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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

4 character and development of de Stijl

The artistic aims and the aesthetic principles

The preceding chapter has shown, that the work of ‘De Stijl’ was based, from its very beginning in 1917, on the acceptance and elaboration of a way of artistic expression which had hitherto been unprecedented. As Mr. Alfred Barr terms it: ‘Two elements formed the fundamental basis of the work of “De Stijl”, whether in painting, architecture or sculpture, furniture or typography; in form the rectangle; in colour the “primary” hues red, blue and yellow.’176 The creation of the first paintings in this new way which excluded subject matter to the last degree, was immediately accompanied by the writings of their artists. It was their principal object to show that their new way of painting was indeed ‘a new way’, but that it was, on the other hand, a logical fulfilment of the demands which had been drawn from the very essence of painting and from its entire history. They considered the expounding of their theories as a task, as they wanted to help the public to attain a deeper comprehension of their work and of

all its implications. Therefore, the theoretical essays of ‘De Stijl’ painters and architects are introduced in the first number of De Stijl as follows: ‘As the public has not yet come so far as to experience the new plastic beauty, it becomes the task of the specialist to awaken the layman's sense of beauty. The really modern, i.e. conscious artist, has a two-fold vocation. In the first place to create the purely visual work of art; in the second place to make the public susceptible to the beauty of pure visual art’.177 This task was carried out by the reviews of De Stijl during the entire period of its existence: it accompanied the creation of all of the new works of ‘De Stijl’ with the specialist's commentary, explaining his aims and his views. But on the other hand, ‘De Stijl's’ editor, Van Doesburg, was aware from the very beginning of the dangers that an over-emphasis of the theoretical side of the work might bring about. We find, therefore, in the same introduction, a pointed warning against any possible precedence of the theoretical essays with regard to the artistic work of ‘De Stijl’: ‘By giving the modern artist the opportunity to speak about his own work, the general prejudice, that the modern artist creates according to preconceived theories, will disappear. On the contrary: it will become evident that modern art does not emanate from previously determined theories, but - vice versa - that the principles are the result of the plastic work’.178

When speaking of ‘the result of the plastic work’, the artists of ‘De Stijl’ do not only refer to their own work, to their own development from a realistic beginning towards an abstract result. They mean, when speaking thus, a - teleological - evolution of painting towards the aim of abstract art. It was not only that their work had developed in this direction, they merely happened to be the vanguard: the entire history of painting was, logically and forcibly, leading towards this end. In order to put forward a similar argumentation, one has to submit the idea of an independent, an autonomous evolution of painting, of art in general. ‘De Stijl’ does indeed consider the autonomy of artistic development as an important basis for the growth of abstract art and more specially of ‘De Stijl's’. Van Doesburg puts it quite clearly when writing: ‘The art of painting can only be explained by the art of painting’179 and Van der Leck formulates a parallel opinion, when contradicting an allegation, that the origin of ‘De Stijl’ was derived from architectural principles: ‘Modern plastic painting has not proceded from architectural principles, or as a consequence of building and construction, but on the contrary: - it comes as a simplified manifestation of space from free painting after nature; it has developed from the art of painting, from painting that depicts life in all its variegations.’180 And Van Doesburg's introduction to the second annual of De Stijl brings this problem into a somewhat wider context: ‘What comes to definitely established expression in neo-plasticism: the equilibrated relationship of the particular to the general manifests itself as well, more or less, in the life of modern mankind, and it constitutes the basic cause of the social reconstruction of which we are the witnesses. As man has matured to oppose the domination by the individual and its caprice, the artist has ripened to oppose the individual in artistic expression: natural form and colour, emotion etc. This resistance,

which is based on matured internal values of the whole human being, on life in the strictest sense, on reasonable consciousness, is reflected in the whole evolution of art and more specially in the development of the last 50 years.’181 Or, as he terms it in his ‘Three lectures’: ‘Not a single artistic expression arises all of a sudden: one art springs from the other and all together they form a chain that embraces all centuries and all people. (...) This happens - and art shows us - as life is a constantly changing image. The art of painting is the constantly changing result of this image.’182 When Van Doesburg considers the logicaiiy changing aspect of painting, Van der Leck on the other hand, stresses the unity in evolution: ‘In the course of time, painting has developed apart from architecture, independently and, by experiment and destruction of the natural and the old, it has found its own essence, spiritually as well as formally’.183

This independent chain of development, this evolution towards a teleological aim can only be accepted by another abstraction: the abstraction of painting and its development from all other influences, the supposition of an autonomy of painting. Mondriaan formulates this thesis quite clearly in the first number of De Stijl when writing: ‘The art of painting - the one and unalterable’184 and Vantongerloo illustrates the axioms, on which his book is founded, in his l'Art et son avenir: ‘The artist intuitively possesses the certainty of the existence of unity, but he is distracted by the period he lives in and this fact renders evolution slow and difficult.’185 Whole paragraphs of his book have to furnish proof, that art, throughout the centuries, has always been based on the same esthetic principles; to this end, he analyses the composition of ancient paintings, f.i. Rogier van der Weyden's ‘Deposition from the Cross’ and, drawing the attention to the composition in opposition to subject matter, he writes: ‘It is not the Holy Virgin, nor Christ, nor the box of balm, that render the work so beautiful, but it is the positions they hold’.186 Composition, the aesthetic element in art, must therefore be considered essential and it is by force of this aesthetic principle, that all painting throughout the centuries form one chain of evolution. It is the abstraction of the temporal element in art, that dominates here and that becomes clear once more when Kok writes on the modern work of art: ‘For the modern work of art denominations such as new, old-fashioned etc. do not exist in the usual and modish sense, because a work of art of purely aesthetic expression is timeless’. 187

Having accepted this axiom, an evolution that leads towards a realization of the evolutionary end becomes indeed clear. Van Doesburg expresses this view in his pamphlet Classical, baroque, modern as follows: ‘This artistic development has had an aim throughout the centuries: the realization of the notion of art, which consists of the following - to express exclusively and entirely in the way of art, the relationship between the inward and the outward, between spirit and nature’188. And as Van Doesburg thus formulates the aim of all art, Mondriaan in ‘De Stijl’ points in a parallel direction by defining the origin of all art: ‘As different as these artistic expressions may be in appearance, there is no difference in essence. Let us go back to the origin of the work of art: the emotion of beauty.’189

Art thus - according to ‘De Stijl's’ conception - springs from the emotion caused by beauty and aims at the exclusive realization of its aesthetic ambitions. The evolution of the arts has therefore to be consistent, uninterrupted and - the term may be permitted here - rectilinear. Van Doesburg gives his view on the consistency of this evolution: ‘The reason was, that the aesthetic had not yet achieved an independent existence. The liberation of art from the ties of morality, of religion, of nature, in order to become a free expression of the human spirit, is therefore an important part of the knowledge of artistic evolution.’190

All artistic development should therefore be considered from this point of view. The artists of ‘De Stijl’ did indeed look upon the development of the arts as on a consistent continuing chain, the end of which was modern abstract art. It is chiefly Van Doesburg who - with his astounding knowledge and his brilliant feeling for mutual relationships - developed surprisingly bold conclusions: ‘Means of expression: as means of expression have to be distinguished 1. extremely differentiated forms (man, flower, tree etc); 2. elements of form (sphere, cylinder, cone etc); 3. plastic elements (plane, line, colour). With these three categories, three categories of construction correspond, i.e. to the first natural (organic) construction, to the second: utility (anorganic, artificial) construction, to the third: plastic (artistic) construction. Historical development of art shows most clearly the succession of natural form, element of form, and plastic element.’191 All the aspects of art history are therefore determined by this sequence.

