VAN DOESBERG & THE INTERNATIONAL AVANT-GARDE: CONSTRUCTING A NEW WORLD, Tate Modern, London
Theo van Doesberg has never been given quite as much credit as he deserves in the history of modern art. Piet Mondrian is really the star of the De Stijl era – largely, I suspect, because he moved to America during the war – but it was van D that edited the magazine, and whose uncompromising principles characterised the movement. And it was van D who took abstract art out of the gallery into the everyday social world, in the form of architectural design and printing typeface, and who also dabbled in other arts such as poetry.
All these extensions of De Stijl are captured in this excellent exhibition, one of the best in London in recent years. Over ten galleries take us through the various stages of van D’s artistic career, from his early Kandinsky-inspired paintings to his Art Concret phase shortly before his death in 1931. On the way it takes in his surprising collaborations with the Dada group, the Bauhaus school, and creative figures working in other media such as film and furniture design.
Naturally, the bulk of the exhibits on display are paintings; plenty of van Doesberg’s own compositions (No. 11 on the left), a few Mondrians and Huszárs, and, most interesting of all, van der Leck’s Leaving The Factory, a model example of the De Stijl principle of reducing a scene to its basic elements. It’s not obviously a painting of workers leaving a factory (don’t even begin to think Lowry here), but given the concept, the ostensibly abstract shapes start making sense. It was precisely this type of representation that van Doesberg broke away from eventually, arguing for a rigidly geometric approach, in which the shapes stood only for themselves. He made a lifelong habit of forging fruitful collaborations and then breaking them through his refusal to compromise. But, rather than just ploughing a solitary furrow, he just moved on, and found someone else to work with, however unlikely.
Indeed, it’s in the unlikely collaborations that the exhibition’s most striking exhibits emanate. The original typefaces, cover art and letterheads from De Stijl are on display, in which the geometric principles of lettering are taken to such extremes as to render them virtually unreadable. Along with original prints in Dutch and French of some of the 70-odd issues published between 1917 and 1928, there are original prints of Mécano, the Dadaist magazine that van D founded in the early 1920s, and various posters and other prints produced using the same graphic designs (on the right, the cover of a public housing portfolio by Huszár, Wils and Berlage fom the Hague Arts Circle, 1919).
And then there’s the furniture: the classic Red-Blue chair, painted in the De Stijl primary colours after the architect and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld joined the group in 1918. How many of these are knocking around is hard to say, but this seems to be the original, on loan from the Utrecht Centraal Museum. Also on show is a copy of Rietveld’s classic buffet, or sideboard, which van D compared to a Mondrian painting, and one of his famous hanging lamps.
There are also some short films of van D’s collaborations with architects – his crossword-puzzle tiles for the Noordwijkerhout (a holiday home for poor children by the North Sea), and doors and windows for a terrace of houses in Friesland – and various designs for public buildings, including a striking shopping arcade in the Hague. Unfortunately many of van D’s colour schemes were short-lived, painted over within a year by disgruntled residents, but lately, more sympathetic owners have since restored some of them to their original state.
Perhaps most surprising of all is van Doesburg’s association with the Dada group. Several Dada pieces on display lack obvious reference to van D’s work, but there is a reconstruction of Huszár’s Mechanical Dancing Figure (1920), a hinged puppet that performed at Dada soirées given by van D and others in Dutch cities, often accompanied by Mrs.Van D, a professional musician, on piano. Light projected from behind was filtered through red and green transparent slides to create what van D referred to as ‘a kind of kinetic painting’. We can see something similar in a film by Werner Graeff, in which geometric shapes flash across the screen like a Mondrian canvas come to life.
And the rest is history: it’s from here that modern art, and contemporary art, take their cues. Not only did van Doesberg and his collaborators change the course of art history, but they changed the way the world appears. On my way back to Waterloo station, I pass a row of houses with red and blue doors, fiercely geometric windows, not a curve in sight.
