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De Stijl 1917-1931 (1956)

De Stijl 1917-1931

(1956)–H.L.C. Jaffé–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art


Vorige Volgende

1 introduction+

While I was collecting the material for this study on ‘De Stijl’, which I herewith submit to the reader's kind consideration, I found myself confronted by the problem of the ‘historia hodierna’ of the fine arts. How should the art historian treat a subject which belongs by no means to the past, but is still a part of the present? And, as a further complication, how should the art historian characterize-and do justice to-a modern trend which makes a peremptory claim to absolute validity?

While selecting the material and the quotations, I happened to run across a passage in J.J.P. Oud's article on Dutch architecture that proved to be of great help. ‘Though the importance of a work of art can only be judged from an absolute point of view, the significance of an act can only be appreciated according to a relative standard’.1 Since one of the founders of ‘De Stijl’ gives me this clue, I feel entitled to work according to this method.

In dealing with ‘De Stijl’ we are faced with both the aspects mentioned by Oud: the importance of works of art, i.e. their aesthetic quality, and the signif-

icance of an act, of an historical fact: the rise and development of an artistic movement which in its results happens to be identical with these works of art. And it will sometimes be difficult to separate these two aspects because the first manifestations of the historical fact are the very works of art which have to be appreciated by different standards.

But still, Oud's remark remains valid. And it has moulded the form of this study. The importance of a work of art, its quality, cannot be explained or accounted for by art history or by any other scientific means. The work of the man of genius can be discerned as such by art history-the rest should be silence and wordless admiration. But the appearance of a work of art, its style, can and should be elucidated by art history. There, more than anywhere else, lies the task of art history and in this task the ‘historia hodierna’ is included.

Art history in its present stage and after having passed through a period of descriptive cataloguing of phenomena, is now mainly concerned with one ever recurring question: the research into the reason of artistic expression, into the conditions under which the several styles were able to develop in the course of time. As to this latter problem, contemporary history of art supplies the scholar with a wider field of experience, even when knowledge is sometimes obscured by a lack of historical perspective. But anyhow, we know a lot more about our own century, about its complicated pattern of human activities, than we do about the- perhaps far more simple-circumstances of, for instance, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. We are able to question witnesses in the different fields of activity and include their testimony, distorted or otherwise, in the material of our survey, based on a research in chronological order of the established facts.

This research cannot be confined to the domain of the arts. The recent results of psychology and of historical science will point with increasing insistence to the fact that the artist's work is principally a social activity. Therefore the artist has to be considered as a member of society and more specifically as a member of an existing and closely defined group of society. A century ago, Hyppolite Taine formulated this complex but exact method when he wrote ‘L'oeuvre d'art est déterminée par un ensemble qui est l'état général de l'esprit et des moeurs environnantes.’2 A form of art history, based exclusively on the so-called or alleged autonomous development of the arts, can therefore account for influences; it enables us to establish the relations between masters and pupils, but it will but seldom reveal the reasons for a new trend, a renewal in art. On the other hand, all research into the field of contemporary art history should start with an account of the technical progress of art before the period under discussion. It has to define the borderline from which a new group or an individual artist launches his discoveries into territory, hitherto unknown or insufficiently explored. The starting point of these explorations will always determine the direction of these travels. The development of ‘De Stijl’ would be hard to explain without the evidence offered by the transformations in the field of art during the latter half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, from Cézanne onwards.

Though ‘De Stijl’ prides itself on being a logical consequence of the previous development of the arts, it has a pronounced ideological character, which cannot be accounted for without investigating the adjacent planes of cultural activity. Contemporary philosophy deeply influenced the artists which founded ‘De Stijl’. The universalism of the movement, the new and quite different scope they have claimed for their art can, up to a certain point be traced to certain trends in Dutch philosophy during the first years of the 20th century. And though this could not be easily demonstrated in the resultant paintings, positive proof can nevertheless be obtained from the written explanations.