‘De Stijl's’ interest, however, is especially concentrated on the last 50 years preceding its foundation. The recent developments in painting supplied the opportunity to link it up directly with ‘De Stijl's’ ambitions. It is obvious, that Cézanne meant a great deal to them; he is considered one of the important links in the chain of development. But, as we have seen in Mondriaan's personal reflections - the cubists are an even greater source of inspiration for Van Doesburg as well. ‘Where Cézanne had stopped, at the primary mathematical forms. From these he(Picasso) had to compose a new plastic language’.192 But this direct evolution to abstract art shows itself even earlier: ‘All modern art is distinguished by a relatively greater freedom from the oppression of the subject. Impressionism emphasized the impression of reality more than its representation. After the impressionists, all art shows a relative negation of nature's aspects; the cubists delivered a further blow; the surrealists transformed it; the abstract artists excluded it.’193 When writing about space-determination as an essential factor of his art and of neo-plasticism, Mondriaan writes: ‘In the course of culture space-determination is not only established by structure and form, but even by the mechanics of painting (brushwork, colour-squares or points - impressionism, divisionism, pointillism). It has to be emphasized that these techniques deal with space-determination and not with texture.’194

But cubism is the most essential phase in the general development, more than in the individual evolution of ‘De Stijl’ artists. Van Doesburg terms it as ‘the critical point in evolution. This, exactly, is the great importance of cubism: to have raised to the first rank these elements which, in illusionistic painting,

had held a secondary plane (such as plane, colour, proportion). This “Umwertung” of plastic qualities from secondary into primary factors is, indeed, the only essential feature in the evolution of painting towards an independent expression of relations. The fact that the cubist problem is set forth, is the revolutionary stage, the critical moment in painting more than any other. It is the stage at which all formal, tangible qualities (secondary) are transposed into essential qualities of relation (primary). It is obvious, that painting, after having conquered its primary plastic qualities of expression, needs but continue its further development. There is no other way, no other possible direction of evolution and only where it manifests the plastic urge by painting's essential and primary means of expression, it is indeed elementary and new plastic creation’195 Mondriaan considers the fact of cubism from a slightly different angle, yet arrives at the same conclusions: ‘Cubism brings form to a more definite, to a proper expression: it is already creating composition and relation, much more directly than ancient art. Thus cubism causes a work of art to be a phenomenon that has grown from human spirit and is therefore one with man.’196

So the entire evolution of art appears to the artists of ‘De Stijl’ as a constant development from natural forms to plastic elements. Van Doesburg summarizes this evolution when writing: ‘By plastic expression the values of nature are transposed entirely or partly into symbolical values.’197 At the end of this evolution and as its unavoidable consequence, ‘De Stijl’ came into existence. Mondriaan, when looking back on the evolution of neo-plasticism in one of his last essays, sees this evolution as an essential fact: ‘If we follow the development of plastic art from the past to the present, we see a gradual detachment from the natural vision and a progressive determination of the real expressive means. We see no sharp division between the art of the past and modern art. The two expressions dissolve into each other, until in modern times a real difference of expressive means - forms, colours and spacial relationship - is created.’198 Or, as he expresses the same thought much earlier in De Stijl: ‘When painting had once freed itself from the natural representation of things, it arrived, of a necessity, at a further liberation. It had liberated itself to some extent from natural colour, even to some degree from natural form and now breaking with natural colour and natural form was to follow. This was achieved by expressionism (cubism,orphism etc.). And finally dissolution of all form into straight lines and of natural colour into flat, pure colour was to follow (abstract-real painting)’199

Starting from this conception of artistic evolution as an axiom, ‘De Stijl’ is indeed obliged to aim at the utmost purity and rigidity of plastic expression. When considering their plastic activity as the conclusion of all preceding artistic results, ‘De Stijl’ artists could indeed not admit of any compromise with previous artistic realizations, though admitting their quality. They had to be in strict opposition to the entire past. Van Doesburg makes a point of this fact, when he writes: ‘Neo-plasticism indeed lacks every nuance. This is properly of an era, when painting still set to work with vague means, it is the principal characteristic of feigned plasticism. The luminists have already put

something else in its place: a striving for clarity, for distinctness of form and line and finally clearness and distinctness of composition. What in ancient painting was done by nuance, shades of tone from light to dark, from yellow to brown, all this has been deepened in neo-plasticism to a decisive establishment of relations - already prepared by the luminists - by the opposing of complementary colours.’200

In an essay, published in 1937, Mondriaan draws the conclusion of this theory of artistic evolution: ‘Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the setting up of any particular form. We note thus, that to destroy particular form is only to do more consistently what all art has done. The dynamic rhythm which is essential in all art is also the essential element in non-figurative work. In figurative art this rhythm is veiled. Yet we all pay homage to clarity.’201 And in the same essay: ‘We only need to continue and to develop what already exists. The essential thing is, that the fixed laws of the plastic arts must be realized. These have shown themselves clearly in non-figurative art.’202 And finally this conclusive and coercive passage: ‘...if all art has purified and transformed and is still purifying and transforming these forms of reality and their mutual relations; if all art therefore is a continually deepening process: why then stop halfway? If all art aims at expressing universal beauty, why establish an individualist expression? Why not continue the sublime work of the cubists? That would not be a continuation of the same tendency, but on the contrary, a complete break-away from it and all that existed before it.’203

Indeed, this conception of the history of painting leads to unexpected and fascinating conclusions and perspectives. A history of painting could well be written from this point of view: the devaluation of the motive through history. It would indeed show, that in an earlier stage of painting the motive existed in the proper sense of the word: as the object, that set the artist in motion, as the given fact that caused an artist's specific conception and on which the artistic result largely depended. In the course of evolution, the motive became indeed more and more an occasion, by which an artist manifested his particular approach to nature, so that, at the present stage of development, if at all discernible, it is not much more than a faint memory of a quite casual fact, from which the process of abstraction had started. This would then be the history of the declining importance of the outer appearance to painting, at first for the benefit of individual expression, ultimately for the realization of generally existing laws of plastic composition. Up to a certain point it tallies well with the facts, as it accounts for the historical development from the sum of single works towards the more uniform aeuvre of an artist.

But this conception of art history finds - at least partly - its origin in the fact of art history itself. The conception of an autonomous history of art, developing in the direction away from the motive, is only possible by the abstraction of all the manifold aspects in a work of art, that are not directly related to its aesthetic properties. Van Doesburg is well aware of this fact - but as ‘De Stijl’ only draws the conclusions from its own version of the history of painting, he

also emphasizes the importance of these facts to neo-plasticism: ‘When we experience the joy of beauty in seeing an Egyptian (......) work of art, this is due to the fact, that we open ourselves to it without an ulterior motive (such as national, practical, religious etc.). We experience it as a product, for its own sake. In the course of time it has lost most of its practical elements and now stands before us as a timeless aesthetical product. As such, it is beautiful in all time, because the aesthetic or general is beyond time. For its contemporary beholder, such a product could not be enjoyed from the aesthetical point of view alone, as the plastic enjoyment, the joy of interior beauty, was lost in the religious atmosphere, which almost stifled the aesthetic atmosphere.’204 Indeed, this quotation, more than any other, makes it obvious, in how far the contemporary approach to art history, 19th and early 20th century appreciation of works of art, are at the base of the aesthetic theories and ambitions of ‘De Stijl’. The theory of a teleological development of the arts, of an evolution towards abstraction, is indeed - like the whole idea of ‘l'art pour l'art’ - born in, or rather from, a museum. It is the consequence of a consistent grouping of works of art according to schools and chronology, it is the conclusion drawn from a complete abstraction in these works of art. All these temporal factors, are characterized as secondary motives, though, to a contemporary, and often to the artist, they were of major, of dominating importance. These theories are a consequence of the statement which by no means originated from Van Doesburg, but is the accepted truth of a period, i.e. that ‘beauty is for all time because the aesthetic of the general is beyond time.’

