VAN DOESBURG & the international avant garde
Constructing a new world
Tate modern 6th February 2010
I went to the tate modern today to check out the new Van Doesburg exhibition, which is running until May. It was fantastic. The range of design genre he dipped into during his career was phenomonal and cutting edge for the era. he originally trained briefly as a singer/ actor until he decided to be a painter and then gradually through his career became interested in typography, design and architecture. Theo van Doesburg was born as Christian Emil Marie Küpper in 1883 in Uttrecht, and his early paintings were reminiscent in style and subject matter to the Amsterdam Impressionists. In 1913 Van Doesburg was heavily influenced by Wassily Kandinsky, after reading his book 'Rückblicke', and began to experiment with abstraction.
"Like kandinsky, he saw abstraction as directly embodying the spiritual qualities that he believed to be fundamental to all works of art. It could be means of expressing the artists inner emotions, or of representing the mystical forces underlying the visible world, reflecting the doctrine known as theosophy."
(Gladys Fabre)
During Van Doesburgs two year service to the army in 1915, he came into contact with the work of Piet Mondrian. The complete abstraction of reality portrayed in Mondrian's work appealed to van Doesburg and he contacted Mondrian. Together with other artists Bart van der Leck, Anthony Kok, Vilmos Huszar and J J P Oud, he and Mondrian founded the magazine De Stijl. De Stijl, as a magazine and a movement, was a major element in Van Doesburgs life and featured broadly in this exhibition. The paintings were predominantly large canvases of vertical and horizontal grids with blocks of solid primary colour, although Mondrian often strayed from the restricted palette of primary colours. The paintings originally were based on a physical object or form, but evolved eventually into independent compositions of geometric grid and colour. I found the paintings bizarrely enchanting.
Theo van Doesburg: Counter composition VI 1925
In 1919 Van Doesburg created a new type face which i recognised instantly; It is created in line with the De Stijl movement of straight lines with no curves in squares and blocks, with capitals used where necessary, to keep the uniform shape. It was fascinating to see how this was developed and to understand the reasoning behind it. Van Doesburg felt a unity between his De Stijl movement and the Dada movement in the early 20's, there was a whole room dedicated to this during the exhibition, which i found really interesting. I was introduced to the ideals of Dadaism in my foundation year in Norwich where I had a fantastic lecture on it, however I have never properly looked into it, so it was interesting to see a portion of the exhibition focused on Dada.
Theo van Doesburg/ Cornelus van Eesteren: Perspective with final colour design, shopping arcade with bar restaurant, Laan van Meerdervoort, The hague 1924.
Van Doesburg's major inputs into the design and architecture world where during the period between 1923 - 1930. He met architect Cornelis Van Eesteren in 1922 and collaberated with him in creating a series of architectural models based on the idea of planes floating in space using black and white and the primary colours. The ideas behing De Stijl architecture and design influenced, Rietveld, Oud, De Marle, Gorin and Eileen Gray. the major project displayed in the exhibition was the Aubette building in Strasbourg. This was redeveloped in partnership with Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp into a Cafe, restaurant, Ballroom and Cinema complex. the new aethetic he created with this design he termed Elementarism. Displayed along with the ork in this room was a fantastic quote from van Doesburg:
"The point is to situate man within painting, rather than in front of it . . . Man does not live in the construction but in the atmosphere generated by the surfaces."