One of the terms for which ‘De Stijl’ artists show a certain preference in their articles, is ‘the common consciousness of the period’. This consciousness is a direct result of the conditions of the period, they cannot therefore be neglected in this study as they are conditions of a different aspect and of varying importance. In more than one respect ‘De Stijl’ bears the stamp of its period, perhaps even more than it shows the influence of its predecessors. The nature of our research is best described by altering a quotation from Marx: ‘Photography and the technique of reproduction were revolutionaries of a character, considerably more dangerous than the painters Cézanne, Gauguin and others.’3 New facts, inventions and discoveries have contributed more to the origin of the common consciousness of the period than any individual artist or thinker could have done. In order to understand the rise and development of ‘De Stijl’, we have therefore to investigate the period of its birth and growth, i.e. the social and economic pattern which, to a great extent shaped the consciousness of this group.

It would however, be insufficient to restrict our investigations to a survey of ‘De Stijl's’ period and its social condition. ‘De Stijl’, though an obvious manifestation of its time, is even more obviously the vivid expression of its national entourage with its inherent traditions. I am well aware of the fact that ‘De Stijl’ was intended by its members and in all its manifestations as a universal movement, international in spirit, constantly striving to abolish all such limitations as are imposed by geographical conditions. Nevertheless, ‘De Stijl’ appears to be deeply rooted in the traditions and the characteristics of its native Netherlands. The first decade of the 20th century witnessed the rise of abstract art together with its theoretical justification. But now that nearly half a century has elapsed, we are as amazed by the coinciding, mutually independent currents in this new trend in art, as we are intrigued by the profound differences between them. ‘De Stijl’ was born in the Netherlands and bears all the marks of what Huizinga has so neatly characterized as the ‘Nederlands geestesmerk’, (the spiritual trademark of the Netherlands).

These characteristics do not belong entirely to a given historical period; whereas one century may stress this aspect, another period will accentuate that. ‘Nederlands geestesmerk’ has been moulded by the country's shape and essence, by its social pattern and religious trends. It is made visible and audible and thus brought to greater consciousness by its painters, poets and philosophers. ‘De Stijl’ may be accepted as the contemporary manifestation of the state the mental

and moral attitude had attained during the first world war and shortly after it. No doubt the contemporary attitude, in other countries and in all of Western Europe, greatly influenced ‘De Stijl’, but there are too many facts which are inherently Dutch to make us believe that Dutch traditions, that ‘Nederlands geestesmerk’ may be neglected when investigating the specific conditions which account for the birth and the growth of ‘De Stijl’.

 

Thus, after having tried to uncover the roots of ‘De Stijl’ and made an attempt at proving it to be the Dutch contribution to modern art, we shall have to concentrate on the special qualities of its work, on the peculiarities of its ideas and creations. We are sufficiently aware of the fact that it would seem a contradiction to speak of ‘peculiarities’, where ‘De Stijl’ has constantly fought for the abolition of form in particular. Nonetheless we must approach ‘De Stijl’ as being a phenomenon and, though the phenomenon claims to be universal in its kind, our method in approaching it will have to be strictly individual. Yet when we endeavour to present a survey of ‘De Stijl's’ characteristics and do them full justice, we have to make it quite clear that it is not only an artistic movement, not only a trend in modern and, more especially, in abstract art, but that it is mainly and principally a new attitude towards life and society. We can in this context base our investigations to a large extent on the articles published in the periodical De Stijl, in which the various members of the group expounded the programme they had established in the course of their collaboration. In doing so, they have created a terminology of their own, very difficult to translate into any other language: even the Dutch reader, unless he is an initiale will find it very confusing.