By the acceptance of this statement, ‘De Stijl's’ theories are ranged in the large current of ‘l'art pour l'art’. Van Doesburg's articles and publications emphasize this fact over and over again: ‘Art is an aim in itself. First, the impressionists discovered this fact about 1880, and therefore their device was “l'art pour l'art”. The place that art should take in our society is: to supply aesthetic needs. Man evinces a need for the aesthetic besides his material needs and art is the obvious medium to supply this need. Aesthetic requirements are of a spiritual nature, that is to say they rise from our spirit. Where art supplies these needs, it is spiritually effective, that is to say, it satisfies our spirit. But when a work of art is in contradiction to itself, by having an other significance than an aesthetic one, it is either imperfect or no work of art at all. Such work masquerades as a work of art without being one.’205 And a bit further in the same pamphlet: ‘You will now ask me, what is the aim of the artist and my answer is: none at all. The artist produces a work of art through his nature, as his nature is aesthetical. There is not even room for an aim. What the artist desires is, that what he makes should be according to his nature, that is to say, that his product expresses his aesthetical experience of reality. For supposing that his nature is aesthetical, his experience will be similar and therefore aesthetical.’206

Starting from this principle, it is indeed possible to claim the ‘independence’ of art, as ‘De Stijl’ had done in its work and its artists, chiefly Van Doesburg, in various articles in their review: ‘What only matters in art, is to use everything,

nature as well as science, as a means and not as an aim. Art is an aim in itself. It is for this reason that is has abandoned, in the course of time, all secondary intentions such as the awakening of religious feeling, the stimulating of humanitarian sentiments, etc. Plastic art has to express its aesthetical content by its proper, pure means of colour and form.’207 Stating the fact of a development in the past, comes down to formulating a programme for his own period: ‘Painting sought its aim in many a direction (......). That is why it continued to live as a parasite. Painting in modern time however, depends on itself, it has to ensure its proper existence, not through literature, nature or allegory, but by its own plastic means. For as long as an art does not possess the faculty to transform by its means of expression an inner reality - f.i. an emotion - into an externally perceivable reality, it is not independent and, because art is independent, not art, either. Music, considered as the highest expression of feeling, has reached far ahead of painting in its way of expression.’208 This liberation of painting from all outside influences and tendencies was considered, by ‘De Stijl’, as the most important task of its period: ‘Therefore every artist who indulges his plastic conscience, in spite of subject-matter, has to fight current opinion. And as long as we fancy that a painting should have another content except an emotion, another form than a plastic form, as long as we cling to the notion that painting is limited to the more or less emotional representation of certain natural objects, this struggle will continue.’209. An independent art of painting, that was ‘De Stijl's’ claim, advocated by Van Doesburg in various articles and practically realized, as early as in 1917, by the paintings of the three ‘Stijl’ painters. We shall see, that their liberation of painting went even further than the other contemporary trends, for they were well aware of their task. ‘To make painting independent, means: to ensure for it an existence as an expression in its own right, which may be admired for its own sake.’210 Van Doesburg thus formulated the task. In the same pamphlet elsewhere he writes: ‘The suggestive effect, which colour and form have on our souls contains the possibility of enjoying an art of painting for no other secondary feeling than the purely aesthetic one, that is to say for its own sake.’211 This general statement is only a claim; but Van Doesburg and the other artists of ‘De Stijl’ are much concerned with its realization: ‘The uncovering of the aesthetical essence is the most important principle of New Painting. Hence the expression “abstract” is derived; by this is principally intended, stripped of the naturalistic, the practical, the national and, generally speaking: the particular. As contrasted with traditional painting, where particularization was of primary importance, painting in our time considers generalization, that is to say the uncovering of the purely aesthetic in plastic features, as its principal value. This fact has brought painting to a higher level, it has made its aesthetical way of expression independent and has opened a number of possibilities.’212

Painting has thus become, since the first realizations of ‘De Stijl’ in 1917, an independent art, an art that manifests only itself. We shall have to examine later in how far ‘De Stijl’ went further in this direction than other, somewhat earlier or contemporary trends. But the fact ‘De Stijl’ had aimed at and which it had

succeeded in realizing as early as in 1917, was the liberation of painting, that is to say the creation of an art that was entirely free from associations. All standards, which do not pertain to painting are therefore excluded from the appreciation of a work of painting; every thought, trying to link up a work of art with any phenomenon of the outer world, is therefore out of place. Van-tongerloo summarizes this exclusive attitude towards painting, when writing in De Stijl: ‘What do you say when you are in front of a painting with a general idea or without any idea? “It is well done, it is well rendered”. The painter, therefore, rendered what he wanted to make. You have understood well enough.’213 What a work of art demands, is not the spectator's activity, that starts from the painting and then tries, by way of associations and remembrances to find the links between the work of art and a series of phenomena; the work of art demands the spectator's exclusive concentration on its composition, on its structure and its development on the canvas. All other intentions should be excluded.

Van Doesburg formulates this claim: ‘With regard to the contemplation of a work of art, we would like to speak about the aesthetic attention as the first and principal claim. This aesthetic attention means the opening up of one's receptivity.’214 Thus, the new trend in painting did not only concern the artist, but the spectator as well. The latter was to be made familiar with a new manner of looking at works of art. And the artists were willing and ready to help. It is one of the reasons for the publication of the review De Stijl, as we have seen from the introduction: ‘If the new ideas on modern plastic beauty have not yet penetrated to the general public, it becomes the task of the specialist to awaken the layman's sense of beauty (......). For this reason a magazine of an intimate character has become necessary.’215 And Van Doesburg has, once and again, emphasized this point of view, most clearly in a speech on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition in the Amsterdam Municipal Museum in 1929: ‘The ancient painters, realists, naturalists, impressionists, have taught man to see nature; the painters have seen it first (......). But the new painters, the painters of relationship, will teach people to see art, the art of painting. These painters, discovered it for the first time. There is a difference between “seeing” works of art and looking at paintings. The first suggests a plastic vision, the latter only an optical one.’216

Having cut all the ties which had linked art and the outer world, and having concentrated exclusively on the proper laws of art, it is not surprising that the artists of ‘De Stijl’ emphasize another aspect of their art: the element of play. Mondriaan writes in De Stijl: ‘Art is a game and games have their rules.’217 And there is a passage in Dr. Schoenmaekers' book The new image of the world, which enables us to get an approximate notion of Mondriaan's intentions: ‘Life and repose, united and one, are nothing but life without an exterior aim, i.e. life for its own sake, life lived for and by itself. Life for life's sake, that is, in other words: playing. The one and continuous deed of creation is a game (......). We human beings play as well.’218 It is the disinterested and detached character of ‘De Stijl's’ art that makes Mondriaan speak of a game, that is only dependent on its own rules. And it is the same feature in the art of ‘De Stijl’ which shows it to

us as a culmination of ‘l'art pour l'art’, as the extreme consequence of this axiom.

