18. Illustrated in Klei, no.-12 (1920).T h olor scberne of the u~indou~fiarnes,doors, and shutters and the tile mptycbabo~lehe entrance are by ran Doesburg.


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TheDe Stijl Idea 113

The second movement is the consequence of a collaborative enterprise turnedsour, the first genuine collaboration between a painter and an architect of the De Stijlgroup, that is, van Doesburg and Oud's teamwork for the De Vonk vacation houseof 1917 (at Noordwijkerhout), and later for the Spungen housing complex at Rot-terdam (1918-21). If this collaboration resulted in divorce (Oud refusing the lastcoloristic 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 contrapuntalcolor sequence) , the mediocrity of the architecture itself (fig. 35) led the painter toplan his color scheme independently from the constructive structure of the building.This color scheme was conceived in relation to the entire building, the wall nolonger being the basic unit, and in opposition therefore to individual architecturalelements.12 There is a paradox here: it was precisely because Oud's symmetrical,repetitive architecture was absolutely antithetical to the principle of De Stijl that vanDoesburgwasdrawn to invent a type of negafite integration based on the visual abo-lition of architecture by painting. (With the exception of his Projectfor th e Purmer-&Factoq~ of 1919 [fig. 361, strongly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, Oud's earlywork is characterized by repetition and symmetry; his contribution to De Stijl is thuslimited to a few theoretical pieces in the journal).13

"Architecture joins together, binds-painting loosens, unbinds," van Doesburgwrote in 1918.14Thus, the "elementarist" oblique, which appears for'the first time ina 1923 van Doesburg color study for a project for a "university hall" by van Eesteren

3G.JJ.P. Oud, roject of a Factory in Purmerend, 1919. Pencil and u-afercolor npaper,37. x 64.2 crn ('14% X 25'/4 in.).Nederfands DocumenfafiecenhurnLW de Bouwkumf,Amsferdanz.Photo of the musatm.


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I1 Abstrac tion I 114

37.ComefisvanEesteren, with co l o r by uanDoeshug Interior Perspectiveof a UniversityHall, 1921-23.Ink,tempera, nd o l lage on fracingpaper, 63.4X 146 cm (25 X 57V4in.). VanEesteren-Flu& G tlan bbuizer~nicht ing msterdam.

(fig. 37), a yea r late r in vanDoesb urg's d esign for a "flower room " in the villa Mallet-Stw en s built in Hyere s, and finally, on a gr and scale, in the 1928Caf6Aubettein Stras-bou rg, is each tim e launc hed as an attack against a preexisting architectural situation.While the oblique contradicted De Stijl's integration principle within the realm ofpainting, it fulfilled that principle in the n ew d oma in of the abstract interior. The re,it is not "applied"; rather, it is an e lem ent with a function (ironically, an antifunc-tionalist one) , that of the camouflage of th e building's horizontal-vertical skeleto n(its "natural," anatomical aspect). Such cam ouflage was, for van Doesburg, absolutelynecessary if the interior was t o work as an abstract, nonhierarchical w hole.

But the obliqu e was not the only solution to his new integrative task,as Huszarand Rietveld demo nstrate d in their extraordinary Berlin Pavilion (1923; fig. 38): thearticulation of a rchitectural surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling) could itself be e lem en -tarized by using the cor ne r as a visual agent of spatial continuity. In this interior, col-ore d planes painted on the walls d o not s top wher e the wall surfaces meet , butoverlap, continue aro und the c orner, creating a kind of spatial displacement andobliging the spectator to spin his body o r gaze around. Stretching to the utmost itsown possibilities, painting solves a purely architectural problem --circulation inspace. Conversely, as the architectural space was not preexisting, this project of apavilion marked the birth of an architectural problematic that would beco me p rop erto D e Stijl (it is hardly coincidental that this is a piece of exh ibition architecture,


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The De Stijl Idea 115

38. GeAt Rietz9eldand Vilmos Hzrszar,Spatial Color Composi-tion for an Exhibition [Kuimte en Kleuren-conipositievoor emtentoonstellingl Berlin, 1923. Three ~i e u sf tl x nzodel for theRwhn Pa~liliorz it is not certain tlwt t l ~ kbslract interior uaqaw ealized). Pl~oto tedelijk .tlzfieunz,An~qterdam.


