Twentieth century art is seen by many as a series of movements evolving from either an opposition to or an extension of concepts of previous movements.

While some movements quickly pass the newness stage in their lifespans, their philosophies continue to live on, even though greater attention may be given to even newer movements. In the case of De Stijl and Neo-Plasticism, the theoretical end of this life span came with the death of one of its founders, Theo Van Doesburg. Here we explore the fascinating art movement and its influences on contemporary culture. De Stijl, Dutch for The Style, also known as Neo-plasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917 and staked its place in the history of art and design at nearly the same time as its close counterparts Suprematism and Constructivism. They were isolated from the international art world, particularly from Paris. In response, Van Doesburg set up a new art movement to ensure that Dutch art continued to progress. Van Doesburg had a flamboyant personality and was adept at gaining support. A number of radical artists gravitated towards him. The groups principal members were the painters Doesburg and Piet Mondrian with a number of others artists like Bart van der Leck and the architects Gerrit Rietveld and J.J.P. Oud contributing shortly after the movements birth. The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the groups work is known as Neo-plasticism the new plastic art. Holland was neutral during the war, which meant that Dutch artists could not leave the country after 1914. De Stijl was the brainchild of the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg. While serving in the army, he encountered Mondrian's paintings, in which he saw his ideal. He then met him at an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and, after many discussions, they formed the De Stijl art group. At the same time they also founded the De Stijl journal, edited by Van Doesburg, to which Mondrian contributed numerous articles. Although its circulation rarely exceeded 300 copies per issue, its readership was influential within artistic circles and widespread. 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 the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. De Stijl was built on the fundamental principle of the geometry of the straight line, the square, and the rectangle, combined with a strong asymmetricality; the predominant use of pure primary colors with black and white; and the relationship between positive and negative elements in an arrangement of non-objective forms and disections.

Where did the theory come from? De Stijl was inspired by a school of thought known as Theosophy. An eccentric mathematician called M.H.J. Schoenmaekers devised a mystical philosophy about ideal geometric form. This was a NeoPlatonic philosophy it was influenced by the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Schoenmaekers believed in the beauty of pure geometry. Geometric forms never change and exist beyond physical reality in what Plato called the world of ideas. Schoenmaekers published The New Image of the World (1915) and Principles of Plastic Mathematics (1916). These publications had a great influence on members of De Stijl. All signed the De Stijl manifesto which committed them to the theory of NeoPlasticism, as developed by Mondrian. The group were also influenced by a variety of other elements, including Picasso and Braque's Cubism, Tatlin's Constructivism and Malevich's Suprematism, theoretical works such as The New Image of the World (1915) and Principles of Plastic Mathematics (1916) by M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, and of course the architectural designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. From Schoenmaekerss work, the group developed an artistic philosophy known as Neo-Plasticism the new plastic art (Nieuwe Beelding). The term was coined by Mondrian in 1917 and articulated in twelve articles called NeoPlasticism in Painting. They were published in the journal De Stijl. In 1920, Mondrian published a book entitled Le Neo-Plasticisme. In one of the essays, Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art, Mondrian defined the new aesthetic: This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour. [This art allows] only primary colours and non-colours, only squares and rectangles, only straight and horizontal or vertical line. De Stijl was not trying to imitate nature. Instead, it tried to achieve pure abstraction by reducing everything down to its essential form. They only used straight lines and rectangular forms. The colour palette was reduced to primary colours, plus black and white. They avoided symmetry and achieved aesthetic balance by the use of opposition. De Stijl can be interpreted as a Modernist movement because it tried to achieve ultimate simplicity and abstraction. De Stijl expressed a utopian ideal of spiritual order by using pure geometric form. The members decided that primary colours represented formal purity, so De Stijl used colour extensively, meaning that its more sympathetic than most Modernist design.

These strict guidelines lead to works heavily weighted on their compositional structure works whose subjects were produced as pure and nonrepresentational abstraction and are not to be mistaken with the later Abstract Expressionist movement. These guidelines were very limiting yet have led to an artistic language that has stood strong and influenced many throughout the ages as in fashion and typography design, product design as reinterpreted through the Bauhaus school, architecture and visual art later in the 20th century. Artists working in the template of Neo-Plasticism and De Stijl had just begun to experience success in the early 1940s when the emergence of Abstract Expressionism swept aside the public recognition of those achievements. It was not until Minimalism ushered in a renewed enthusiasm for geometric abstraction in the 1960s that their works began to receive serious attention. The Schroder House designed by Gerrit Rietveld in the Netherlands is one of the very few examples of Neo-plastic architecture. Although there are many examples of murals, ceramic and interior installations designed to reflect the principles of Neo-plasticism there are very few architectural structures. The Schroder House is the only shining example remain to this day. It was an incredibly radical house built in a conventional suburban area of Utrecht. This uses the same principle of reducing objects down to their underlying geometry in order to discover their essential form. Rietveld designed the whole building and all the furniture and fittings. The emphasis on horizontals and verticals and the restricted colour scheme give a visual unity to the interior and exterior. You can see that De Stijl has been extrapolated from Mondrians two-dimensional images, through Rietvelds three-dimensional furniture, to an all-encompassing environment. The interior was designed to be a flexible space. The various rooms are separated from each other by loose sliding walls, which enabled the owner to change the layout. Allowing the user to reconfigure the space was unusual for Modernism. It was usually very prescriptive and even tyrannical. This seems more humane and sympathetic than the austere Modernism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. Rietveld was inspired by Japanese design and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. The sliding partitions are derived from Japanese interiors, and the idea of free-flowing space comes from Frank Lloyd Wrights work. This exciting use of space was described in Van Doesburgs essay Sixteen Points of a Plastic Architecture (1924), in which he writes