The consistent pursuit of this idea has led to the liberation, to the independence of painting. It has led, as well, as we shall have to realize later, to the establishment of its proper means of expression. But it brought up, nonetheless, a limitation of painting, at least in regard to its public: it has limited the appreciation of painting to the aesthetically susceptible. Van Doesburg states this fact, in the 1929 speech quoted above: ‘Plastic vision means seeing relations. For him, who does not hear musically, Bach and Stravinsky are quite the same: a sequence of sounds. “Hearing” or “seeing” of context is already a beginning of understanding. All those, who see the new art as only “ornament” must have seen ancient art exclusively as “subject-matter”. They lack the organ, which is absolutely essential for the spiritual enjoyment of art; they had better abstain from judgment.’219 This limitation of the appreciation of art to the aesthetically susceptible - in the case of painting the visually ‘musical’ - is an essential consequence of the liberation of art; it has caused a deepening of the gap between the artist and the public, it has prejudiced the position of the arts in regard to society. Yet, everyone is disposed to assign similar privileges to music. For modern society had accepted the notion that enjoyment was the only aim and the exclusive function of music, whereas it expected from painting an explanation of nature's appearance. We shall have to see later, in how far the artists of ‘De Stijl’ were prepared to answer this desire. But this readiness could, however, not change ‘De Stijl's’ determination to consider the work of art as an independent entity, or to deviate from the course which, in their opinion, history had stipulated for a further development of the arts, already from the start of impressionism: ‘Painting became an art as painting, and the entire nature became a problem of relations, of tonal values to the impressionists. It was their aim to identify painting with this task. “How” became everything, “what” became a secondary matter. Or rather “how”, became “what”.’220

In this progressive striving for the liberation of painting, for the independence of art, ‘De Stijl’ has indeed gone further than its contemporaries and than the other trends of abstract art. For the other currents of abstract art the exclusion of subject-matter was a further step towards complete self-expression of the artist. The realization of his individual emotions had still been hampered by subject-matter, even by its remnants in cubism, as even geometric forms were an objective limitation of the artist's subjective approach. But ‘De Stijl’ considered the problem from a different angle: not the artist was ‘De Stijl's’ aim, but art. Mondriaan had well realized the possibility of abstraction in the direction of subjective expression, as he writes: ‘A work of art depends exclusively on the will of its creator,’221 but he refuses to exploit this fact in order to realize a subjective expression by abstract means. On the contrary, ‘De Stijl’ has always considered the desire for subjective expression as the most harmful and serious limitation of art. In its striving for purity in art, individualism and the desire for self-expression had to be considered as the worst enemy. Mondriaan, in all his writings, is the resolute opponent of every manifestation of individualism. Already in his first article in De Stijl where he gives a definition of style and of the

means to realize it, he attacks individualism: ‘The artistic temperament, the aesthetical vision, recognize style. Everyday's vision, on the other hand, does not see style, neither in art nor in nature. Everyday's vision is the vision of the individual, which cannot rise above the individual sphere. As long as matter is perceived individually, style cannot be seen. Thus everyday's vision stands in the way of all art. It does not want style in art, it desires detailed representation. The artist, on the other hand, wants style and searches for it; this is his struggle.’222

We shall have to see later that Mondriaan does not only oppose individualism in art, but in life as well. A passage from one of his articles in De Stijl does already point in this direction. ‘As we become freer from our attachment to the individual values, our idea of beauty will be gradually liberated from it as well, and vice versa. The liberation of our idea of beauty manifests and at the same time contains the evolution of our life.’223 In another article, of some years later, he squarely opposes individualism to pure beauty: ‘If our material environment is to be of pure beauty, if it is to be healthy and directly sufficient for use, then it is necessary that it no more reflects the egoistic sentiments of our petty personality; that it does even no more reflect any lyrical expression, but that it be purely plastic.’224 For Mondriaan, lyricism is the direct manifestation of individualism: ‘Lyricism is a remnant from humanity's childhood. From a time, when the lyre was known, but not electricity.’224a Painting will indeed never be fully independent, as long as individualism is still an active force, and neo-plasticism has therefore quite definitely to exclude individualism. Formulating his views about neo-plasticism, Mondriaan writes in 1942: ‘Actually it is an expression of our modern age. Modern industry and technics show parallel if not equal developments. Neo-plasticism should not be considered a personal conception. It is the logical development of all art, ancient and modern, its way lies open to everyone as a principle to be applied.’225 But it is not only Mondriaan, who opposes individualism; several passages from the first manifesto of ‘De Stijl’ should be quoted here, in order to show that the struggle against individualism is part of ‘DeStijl's’ principles, and an important feature in its striving for the liberation of art: ‘There is an old and a new consciousness of time. The old is connected with the individual. The new is connected with the universal. The struggle of the individual against the universal is revealing itself in the world war as well as in the art of the present day. The war is destroying the old world with its contents: individual domination in every state. The new art has brought forward what the new consciousness of time contains: a balance between the universal and the individual. The new consciousness is prepared to realize the internal life as well as the external life. Traditions, dogma's and the domination of the individual are opposed to this realization. The founders of the new plastic art therefore call upon all who believe in the reformation of art and culture to annihilate these obstacles of development, as they have annihilated in the new plastic art (by abolishing natural form) that which prevents the clear expression of art, the utmost consequence of all art notion. The artists of today have been driven the whole world over by the same con-

sciousness, and therefore have taken part from an intellectual point of view in this war against the domination of individual despotism (......).’226

In this opposition of individualism and subjectivism, which is clearly expressed in ‘De Stijl's’ manifesto, an essential mark of difference with all other currents of abstract art can be discerned. Kandinsky, for instance, writes about his Improvisation of 1913 - and this sentence could as well be applied to his entire work: ‘The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood, and not as a representation of objects.’227 And Malevitch, the founder of Suprematism in Russia, wrote about his first suprematist painting, also dating from 1913, as follows: ‘I mean the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts.’228 and elsewhere: ‘I have invented nothing. I have only felt the night and myself, and in it I have discovered the new thing which I have called suprematism. It expressed itself in a blank surface, that represented a square.’229 In his ‘Bauhausbuch’, the Russian text of which has already been written in 1915, similar definitions can be found, for instance the following: ‘An artist who does not imitate, but who creates, expresses himself - his works do not mirror nature; they are new facts, no less important than the fact of nature itself.’230

 

In opposition to these tendencies, ‘De Stijl’ clings to strict refutation of individualism. The liberation of art from all accidental features, the reduction to its pure elements, can indeed only be completed if a work is free of the most accidental of all its origins; the casual moods and the incidentals of its creator. Therefore one of the primary ambitions of ‘De Stijl’ has been to promote a means of expression, which excluded all casual moods and arbitrary expressions of the artist. The striving for a generally valid mode of expression is one of the reasons for the creation of neo-plasticism; it is also an expression of the fact that ‘De Stijl's’ ambition had always been directed not only towards the creation of works of art, but towards the creation of a style.

The ultimate ambition of ‘De Stijl’ is therefore not only abstract art and not only an artistic manifestation, that is no longer dependent on nature. If this would have been the case, the artists of ‘De Stijl’ might as well have contented themselves with a development of their art of before 1917. Their ultimate aim is to realize harmony and equilibrium objectively, with a similar objectivity as science had reached in establishing the laws of nature. Everything that could hamper this objectivity had therefore to be excluded from their work. And the only means of expression by which it would be possible to manifest this harmony objectively were the elementary plastic means of ‘De Stijl’: straight lines in rectangular opposition, and the primary colours.