 

‘De Stijl’, on its first appearance and in its first manifestations presented itself as an artistic, as an aesthetical movement. It had done away with every representation of nature and confined itself to the elementary means of plastic expression: vertical and horizontal lines and primary colours: yellow, blue, red and no-colours: white, black and grey. Thus we are concerned with a new fact, manifested in a series of paintings - and with a new programme. We shall have to deal with these two newcomers and all their implications. First of all there is the theory of the aesthetics of pure art which must be investigated. This theory in its turn is based on a hypothesis: the development of abstract art as a continuous and logical evolution through the various intermediate stages, from the 19th Century realists onwards. The autonomy of all plastic arts is asserted by the writers in De Stijl and from this fact they draw conclusions which are important to their work and their ambitions, aesthetic and otherwise. In this manner they claim that their art is inevitable and necessary and they find one of the bases of their further programme in this fact. They characterize their work and ambition as an urge to purify and liberate art from various secondary and obnoxious attributes such as subject matter, inaccuracy, obscurity and, above all, individual, merely casual emotion. This purification, which had already been begun by the Impressionists and was thence carried on by the subsequent schools

of modern painting, reached its climax and its end in ‘De Stijl’, in Neo-Plasticism, (Nieuwe Beelding). This purification marks the commencement of ‘De Stijl’ it is the basis on which it ia to develop its entire further progress. It must therefore be dealt with first.

This huge effort, aiming at the total purification of the plastic arts from mere accidentals is decidedly not negative only in its intentions. By stripping the arts from all casual attributes, ‘De Stijl’ aims at the realization of a universal law and a universal spirit. It aims at exteriorizing by means of pure plastic expression the equally pure harmony which man claimed to have found in all the laws and principles of the cosmos. It therefore attempts to render visible and subject to contemplation something very close to the platonic idea. In its striving after abstraction, after the liberation of the arts from all accidentals, ‘De Stijl’ constantly aims at the visible expression of the universal principle which its members consider the rendering of exact and equilibrated relations. This is the central, the positive thesis of their programme and it requires to be explained because all that follows after, emanates from it.

Universalism, the balance of equivalent relations has been realized by purified plastic means of expression in the work of ‘De Stijl’. This realization, which was accomplished in the very first year of ‘De Stijl's’ existence inspired the artists with a hitherto unknown confidence in the future consequence of their movement and their endeavours. It shaped ‘De Stijl’, making it a movement which, when it spread beyond the borders of artistic creation, felt itself compelled to apply the new-found truths to all other forms of human activity.

This is the source of one side of ‘De Stijl's’ development: its utopian character. Art, in complete freedom and detachment has realized or has come as close as possible to universal equilibrium. Art had to serve as a paradigm and the products of abstract art, of neo-plasticism could demonstrate and teach humanity how to realize this same harmony by abolishing all particular form, by evicting all individual, casual and secondary incidentals, in the most convincing way. In accordance with its fundamentally Dutch origin, ‘De Stijl’ readily turns an aesthetic result into an ethical principle. Society, both contemporary and local, moulded ‘De Stijl’ but, on the other hand, ‘DeStijl’ claims to build a new reality on the base of its spiritual discoveries. Its utopian character and its place in contemporary life must therefore be investigated.

The ultimate consequences of its universal ambitions were formulated by ‘De Stijl’ in its programme of utopian desiderata. A new life, a new reality was to arise, according to the universal principles which the painters of ‘De Stijl’ had rendered completely visible for the first time in history. But not all of ‘De Stijl's’ efforts were concentrated on a utopian, remote future. The purification of the plastic means of expression, should also serve to solve various actual problems of our present time. The pure means of expression could, in the first place, create a clear and universally current plastic language. This means that they were able to launch a style into present-day life, a style capable of expressing the lucid tidiness which our century seems to demand. It would have to be a style, universally valid, its expression the essence of our time, because it would

do away with all the remnants of misunderstood baroque, which we have come to detest so wholeheartedly.

The inclusion of ‘De Stijl's’ principles in to-day's reality is the last item which has to be dealt with in this study. The creation of a style which would not be an untimely paradigm for a utopian reality, but an expression heralding an as yet unrecognized character of our epoch, was the aim of still another trend within ‘De Stijl’. And, as it was fit for immediate inclusion, it has since been manifested in various fields of artistic reality. ‘De Stijl’ architecture is perhaps the most convincing and the most conspicuous proof of the ability of ‘De Stijl’ to realize its principles in modern life and to produce a language of forms which, in many respects, expresses the ‘common consciousness of our period’.