The new architecture is anti-cubic, that is to say, it does not try to freeze the different functional space-cells in one closed cube. Rather it throws the functional space cells (as well as overhanging planes, balcony, volumes etc.) centrifugally from the core.

1. Fritz Glarner: Trabalhava com tondos (pinturas circulares). Suo. Entrando em contato com Mondrian em NY, 1940s, foi bastante influenciado por suas teorias neoplsticas. Modificou a severidade do trabalho de Mondrian, utilizando linhas diagonais, transformando retngulos em trapzios e dando uma impresso de ritmo irregular. Alm disso, decidiu utilizar tambm tons de cinza, dando uma certa impresso espacial (no presente nas obras do Mondrian). 2. Burgoyne Diller was recognized as the first American painter to embrace the tenets of Neo-Plasticism, making an important contribution to the development of non-objective art in the United States. Working in a hard-edged geometric style, he produced paintings, drawings, and collages that paved the way for the development of American Minimalism during the 1960s and 70s. Created in 1934, Early Geometric reveals Burgoyne Dillers prescient absorption of the ideas of Mondrian. Like Mondrian, Diller limited his work to primary colors and horizontals and verticals. At the same time, his careful consideration of the relationship of the forms and colors within the space evokes the teachings of Hofmann. Through his offcenter placement of shapes, Diller produced an assymetrical balance. While the three-sided blue rectangle is floating freely, the vertical black and yellow lines anchor it to the picture plane, its firmness and sense of belonging accentuated by its contrast with the red circle that has less of a mooring. Yet, even the circle seems to have its own gravitational pull, as the yellow line to its left and the blue one below it, seem to have a force holding it in a state of suspension. While the open-sided blue rectangle seems to slide our eye toward the left edge of the picture, the red circle seems to move in the opposite direction. The result is a sense of balance without symmetry that was also an important ingrediant of De Stijl. Indeed, that Diller would have such an advanced awareness of the types of principles explored by Mondrian is

amazing, given that the Dutch painter would only begin to have an impact on the American art scene after he immigrated to New York in 1940, six years after Diller created this image. 3. Highly influenced by Piet Mondrian, Ilya Bolotowsky constantly searched for order through his visual expressions. However, unlike the earlier adapters of the tenets of Neo-plasticism Bolotowskys visual language was fueled by the now popular Suprematist, Cubist, Constructivist, and Abstract Expressionist art movements. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, he immigrated to America in 1932 and attended the National Academy of Design. He quickly associated himself with The Ten Whitney Dissenters, a group of artists who, unhappy with academy and museum structures soon began to mount their own exhibitions. It was here that he credits his magnetic draw to Mondrians work. One may suspect by looking closely at Bolotowskys late work that clear, precise control of his images was of utmost importance. He did however emphasized the role of intuition over formula in determining his compositions and in many of his interviews states that the pieces are just as much an abstract composition as they are what the viewer saw in them. After all, one mans Neoplastic composition in yellow and blue was another mans reduced aerial depiction of a farmers pasture dissected by roads and property lines!

4. One can see an obvious tie to the fundamental rules of Neo-plasticism and De Stijl in Pierre Clerks work however they beg to call these rules into question. Subsequently, he not only calls them into question, but disregards these rules just enough to define his work as a unique addition. Absent from his work are compositions adhering to strict primary color usage. Although black lines and shapes are often present in his work, rarely are they horizontal or vertical. As with Bolotowsky, Clerk often produces work that is not just pure abstraction. Although abstract in nature the work often represents a theme, a place, an idea that is only known to Clerk and only slightly alluded to in a brief title. Lucky for collectors, Pierre Clerk is still producing work (and large powerful work at that) to this day. 5.

Bryce Hudson is among a small set of contemporary artists presently working to decipher the boundaries of geometric abstraction as they relate to past art movements and the present day. Hudson, who is biracial, began his career with the production of symbolic works in which he would combine this geometric abstraction with an underlining tie to race and class stereotypes in American society. His black and white color frequently represented Black and Caucasian races, yellow and orange represented Asian and Latin races. In his paintings the reductionist influences of De Stijl and the later Minimalism movement of the mid-20th century cannot go unnoticed. Presently, Hudson has withdrawn from his original approach to these either tongue-in-cheek representations or direct reinterpretations from American census surveys and allowed his work to follow a more abstract nature.