‘Unconsciously, every true artist has always been moved by the beauty of line, colour and relationship for their own sake and not by what they may represent.’231 The beauty of these plastic elements is therefore the only possibility of expressing beauty objectively, without interference from nature or from any other incidental. ‘Finally as a consequence, in abstract-real painting composition itself is rendered visible. For the composition only becomes positive in ancient

art, when subject matter has been subtracted; on the other hand it appears directly in abstract-real painting, because there is an abstract means of expression.’232 And it would not be sufficient either, to have an abstract means of expression, but the means of expression in its turn, has to be objective, exact: ‘Abstract-real painting is capable of mathematically aesthetic expression, because it possesses an exact, mathematical means of expression. This means of expression is definitely established colour. The definite establishment of colour implies: 1, the reduction of natural colour to primary colour, 2. the reduction of colour to flatness, 3. the inclosure of colour, so that it appears as a unity of rectangular planes.’233

So by a progressive purification of its means, ‘De Stijl’ arrived at the manifestation of its ambition: the creation of an autonomous beauty in painting. ‘Artistic culture, tending towards the purest and most real manifestation of the essential in art, had to lead, of a necessity, towards an “art without subject-matter”. The forms, used by this art, we can call “neutral”, as they do not have a limiting character. Geometrical forms can be counted among these, by their universal expression. Straight lines, in rectangular intersections, may be considered the utmost consequence of the abolition of individual form, as it is the intersection of the lines which necessarily forms the rectangles.’234 The use of this elementary means of expression bestowed the independence as well as the objectivity on painting: ‘With the exception of non-figurative art, there seems to have been a lack of realization of the fact that it is possible to express oneself profoundly and humanely by plastics alone, that is, by employing a neutral plastic means, without the risk of falling into decoration or ornament. Yet all the world knows that even a single line can arouse emotion (......). In general, people have not realized that one can express our very essence through neutral constructive elements; that is to say we can express the essence of art. (......) But everybody agrees that art is only a problem of plastics. What good then is subject-matter?’235

Van Doesburg, who had already advocated abstract art for some time, but, who could not be satisfied with Kandinsky's results, which he had closely followed, states the perfection of the new artistic manifestation: in this way, the aim of the plastic artist has indeed been realized most exactly; the aim which is to ‘create plastic harmony and to give truth in the way of the arts’ - illustrating once more by these words ‘De Stijl's’ eagerness for objectivity, which could not have been realized by the preceding schools of painting, which followed nature. ‘The organic unity is based on three fundamental elements: 1. the spiritual state or the emotion, 2. colour, 3. form. Painting, considered as a plastic art, is nothing but finding the right balance between these three fundamental elements. We see therefore,that in organic unity nature can be excluded completely and that a purely plastic work of art is free from natural elements as well as from sentiment.’236

Painting must concentrate upon the proper means; indeed, ‘how’ becomes ‘what’ and it is not a false claim of ‘De Stijl’ to have achieved the culture of ‘l'art pour l'art’.

‘The strongest form of expression of every art is to be found in the exclusive use of its proper means.’237 This statement by Van Doesburg is completed by the negative assertion: ‘Plastic arts may leave the interpretation of stories, tales, etc. to poets and writers (......). Arms, legs, trees, landscapes, are not pictorial means. The pictorial means are: colours, forms, lines, and planes.’238 In this context, Van Doesburg once more joins the idealist tradition by quoting Poussin as an example: ‘The painter concerns himself more with aesthetic intentions than with natural forms.’239

But not only nature, every other outward interference should be excluded, in order to secure the painting's independent objectivity: ‘When the new plastic artists use mathematics, they may be compared to a Renaissance artist using anatomy. No more can we make a Renaissance work of art by a great deal of anatomical knowledge, than a modern work of art with a thorough knowledge of mathematics (including the four-dimensional). By mere mathematics we shall never be able to compose a painting - with (the aid of) mathematics, however, we may do very well. One can learn the means: their use however, is the hereditary rights of genius. What matters in art is to use everything, nature as well as science, as a means and not as an aim.’240

The exclusive means of painting, therefore, are colours, lines and planes. But they were more: by themselves they manifested plastic harmony. Van Doesburg explains this fact by writing: ‘Gradually, the material became obvious to the artist as being the bearer of the content.’241 In these few words, the early years of ‘De Stijl's’ development are summed up. Mondriaan, in his articles in De Stijl and in his later retrospective essays, fills in the details of this broad conception: ‘It is to be understood that one would need a subject to expound something named “spiritual riches, human sentiments and thoughts.” Obviously, all this is individual and needs particular forms. But at the root of these sentiments and thoughts there is one thought and one sentiment; these do not easily define themselves and have no need of analogous forms in which to express themselves. It is here that neutral plastic means are demanded. For pure art, then, the subject can never be an additional value, it is the line, the colour and their relations which must bring into play the whole sensual and intellectual register of the inner life......not the subject’242 And more specifically about the realizations of ‘De Stijl’: ‘We may call those (forms) neutral which do not evoke individual feelings or ideas. Geometrical forms being so profound an abstraction of form, may be regarded as neutral.’243 These statements coincide with Mondriaan's - and ‘De Stijl's’ - artistic development: ‘To create pure reality plastically, it is necessary to reduce natural form to the constant elements of form and natural colour to primary colour. The aim is not to create other particular forms and colours with all their limitations, but to work towards abolishing them in the interest of a larger unity. The problem was simplified for me, when I realized two things: a. in plastic art, reality can be expressed only through the equilibrium of dynamic movement of form and colour and b. pure means affords the most effective way of attaining this. When dynamic movement is established through contrasta of oppositions of the expressive means, rela-

tionship becomes the chief preoccupation of the artist who is seeking to create equilibrium. I found that the right angle is the only constant relationship and that, through the proportion of dimensions, its constant expression can be given movement, that is, made living.’244 This quotation applies to the very first creations of ‘De Stijl’ where rectangular composition is matched with pure colour. The next one deals with the period of 1918, immediately before the definite creation of neo-plasticisrn: ‘In my early pictures, space was still a background. I began to determine forms: verticals and horizontals became rectangles. They still appeared as detached forms against a background, their colour was still impure. Feeling the lack of unity, I brought the rectangles together: space became white, black or gray; form became red, blue or yellow. Uniting the rectangles was equivalent to continuing the verticals and horizontals of the former period over the entire composition. It was evident that rectangles, like all particular forms, obtrude themselves and must be neutralized through the composition. In fact, rectangles are never an aim in themselves, but a logical consequence of their determining lines, which are continuous in space; they appear spontaneously through the crossing of horizontal and vertical lines. Moreover, when rectangles are used alone without any other forms, they never appear as particular forms, because it is contrast with other forms that occasions peculiar distinction.’245 The course of development is concluded with a quotation, regarding the years of 1919 and 1920, thus the constitution of neo-plasticism: ‘Later, in order to abolish the manifestation of planes and rectangles, I reduced my colour and accentuated the limiting lines, crossing them one over the other. Thus the planes were not only cut and abolished, but their relationship became more active. The result was a far more dynamic expression. Here again I tested the value of destroying peculiarities of form and thus opening the way to a more universal construction.’246 The entire development towards neo-plasticism has been dictated by the ‘gradual perception, that the material is the bearer of the content.’ And the further development, Van Doesburg's creation of elementarism and the schism in ‘De Stijl’ resulting from this fact, were repercussions of the same facts. When Van Doesburg in 1925 introduced the diagonal into neo-plasticist composition, he did so in order to increase the ‘dynamic expression’, to which Mondriaan referred. ‘The rectangular composition, in which extreme tension, horizontal and vertical, had been neutralized, kept - as a remnant of classical composition - a certain homogeneity with the statics (support-charge) of architecture. Contra-composition (or anti-statical composition) has liberated itself from this homogeneity. Its contrasting relation to architecture is (but on another level) to be compared with the contrast between white and flat architecture and gray, curved nature. Elementarism only has liberated painting completely from convention.’247

Another quotation goes even further: ‘As neo-plasticism had already rejected (and quite rightly so) symmetry, which is associated to our corporal external structure, it would have led in its way to reject rectangular composition as well as the only possible means of expression, as it is associated with our natural organic structure. This is what elementarism achieves: by the suppression of

rigid statica it awakens in us a new spiritual motion, accompanied by a new vision.’248

Mondriaan's opinion on what he termed ‘a deviation from “De Stijl's” original conception’ is no less revealing: ‘Van Doesburg kept the rectangular relationship of the vertical and horizontal lines, but turned them to a 45-degree position. This in opposition to the natural aspect of reality. He called his conception “elementarism”. In this way he put the accent on the expressive means, while I saw relationship of equal importance with these means.’249 The difference in the ideas of Van Doesburg and Mondriaan, which came to light as a result of elementarism, is deeply rooted in the difference of opinion about the essence of painting, which developed between the two artists and which we have to examine later. But the entire evolution of ‘De Stijl’ was due to a desire to develop this principle: ‘the material is the bearer of the content.’