The principles and the moral creed of ‘De Stijl’ have to be dealt with in a special chapter, which will simplify matters as we have to bring the different aspects of ‘De Stijl’ under different headings. This methodical subdividing of ‘De Stijl's’ activities and ambitions does not prevent a constant and fruitful interplay of the different trends. Though the different aspects are more or less linked up with the various members of ‘De Stijl’, there has been a continual interrelation. This is the reason why no names have been mentioned up to this moment, though their different approach to the various problems will have to be demonstrated by means of the several members of the group. Still ‘De Stijl’ maintained its universal and anti-individualist principles even in internal collaboration and ‘De Stijl's’ manifestoes are very much the result of a collective activity. And, when viewed from across a quarter of a century, ‘De Stijl’ still remains the collective and united effort of its members.

 

In this way, after having attempted to characterize the principles and the aspirations of ‘De Stijl’, this study will later have to try to determine its influence on modern art and on the ‘common consciousness of time’. It is amazing to realize the expansion of ‘De Stijl's’ influence, although the movement, originating in a small country existed as such for hardly more than fifteen years. In an issue on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, De Stijl draws attention to this influence. It continued to increase after 1927. Every field of artistic activity seems to have been inspired by ‘DeStijl's’ dynamic and purifying attitude. Architecture in the first place bears the marks of ‘De Stijl’ and no wonder, for a series of daring and revolutionary projects had already been realized by the group. But its influence is not limited to architecture only, because it does not emanate from any specific work of the group. It is mainly due to the activities and the dynamism of Theo van Doesburg, ‘De Stijl's’ gifted and courageous leader. He propagated ‘De Stijl's’ principles and achievements all over Europe and by his fascinating lectures-the one I heard as a schoolboy has since remained in my memory as one of the most impressive speeches I have ever heard-and his great personal charm, he would find an echo even in the remotest corners of the Continent. He and the small group of friends and followers had to fight against various forms of resistance, i.e. conservatism, an inveterate addiction to baroque pomp, mere external show and façade. ‘De Stijl's’ principles and

achievements were attacked all over Europe during the whole period of ‘De Stijl's’ existence by the representatives of reactionary taste, mostly to be found among the ruling and administrative circles in the post-war European countries. But they succeeded -up to a certain point-because they were the manifestation of a really existing trend in contemporary European consciousness. Architecture, the designing of interiors, typography and many other fields of artistic activity were influenced and inspired by its example. Even in those arts literature and music, both only remotely connected with the original nucleus, ‘De Stijl’ made its influence felt.

 

1933 saw a temporary ending of ‘De Stijl's’ influence. Two things were of considerable importance in bringing about this ending: in the first place Van Doesburg's death in 1931. ‘De Stijl’, having lost its dynamic and inspired leader, no longer enjoyed the support of his active propaganda and his captivating charm. Yet the results of the movement would very probably have continued their effect unabatedly but for the accession to power of Fascism in Germany. ‘De Stijl’ influence, abstract art and its adherents belonged to the first and favourite scapegoats of national socialism. The Nazi leaders, most of them risen from the lower middle class, (the German ‘Spiessbürgertum’), impregnated by its narrow-minded and reactionary prejudices, did not hesitate to declare ‘De Stijl’ and its influence as ‘degenerate art’ in the very first ‘cultural’ strictures they made. They did, indeed, not misjudge ‘De Stijl’ in one respect: it would have been and eventually became, by reason of its quest for cleanliness and purity, one of the essential antagonists of Nazi pomp and showmanship, of the mendacious and pathetic theatrical performances staged by this régime. By its oppression of ‘De Stijl’ followers Nazism succeeded in spreading the influence of ‘De Stijl’ through the remainder of Europe and across to the New World.