6. Huszr met other influential artists including Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, both central figures in establishing the De Stijl movement with Huszr in 1917. He also co-founded the De Stijl magazine and designed the cover for the first issue. The whereabouts of many of Huszr's works are unknown. Many of his paintings and sculptures are only known through photographs that appeared in De Stijl, or from photographs taken by the artist himself. Works that are lost include the Dancing mechanical doll, a device that could adopt several different postures and was used during Dada conferences in the early 1920s. O movimento teosfico, fundado por Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), alegava ter resolvido o conflito entre espiritualidade e cincia (conflito evidenciado, principalmente, pela teoria da evoluo de Darwin) ao aplicar o conceito de evoluo a uma escala csmica todo o universo estaria evoluindo, no s as espcies, e ns estaramos vivendo sucessivas encarnaes rumo perfeio. A teosofia exerceu grande influncia no trabalho do matemtico M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, especialmente no tratado "Matemtica Expressiva", que influenciou fortemente a concepo artstica de Piet Mondrian na fase inicial do Neo-Plasticismo. Como resultado, o De Stijl era visto por seus integrantes como mais do que um estilo artstico, possuindo um carter quase messinico, sendo uma forma de filosofia e religio. Seus ideais primrios eram promover uma sntese msticoracional, uma busca pela ordem, pela harmonia perfeita existente que poderia

ser acessvel ao homem (e sociedade) desde que este se subordinasse a ela. Trata-se, portanto, de uma misso de carter tico-espiritual, a tentativa de alcanar a "beleza universal" citada por Mondrian. "Uma expresso individual no se torna uma expresso universal por meio da representao figurativa, que se baseia em nossa concepo do sentimento, seja clssica, romntica, religiosa ou surrealista." A arte no-figurativa, forma encontrada para atingir a "expresso universal", no , todavia, fruto do inconsciente, do Id Freudiano, de lembranas individuais e pr-natais. Esta forma de expresso artstica fruto da intuio pura, do pensamento puro, embora tanto Mondrian quanto Van Doesburg admitam que os estmulos do mundo exterior so indispensveis, pois eles provocam o desejo de criao, o desejo de tornar concreto (atravs da obra de arte) aquilo que s podemos sentir de forma vaga e imprecisa, mas que inerente vida e subjacente realidade visvel. A reduo a formas elementares, neutras, que por si s no provocam qualquer reao individual as linhas retas e cores primrias nos leva a duas outras preocupaes essenciais dos tericos do De Stijl: a nfase estrutural e a necessidade vital do equilbrio assimtrico. Para Mondrian, o "mais puro de todos os membros" (na opinio de H.B. Chipp), "a beleza universal no surge do carter particular da forma, mas sim do ritmo dinmico () das relaes mtuas das formas." Rejeitando a simetria, os membros do De Stijl procuravam ento, atravs da combinao de linhas e ngulos retos, um equilbrio dinmico que tocasse a "beleza universal", provocando a emoo de beleza que, por sua prpria caracterstica, "csmica" e "universal". Pelo equilbrio assimtrico, entende-se o comportamento dos artistas em atribuir valores semelhantes a combinaes de linhas e cores diferentes, balanceando suas composies. Este exerccio quase matemtico transforma a tela em um plano e transforma o dualismo contedo-forma em uma unidade inseparvel. A noo de unidade fundamental as relaes equilibradas devem ser a mais pura representao do carter universal da ordem, da harmonia e da unidade, caractersticas que tambm esto presentes na mente (se focalizarmos nela, seremos capazes de ver a unidade natural). Este dualismo contedo-forma apenas um entre os vrios dualismos tratados por Mondrian em seus escritos. Para o pintor holands, o Neo-Plasticismo tinha como misso reconciliar o dualismo matria-esprito, alm de resolver o

dualismo entre individual e coletivo, resultado de uma viso artstica onde a expresso pela arte deve refletir a conscincia temporal do homem e vice-versa. Para Van Doesburg e Mondrian, portanto, o De Stijl estaria cumprindo o papel de resolver o questionamento do homem moderno e ilustrar o desenvolvimento da conscincia do homem do individual para o universal, a rejeio da nfase no individualismo (o Neo-Plasticismo seria, de certa forma, a primeira expresso artstica puramente plstica porque no aceitava a predominncia da conscincia individual). Nas palavras de Van Doesburg: "Aquilo que se expressa positivamente na plasticidade moderna uma proporo equilibrada do peculiar e da generalidade manifesta-se mais ou menos tambm na vida do homem moderno e constitui a causa original da reconstruo social de que somos testemunhas." A composio, como forma principal de expresso pela pintura, no renuncia ao elemento humano, permitindo ao artista expressar sua subjetividade enquanto for necessrio, dando certa liberdade de escolha quanto disposio dos elementos e do ritmo. O que ocorre a reduo drstica dessa influncia individual, aumentando significativamente o carter universal da obra. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The simplicity that characterizes de Stijl thinkingand the order that can be traced in Dutch painting as far back as the seventeenth centurysuggest conceptually provocative yet surprisingly practical methods for organizing space and for achieving visually engaging solutions in screen-based media. Such a hypothesis suggests that we reconsider the screen as a kind of picture plane: with this in mind, this essay suggests that to challenge the picture plane is to radically adjust our thinking about what a screen is, what a computer is, and what role design plays in the mix.