Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World
4 February – 16 May 2010 the truism that the early nineteen twenties were a time of great innovation and experiment in the visual and plastic arts is nowhere better exemplified than in the work of van doesburg, who, along with piet mondriaan, and gerrit rietveld, were founders of the magazine which later came to be known as a movement: de stijl. the magazine sought to promote and develop the principles of what they referred to as neo-plasticism. de stijl was informed by the other great modernist shifts including post-impressionism, synthetic and analytical cubism in painting, as well as italian futurism, dada, and russian revolutionary art, including constructivism.
at the heart of the movement was the analytical tendency to reduce the elements of art and design to its two basic constituents: line and colour. all other features in expression were predicated on these. van doesburg and mondriaan later had serious differences, which split the movement apart, over, believe it or not, van doesburg’s (re) introduction of the diagonal line. for mondriaan this was an unforgivable compromising of principles.
Tate Modern presents the first major exhibition in the UK devoted to the Dutch artist and pivotal figure of the European avant-garde, Theo van Doesburg (1883 – 1931). This is a unique and exciting chance for van Doesburg’s work to be seen for the first time in the UK. This follows in the footsteps of a series of exhibitions looking at different aspects of Modernism, conceived by Vicente Todolí, Director of Tate Modern.
Van Doesburg, who worked in disciplines within art, design and text, founded the far-reaching movement and magazine De Stijl. (read more)
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