The influence of ‘De Stijl’ on the different branches of artistic activity must be examined in this chapter and its traces followed through different countries and to various centres. ‘De Stijl's’ posterity, legitimate and illegitimate, can only be indicated sketchily here, for many of its offspring are beyond our reach, while others have vehemently denied their origin.

Special attention should be drawn to the further development of abstract painting according to ‘De Stijl's’ principles. Several of ‘DeStijl's’ members continued along their original course after Van Doesburg's death and the termination of ‘De Stijl’ as a group. But their lines of development diverged, although they did succeed in realizing still more of ‘De Stijl's’ purposes. On the other hand a growing number of younger painters has adopted, if not ‘De Stijl's’ programme, at least its outward appearance and its means of expression without a deep comprehension for its content: the new attitude towards man's life and his surroundings. This tendency, expanding over the whole of Western Europe and the United States bears, from the point of view of ‘De Stijl’, all the marks of mannerism and all the characteristics of what it would have termed ‘individual baroque’. It cannot be denied but that this trend has artistic merit,

but the relationship between ‘De Stijl’ and the younger groups is one of mere formal coincidence.

By its wide artistic range, by its many-sided inspiration ‘De Stijl’ has proved itself to be one of the most fruitful and influential movements of our time. Its range of influence has not yet been sufficiently probed and only a systematic consideration of its programme and its realizations enables us to trace its consequence.

 

Having examined ‘De Stijl's’ origin, its character and its influence and, having thus assembled the necessary facts and data, we feel entitled to answer the question as to the significance of ‘De Stijl’ with regard to its period and to the history of contemporary art. We now have at our disposal the material necessary to apply the ‘relative standard’ demanded by Oud, to our judgment of the significance of an historical fact in art.

The most important aspect of ‘De Stijl's’ significance lies in the fact that it must be considered as a kind of beacon. Its magnificent effort of purification showed to the arts the course they should follow in order to rid themselves of a cumbersome burden. This purification is all the more important as it points the way towards an objective, general and serviceable language in plastic art. By analysing the elements of plastic expression, the artists of ‘De Stijl’ have not only assisted in deciding the point of discrimination between essentials and accidentals in the field of fine arts, they have done a work as important as the constitution of the musical scale, which is the base of all subsequent development of our musical culture. All the other trends in abstract art rose out of a desire to express a personal and accidental sensibility. ‘De Stijl’, disdaining personal emotion and sensibility, is mainly concerned with the laws of artistic creation.

These laws of artistic creation do not gain such primary importance because they claim to be universally valid. Their significance lies in the fact that they manifest our way of thinking as it is to-day: they reveal the tendency of modern man to think dialectically and they stress the fact that we are conscious of our ability-and our duty-to create our own surroundings according to laws we have found by ourselves. The major importance of ‘De Stijl’ is the following historical act: that it has set up human thought and human ingeniousness against the capriciousness and arbitrary action of natural forces. This conception of art, which is in direct opposition to the traditional way of thinking, will be investigated in the final chapter of this study. The new and revolutionary conception of art has enabled ‘De Stijl’ to take the lead in the field of the arts and has invested it with the authority to impose its notions on other cultural activities.

J.J.P. Oud, whose writings have been quoted at the beginning of this introduction, prepares the readers of his book on Dutch architecture with the following lines: ‘Don't expect from me an unmoving picture of historically established facts. I am no art historian, but an architect. The future means more to me than the past and I prefer to discover the things to come rather than search for the facts that once were. But to look forwards means having a foothold in the retrospect, for the past instructs us in the future’.4

The art historian can agree entirely with these last sentences. He might be permitted to add his sincere conviction that even a picture consisting of historically established facts is capable of conveying a message which permits us a glimpse into the future. If this study is able to bring this about, it may lead us to a better understanding of our time and, above all, be a means towards acquiring a greater appreciation of modern art.


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