From this exclusive desire for purification results ‘De Stijl's’ conception of plastic laws. Having once rejected all outer interference, the artists of ‘De Stijl’ had to concentrate on their means and on composition, in order to express harmony. Oud, in the first volume of De Stijl, imputes impurity to a confusion between aims and means: ‘Impurity in art as well as in religion arises as soon as means are considered as aims. Thus painting could give subject-matter without art; building, details without art; religion, rites without faith; philosophy, reason without wisdom.’250 On the other hand, Mondriaan emphasizes the possibilities of pure painting: ‘Painting is capable of a consistent straightening and interiorization of the means of expression, without leaving the domain of these means of expression.’251 And, in the first number of De Stijl, he gives a definition of his conception of the laws and aims of painting: ‘Thus neo-plasticism means the manifestation of definitely established aesthetic relations. It is built up in painting by the artists of today, as the consequence of all preceding plastic manifestation - it has been realized in painting, as painting is the least bound of all arts. The whole profundity of modern life can be reflected in a painting.’252 Having once developed the new and purified means of expression, it was ‘De Stijl's’ self-imposed task to express harmony by the composition of these means and to bring the expression of harmonious beauty to ever greater perfection. Van Doesburg continues to propound this problem: in the last, memorial number of De Stijl we find notes such as: Equilibrium and perfection are more essential than form or object. If it is possible to arrive at the creation of a work of art by these two superior qualifies, I ask myself, of what ‘use’ are accidentais such as ‘form’ and ‘object?’253 We have thus to interpret the statement, that ‘the material is the bearer of the content’ in such a way, that the means of expression can manifest harmony, an objective beauty, which is not to be realized by other means. ‘This is the beautiful feature in the artist's battle that, again and again, he seeks the pure expression of harmony. Every time he expresses a new vision of beauty, he will experience more strongly that harmony, manifested in the present world, is such a force that a visual representation is unable to render it.’254

‘De Stijl's’ search therefore goes towards the discovery of the laws of harmony

and the possibility of applying these laws. ‘De Stijl’ has found the solution of this problem in the spacial and visual relationship of its abstract expressive means. Vantongerloo is very much concerned with this problem, as his mathematical inclinations urge him towards a scientific approach. In his recent work which contains many retrospective thoughts, he writes: ‘What importance should be given to nature and what importance to the abstract? This study aims at finding the role of each and at formulating an attitude towards them from the point of view of art. We shall have to conclude that, where the arts are in question, we must not only abandon nature entirely, but absolutely ignore it, since nature lies totally outside the sphere of art.’255 The task of the artist is therefore, to create something which is unprecedented in nature and which is only related to the world of natural appearance by a coincidence of its lawfulness.

‘As the man of science, the philosopher and the artist make use of abstract forms, (......) every science needs calculation and reaches its results by abstract means. A machine is not composed with any natural object. Abstract farms, obeying a law, are given to material, for instance, the construction of a bridge, which obeys weight, the aeroplane, which obeys stability. Thus everythng obeys a fundamental law(......). Thus the artist disposes of abstract means. For all that, the line, which does not represent a natural object, is the most perfect materialization of art. Natural lines do not represent the image of a thought, but a local image; the realization of a natural object is not the materialization of spirit(......). A line, in relation to another line, speaks to us about science, about philosophy, even about art. If the relations are equilibrated, the lines give us a sensation of aesthetics.’256 Vantongerloo thus stresses the need for precision and accuracy in art - he emphasizes the conformity of art and science. We have already seen in the first chapter, that science has indeed been one of the important sources of inspiration to ‘De Stijl’, and Vantongerloo wants to continue and to deepen this conformity: ‘For art is a science and not a fancy. Plastic art, that is, the pure means: colour and volume. The work of art is a composition by purely plastic means, directed towards an aesthetical end. So the work of art manifests unity.’257

To create such a work, with a precision that almost equals that of science, a complete command and a thorough knowledge of the means of expression are needed: ‘All plastic art and particularly abstract art shows the importance of the fact already emphasized that forms with their colours have a proper expression which is independent of our vision. The same fact is to be observed concerning the elements of these forms. It is not superfluous to realize that a square is not a circle, a straight line is not a curved line. The more neutral the plastic means are, the more the unchangeable expression, of reality can be established. We can consider all forms relatively neutral that do not show any relationship with the natural aspect of things or with any “idea”. Abstract farms or dislocated parts of forms can be relatively neutral.’258 Forms which bear any relation to the outer world of appearance, are therefore rejected, as they are only capable of disturbing the equilibrium of the work of art; at least they have to be completely neutralized, or straightened. ‘In order that art may be really abstract,

in other words, that it should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance.’259 This denaturalization is not only applied to apparent farms, but even to categories such as space: ‘...in painting three-dimensional space has to be reduced to two-dimensional appearance. This is necessary not only to conform to the canvas, but to destroy the natural expression of form and space. Only then is the equivalent space determination, which abstract art requires, possible in painting.’260 Through denaturalization by abstraction of all natural forms, ‘De Stijl’ artists approach the laws of plastic composition. Any natural element would be as alien to their composition (and would therefore upset it entirely) as a non-arithmetic symbol would be in a mathematical equation. And an equation can only conform to its laws, if its material is adequate. Then too, it is capable of representing reality in an abstract way. In this way the following lines of Mondriaan's essay may be understood: ‘Intrinsic reality - dynamic movement - is established in abstract art by the exact determination of the structure of form and space, in other terms through the composition. In painting, structure is established through the division of the canvas by means of forms (planes) or lines.’261 This notion of space-determination is further explained in another passage of his essays: ‘The action of plastic art is not space-expression but complete space-determination. Through equivalent oppositions of form and space, it manifests reality as pure vitality. Space-determination is here understood as dividing empty space into unequal but equivalent parts by means of forms or lines. It is not understood as space-limitation. This limitation determines empty space to particular forms.’262

When considering example III, given by Van Doesburg in his Bauhausbuch, it becomes clear what is meant by space-determination and by the rejection of space-limitation. There, Van Doesburg exemplifies the transposition of natural forms into an abstraction and he explains this transposition by a series of his paintings, starting from the motive of a cow. He quotes the significance of a cow to the peasant, the veterinarian, the butcher, the cattle dealer, and shows that this significance influences their respective visions. Then he opposes to these aspects the vision of the artist, which is entirely disinterested as far as the object is concerned: ‘he does not see details, as the peculiar characteristics of the object do not interest hum.’263 He is not concerned with the particular limitations but only with general importance of the object as part of spacial reality. Thus the artist develops a spacial approach to reality, an approach which may seem strange and useless to the public: ‘The artist speaks, from his inner and outer world, in words and mental images, which are current for him, as they are partly factors of the world where only he belongs. The public however, has another inner and outer world and the words by which it expresses its notions, characterize this world completely. It stands to reason that the perceptions of different people, everyone having another inner and outer world, cannot correspond.’264 We shall have to see what the significance of the arust's vision can be for the public, we shall thus have to examine the moral significance of abstraction.

