De Stijl
Our capybara has found the space in pieces. Black beams cross each other, coloured panels are waiting for somewhere to be, and between them there is rather too much restless white air. She braces her short legs and pushes the blue panel until the composition starts to hold — not literally, but to the eye.
“Almost. Another two centimetres and the whole room will agree with itself.”
A magazine that became a movement
In 1917 the painter Theo van Doesburg founded a magazine in the Netherlands called De Stijl — “The Style”. Around it gathered painters, architects and designers interested in a new visual language. Europe had just come through the destruction of the First World War, and the idea of a clear, harmonious order sounded especially convincing.
De Stijl was never only a kind of painting. Its principles moved into furniture, architecture, interiors and printed graphics. A page of the magazine could be as much of a testing ground as a canvas or the front of a house.
Fact card. The words De Stijl name both the magazine and the group of artists that grew up around it.
Even the magazine's own letterheads followed the rule. Van Doesburg built an alphabet out of straight strokes, so that the paper an idea arrived on already looked like the idea.
The visual alphabet
Vertical and horizontal
Upright and level lines make the frame. They meet at right angles and never pretend to be a branch, a cloud or the outline of an animal.
Primary colours
Red, yellow and blue were treated as the basic elements of colour. Working beside them were the so-called non-colours: white, black and grey.
Balance without symmetry
A symmetrical composition is like a pair of scales with equal weights on both sides. The De Stijl painters chose a harder problem: balance between unequal parts. A large white area can balance a small red square; one thick black line can balance several thin ones; a bright yellow patch can balance a calm grey field.
That kind of balance stays alive. Your eye travels across the page, compares the areas and assembles the whole again each time. So a strict grid is not necessarily a still one.
Here is the problem solved. One big red block at the top, one small blue and one small yellow at the bottom, and a great deal of white. Cover the red with your thumb and the whole picture tips over.
Balance is not the absence of movement. It is the moment when all the forces have come to an agreement.
Looking closely at our illustration
Press the numbers.
Pick a number
Each marker points at one thing this movement cared about.
Observation. She moves the panel a few centimetres. For a heavy capybara that is nothing. For the composition it is an earthquake.
Piet Mondrian: from a tree to a grid
Before the famous rectangles, Piet Mondrian painted landscapes, windmills and trees. Gradually he cut the visible detail away: branches became a system of directions, natural colours gave way to a limited palette, and the depicted object dissolved into relationships between lines and planes.
In 1917 Mondrian became one of the founders of De Stijl. He was after a balance between the particular and the universal. For him a painting was not a window onto nature but a construction in its own right.
This is where that journey starts: a real tree, painted in 1911, with the branches already turning into a web of lines. The picture two screens back is where it ends, nineteen years later.
Fact card. Not every red-yellow-and-blue grid is “a Mondrian”. That is the wider language of De Stijl, and the artists inside it worked very differently.
Theo van Doesburg: a diagonal enters the room
Van Doesburg was a painter, designer, writer and tireless organiser. Through the magazine, through lectures and through work with architects he carried De Stijl ideas far beyond the Netherlands.
He had come the same way as Mondrian. These are card players, painted in 1916 — you can still find the table, the hands and the hats inside the triangles.
In the mid-1920s he began introducing diagonal lines and called his direction Elementarism. For Mondrian, who had consistently defended the vertical and the horizontal, this was a matter of principle. In 1925 Mondrian left the group.
Turn a single rectangle by forty-five degrees. The rectangle has not changed at all, and yet the whole system suddenly feels faster and less steady. That is what the argument was about.
A house as an abstract composition
In 1924 Gerrit Rietveld, working with Truus Schröder, built a house in Utrecht that looks as though it stepped out of an abstract painting. White and grey planes cross thin black lines, and red, yellow and blue details place the accents.
The upper floor is the most unusual part: sliding partitions let the space be rearranged, turning separate rooms into one open area. The house shows that De Stijl ideas could govern not only what we look at but how we live and move.
Fact card. The Rietveld Schröder House has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2000.
The red and blue chair
Rietveld's chair is made of separate battens and planes that keep their visual independence. The construction does not hide how it was assembled: the lines and coloured rectangles seem to have walked out of a painting and taken a place in the room.
Its strict geometry is a reminder that design can be an object, a drawing in space and an idea all at once. Although before offering such a chair to a capybara, it would be sensible to check the width of the seat: a universal order still has to account for an actual body.
Worth knowing. You will not see the chair itself here, or the house. Gerrit Rietveld died in 1964, so his designs are protected in Ireland until 2035, and there is no free photograph of the house either. The drawing above is not the chair — it is the idea the paragraph describes: the parts kept separate, so that nothing about the way it was put together is hidden.
The balance lab
Three things to try with cut paper. Before you start, look at how far this can be taken: four squares, each half the size of the one before, walking down the canvas. Van Doesburg called it Arithmetic Composition, and there is nothing else in it at all.
The weight of colour
Put a red, a yellow and a blue block on a white sheet and change their sizes. Notice that a saturated colour can feel heavier than a much larger neutral area.
Creative workshop: a room for a calm capybara
Worth knowing. What you need: white paper, black strips, red, yellow and blue paper, scissors and glue.
- Lay two black strips vertically and two horizontally.
- Add no more than three coloured rectangles.
- Leave at least half the sheet white.
- Make the left and right sides different, but try to keep them in balance.
- Add a capybara made of one large soft shape and a few short details.
- Decide whether she obeys the grid or changes it by being there.
Fact card. Use no diagonals at all in your first version. In the second, turn exactly one element, and compare the mood of the two.
The question worth arguing about afterwards: when does simple look considered, and when does it just look unfinished?
What to keep
“Three colours, two directions and a great deal of white. It looks like the simplest art in this whole series, and it is the hardest to get right.”
Mondrian kept going. This is New York in 1942, painted when he was seventy: the black lines have gone completely, and the yellow ones have broken into little squares that will not sit still. He called it Broadway Boogie Woogie, after the music.
Our capybara leaves the room exactly as she found it, which took some doing. In the next chapter she meets painters who wanted the opposite again — no rules, no straight lines, and a dream instead of a plan.
1. What directions dominate the classic De Stijl language?
Right angles only — until Van Doesburg broke the rule and the group split.
2. Which colours count as primary in this system?
The non-colours do as much work as the colours.
3. Why are the compositions so often not symmetrical?
Equal weights are easy. Unequal ones make the eye keep working.
4. Why did Mondrian leave the group in 1925?
A disagreement about one angle was enough to end a friendship.
5. What is the Rietveld Schröder House?
On the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2000.
6. What is white doing in a De Stijl composition?
Cover the white in our picture and the balance falls apart.