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TheDe Stijl Idea 117

39. V h 1 f the Exbibition Les architects du Groupe "de Styl,"Park, Galerie cle LEffortModerne (Leonce Rosenberg director), 1923. hoto Nederhmk D o c u m e n t C U ~ mvoordeB o u w h t . n the foreground. one can see thefirstR o s e d m g model by van Does-burg and m n Eesteren (Private Villa [Hotel paniculier]), with ilsgroundphns diph yed ontbe d l . Behind it i s the third model, House of an Artist [M aison d'aniste]. On the other waNone can recognireOud'sProject of a Factor): and in ront of it a model or a "lramwq~shelter withaf2orlstWosk" by Willem Lmn Leusderz,who u.mwry briejy asassociated with DeStijl. In the second room, there are wo rk by Hurzar and Rietlleld.

I1 Abstraction I


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40. :Comelk L1anEesteren and 73EV L1anDoesbuq, Axonom etric P rojection of a PrivateHouse [Architecture vue d 'en haut], 1923. nk, gouache, and collage (sandpaper),57 X57 cm (22716 22-6 in.). Van Eesteren-FluckG can Lohuizensticbfing,Amsterdam. PhotoNederlands DocumentaIiecenrrum toor deBouu~h~nst.: 73EV van Doesburg, Counter-construction [Analyse d e I'architecture], 1923. encil and ink on racingpaper,50.235.5 m (19% X 14 n.). Nederlanris Documentatiecenrrum t w r deBouu~kunsr, mster-dam. Photo of the museum.

While thefint illustration sbows how L1anDoesburg applied his color scheme on a naxonomemc drawing made by L1anEesteren (a* fbeyhad designed the house together),rhe second ersplains theprocess of the ormation of the many "counter-constructions"re he d to thk project: tan Doesburg "edited tsanEesterenSdrawing urnbile tracing it,choosing to keep or delete certain elernen&so as to enhance hk 'anu&sisof rhearchitecture.


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41. hw r l a nDoes@ and CorneIf r l a nEweren, Model,House of an Artist,1923.Thispbotonwnmge, Ly ttum Doesburg, umsfirslpubIidwd in De Stijl 6, no. 617 1924).PhotoDienst VeqnmdeR@kscoliecties,7ZwHague.


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TIE De St$ Idea 121

42. Genit Rietrekf,Scbroder House,1924, Ubeci3t.

If Rierveld is the only De Stijl architect properly speaking,it is because he wasable to substitute for the functionalist ethic another one, which Baudelaire in his timehad called the "Ethic of Toys."19 Everything is deployed in such a m yas to flatter ou rintellectual desi re to dismantle his pieces of furniture or architecture into their com-ponent parts (and there is in fact a photograph showing all the elements that are nec-essary to build th eRedandglue but like Baudelaire's infant, who takes thetoy apart in order to locate its "soul," we would learn nothing from this operation(probably not even how to reassemble the parts), for the "soul" in question residese l s e w h e r e in the articulation of these elements, in their integration.

11 Abstraction 1


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43. Gerri'rRietrleM, Schrijder House, 1.924.Detail of the comer zuindou! Once open,the u~indoul esh-OJ'She ax * joitzing IU Ofiqauks. This break is doubled by the roofthat h o ~ r r ~~ ~ e rt in a decentered manner.44. Gerri'rRieneld, Red and Blue Chair,1.918. Pair7ted wood, 86 X 63.8 X 67.9 crn(33% X 25% X 26v.1n.). SttdelijkAfzlseun~, msterdam. 7?xJint model of thischair, designed prior to Riet~eld's qu ai n-lance ulith De Stijf ,wm rtncolored.necolor u 8m pplied a& 1.920. Photo of themuseum.

yve -- de stigl idea

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