After having broached a similar example - that of the viewing of a tree by men of various professions, and by the artist, Van Doesburg concludes as follows: ‘It is, however, sufficient if we see from these examples that the artist's perception is different in its nature to that of the layman; from this fact we may derive the following thesis: that the artist's task is to explain the image of the world by way of aesthetics, that is to say, according to art’265 This conception of art does indeed exceed aesthetical perfectionism, but on the other hand, it implies it by necessity. Without a precise handling of the abstract means of expression, such a task could not be fulfilled. Van Doesburg stresses this fact in his methodological lecture, reprinted in the Bauhausbuch: ‘In summarizing the various thoughts, developed about this subject, we may say that only the abstract accents are of importance to the artist and that only when they exclusively prevail, his work has aesthetical value. Having formulated the notion of aesthetics as a denomination of the idea of the fundamental essence of being, we shall have no difficulty in acknowledging the unequivocal manifestation of this idea as being the essence of all art.’266

The rendering of ‘world's harmony’ - that, therefore, is ‘Stijl's’ most ambitious conception of art. And as this harmony does not become apparent in the likeness of any particular object, as it is also an abstraction, the means of expression are necessarily abstract. That is what Mondriaan means when writing: ‘Art has never been a copy of nature, for such a copy would not have been strong enough to evoke human emotion. The living beauty of nature cannot be copied: it can only be expressed.’267 It is in order to attain this aim, that he warns time after time against the danger of subjective approach: ‘For nature cannot be copied and the predominance of our subjective impression has to be conquered. These plastic exigencies produced abstract art. Abstract art has grown out of the abstraction of forms, but it is not a simple abstraction. It is rather, construction after decomposition of forms. Avoiding the formation of limiting form, it can approach an objective expression of reality.’268

 

After having examined the question of ‘De Stijl's’ aesthetical principles and its means of expression, we have now approached the problem of the content of its work. Abstract art, or, as it has been called as well, non-objective art, has always been considered as having, by definition, no content at all. In spite of this notion, it is important to emphasize the significance of the content of ‘De Stijl's’ work and, at the same time, to stress the fact that it is indeed ‘non-objective’ only in so far as it is not concerned with objects. The answer to the problem is given, clearly and explicitly, by Van Doesburg: ‘The modern work of art, indeed, lacks subject-matter. But it does not lack a subject. This subject is of a pictorial nature, it is aesthetical balance, unity, harmony in a higher sense.’269 And Mondriaan completes this thesis about the content of ‘De Stijl's’ work when writing: ‘The laws which in the culture of art have become more and more determinate, are the great hidden laws of nature which art establishes in its own fashion.’270

This task, which ‘De Stijl’ had set itself, demands indeed an abolition of all

particular appearances; it demands even more a complete exclusion of subjective sentiments. It calls on man's clear, all-embracing vision and abhors all sentimental attachment to specific objects. The task ‘De Stijl’ had set itself - to make visible the laws of nature - cannot be trifled with by the concern for any particular object. It is with this intention-that Mondriaan writes: ‘We come to see that the principal problem in plastic art is not to avoid the representation of objects, but to be as objective as possible.’271

The desire for objectivity is the key to ‘De Stijl's’ entire aesthetical conception. ‘De Stijl’, as we have seen, is not concerned with the representation of objects; it is only concerned with the structure of things and not with their appearance. lts foremost aim is an objective, visible demonstration of the laws which reign over this structure. As its content is an abstraction, the means of expression have to be abstract as well; they have to be objective, as the content does not allow any interference of the subject. And they have to be dynamic, as the content which they try to express is motion itself. ‘De Stijl’ has striven for an elementary means of expression, because the content to be expressed had to be universal.

This summary of ‘De Stijl's’ principles defines the social task of ‘De Stijl’. A work of ‘De Stijl's’ neo-plasticism cannot be a direct appeal to the spectator, a stimulus towards any particular activity or action. The task of the work of art in view of the spectator has been changed, it has been more assimilated to that of the scientist: its primary importance is the creation of a method - alanguage - which is capable of expressing the laws of nature, and which may be handled by others to realize special results. Mondriaan stresses the importance of this aspect: ‘Though an aim in itself, neo-plasticism educates the conscious universal vision, as natural painting did in regard to the unconscious, natural vision.’272 And, in one of his later essays, he emphasizes the fact that this vision has to be dynamic: ‘In plastic art the static balance has to be transformed into the dynamic equilibrium, which the universe reveals.’273 He thereby intends that all universal events follow the laws of dialectics and that the language of art has - therefore - to be dialectical as well: ‘It must be emphasized that it is important to discern two sorts of equilibrium: 1. a static balance and 2. a dynamic equilibrium. The first maintains the individual unity of particular forms, single or in plurality. The second is the unification of forms or elements of forms through continuous opposition. The first is limitation, the second is extension. Inevitably dynamic equilibrium destroys static balance. Opposition requires separation of forms, planes and lines. Confusion produces a false unity.’274

‘De Stijl’ has indeed created a new artistic language. The artistic means of expression, until the beginning of the 20th century, had been dependent on objects and were - therefore - statical. But man, in the 20th century, is no more concerned with matter but with energy in nature. It is ‘De Stijl's’ achievement to have created an artistic language, which was in conformity with the laws of nature, that is to say with the activity of human thought, by being dialectical and dynamic. It is only for this property of the new language, that Mondriaan could define the aim of neo-plasticism: ‘It is the task of art to express a clear

vision of reality.’275 And it is in regard to this content of ‘De Stijl's’ work - which has now to be examined - that we have to understand Van Doesburg's thesis, which may otherwise seem presumptuous: ‘The aim of nature is man, the aim of man is style.’276

The content: Universal vision

‘What we understand by abstract art: It is the attempt to bring
about the world's own speech, instead of the language of our
soul, which is moved by the world's image’ (Franz Marc).

Having until now examined ‘De Stijl's’ aesthetic principles, we have to study the essence of its ‘oeuvre’ - the subject, ‘De Stijl’ artists wanted to present visibly without the use of subject-matter. We have already seen that it has been ‘De Stijl's’ ambition to attain - by abstract expression - a clear vision of reality. But it will become apparent in the course of our investigation, that ‘De Stijl’ was not concerned with the mere appearance of reality. What it tried to discern and to render visible, was the essential, the unchangeable qualities of reality.

‘Art - though an aim in itself - is, on the other hand, a means as well as religion by which the universal may be revealed, that is to say, plastically contemplated.’277 With this passage from the first volume of De Stijl, Mondriaan hints at ‘De Stijl's’ general trend of thought, at ‘De Stijl's’ conception of the world and of life. For it would be erroneous and deceptive to consider ‘De Stijl’ as a movement which confined itself to art: ‘De Stijl’ had a firmly established conception of its own with regard to life and reality and this conception was to be and has been expressed by its plastic abstract means. It is difficult to say which of the two existed first: the aesthetic expression or the general conception of life - they are so closely united that they cannot be easily separated, though with Mondriaan, the general conception of life most certainly was the primary cause. They certainly developed one another and both reached their mature manifestation in the paintings of 1917. Since then, the content - once established by its form - may be deduced and can be treated separately.

