Yesterday we featured Bauhaus and its importance to design to these days. Today we will feature another extremely important movement for art and design, De Stijl or simply “The Style”. I am a huge fan of these style, especially Piet Mondrian paints.

De Stijl, Dutch for “The Style”, also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands.

De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) that served to propagate the group’s theories. Next to van Doesburg, the group’s principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960), and Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), and the architects Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), Robert van ‘t Hoff (1887–1979), and J. J. P. Oud (1890–1963). The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the group’s work is known as neoplasticism—the new plastic art (or Nieuwe Beelding in Dutch).

Piet Mondrian and Pétro (Nelly) van Doesburg in Mondrian’s studio at Rue du Départ, Paris. 1923. Photo. Published (in altered form) in De Stijl, vol. VI, nr. 6/7 (1924): p. 86.