The progress of the search for the universal, the absolute reality, is adequately illustrated by a quotation from Mondriaan's notebooks, published by his friend the writer M. Seuphor: ‘What captivates us at first does not hold us afterwards (like toys). If one has loved the surface of things for a long time, one will finally look for something more. This “more”, however, is already present in the surface one wants to go beyond. Through the surface one sees the inner side of things, it is as we regard the surface, that the inner image takes shape in our souls. This is the image we are to represent. For the natural surface of things is beautiful, but the imitation of this surface is lifeless. Things give us everything, their representation can give us nothing.’278 From this quotation it becomes clear, that the universal vision, the absolute conception of the world, was born with the artists of ‘De Stijl’ not by mere speculation, but in the way of the painter: by observation and contemplation. Van Doesburg too had been developing in the same direction during the period since 1913: the influence of Kandinsky's

paintings and writings led him away from tangible reality, towards a search for the ‘spiritual in art’ and not in art alone. That is why he had read Hegel and he quotes his work in this context: ‘The spirit is a thing, infinitely superior to nature; in it, divinity manifests itself more than in nature. (Hegel). Thus it stands to reason, that works wrought according to the spirit will deviate from natural forms and the more or the less so, or entirely, in proportion to the state of distinctness of the spirit.’279 And we find similar expressions with all ‘De Stijl’ artists, even with Gino Severini, who was comparatively an outsider within the group: ‘The task of our modern art is to seek to determine the direction, the aim and the extension of the phenomenon and to bring it into relation with the whole universe, that is to say, to all other phenomena from which it is not really separated, belonging to the domains of our knowledge, apart from any notion of time and space. This brings us close to the platonic idea.’280

Indeed, ‘De Stijl's’ philosophical conception, its image of the word, has not been so very remote from the platonic idea. It is not surprising, that there can be found, in De Stijl, quotations from Aristotle and from Plotinus, all emphasizing the same conception: the existence of a creative force, governing the appearance of matter. ‘De Stijl's’ conception of this creative force did, however not directly spring from the ancient thinkers - it was influenced more by modern science. For modern science had not only taught it the permanence of energy, it had shown the identity of energy and matter and had already hinted at the possibility of the creation of matter out of energy. The results of modern science and the philosophical systems of ancient thought were both adopted by ‘De Stijl’. Indeed, they found a confirmation of their ideas in a sentence by Plotinus, which is quoted in De Stijl: ‘Art stands above nature, because it expresses the ideas, of which the objects of nature are the defective likeness. The artist, relying only on his own resources, rises above capricious reality towards reason, by which and according to which, nature creates.’281 In ‘De Stijl's’ conception of reality, an idea on nature's construction is therefore presupposed. Huszar writes of this fact in the first annual of De Stijl: ‘It is therefore logical that this method is preceded by a different conception of life. The r-cubist (another denomination of the neo-plasticist) has to believe in the absolute (reality) before he can work in it, as the means he uses to express his spiritually-aesthetical aims, are the result of his conception of life.’282 And another instance, quoting Mondriaan: ‘Neo-plasticism arises from the notion of a universal conception of life. The universal can beexpressed by pure relations between the subject and the universal; of the one extreme to the other.’283 The universal force in which the artists of ‘De Stijl’ believed and which they tried to express, had been revealed to them not only by speculation but by their own activity: the observing of nature. ‘Pure observation makes us see the original unity as being the permanent force in all things. It makes us realize, that it is this force which all things have in common. The essential generality has been termed by Aristotle as “substance”, as that which is, as the thing by itself, as that which exists by itself, independent of accidentals as size, form, properties, which only shape the exterior, by which substance reveals itself. Thus this exterior is only by means

of substance, what it is to us. As the substance is the permanent force, direct expression of the universal (that is, direct manifestation of the substance) is not only justified, but necessary, as the permanent force is the highest value.’284 This is how Mondriaan expresses his conviction of the existence of this creative force; from this fact he deduces the task of art and its content: ‘It is spirit, that makes him become man. Man - but it is the task of art to interpret the super-human. Art is intuition. It is the pure expression of this incomprehensible force, which works universally and which we can therefore call the universal.’285 It is this force that leads art, that leads ‘De Stijl’ towards its goal. And in Mondriaan's article we find this amazingly mystical passage: ‘The universal (the source of all art) never errs.’286

It is with this certainty, with the intention of finding the universal force, in all of nature's manifestations, that the artists of ‘De Stijl’ observe reality: ‘Nature too, shows style (......). For everything reveals the universal according to its own fashion.’287. And it is not the variety of manifestations, that is important, but the unity of all these, by the one creative force: To the neo-plasticist the universal is not a vague idea, but a living reality that manifests itself visibly and audibly. For him it is that which becomes apparent in and by the individual, what it holds as its essence, what makes it a unity. That, therefore, which is always the same, the unchangeable. This unchangeable which manifests itself by instability, is equilibrated relation of position by equilibrated relationship of dimensions (measures) and of colour(tone) and non-colour (non-tone).288 By this unity and its various manifestations, life attains its form: ‘The quantity, too, creates rhythm for us. This is as it were, the plastic expression of life for us men and it unites the particular into one.’289 All the appearances of nature are thus considered as manifestations of this force: ‘Expansion - an exteriorization of the active primary force - creates form, corporality, by growth, annexation, construction etc. Form comes into existence when expansion is limited. As the universal is the fundamental force (because all action comes from it) it is to be fundamental in plastic expression as well. If it is to be consciously acknowledged as fundamental, it has to be expressed clearly and directly.’290

The conception of an essentially universal force therefore determines ‘De Stijl's’ vision of reality. The expression of this force is the content of ‘De Stijl's’ painting and tangible reality is only a defective manifestation of this force: therefore, art can never be based on the appearance of reality. All the artists of ‘De Stijl’ adhere to this conception. Van Doesburg sees this force in all the manifestations of life: ‘The significance of life is the manifestation of one and the same thing always in a different manner.’291 Kok, ‘De Stijl's’ philosopher, describes this force: ‘Every form (object) is a coagulation of universality.’292

The mystical accent, which may sometimes be heard in the sentences quoted above, most probably finds its origin in the work of Dr. Schoenmaekers. His system was based on a similar conception of universalism and, by this fact, it may have obtained so great a hold on the founders of ‘De Stijl’. It is indeed a remarkable fact that Schoenmaekers had already termed this universal force

as ‘style’. ‘A positively mystical contemplation of the essence of nature's form will recognize more and more clearly the severe, absolute style in the depth of life and it will therefore easily discern every rippling disturbance that opposes style.’293. Elsewhere in his New image of the world he writes: ‘Who can hear the variations of a musical theme most clearly? He who knows best the essence of the theme and keeps hearing it in all the variations. He hears the variations spring from the theme, he hears variations as variations.’294 A similar universal conception of nature can be found in Dr. Schoenmaekers book, indeed emphasized, in a way which reminds one of mystical writers as well as of theological eloquence: ‘He (the positive mysticist) does not see the particular beside the absolute, but he sees the particular as being one with the absolute, as its proper infelt opposite. He sees the particular as the playful game of severe absoluteness.’295

For the artists of ‘De Stijl’, painting is one of the most appropriate means to manifest this universal force; it is in their opinion a force which is most clearly apparent to the eye: ‘Indeed, a means to unite abstractly, that is consciously, with the universal, is given to man by aesthetical contemplation. Every contemplative activity - as the disinterested contemplation defined by Schopenhauer - raises man above his natural nature. According to this nature, all his activities are directed at his own improvement, at the maintenance of his own individuality. His spiritual ambitions as well do not exist for the sake of the universal - as he does not know it. But in the aesthetical moment of contemplation the individual as such comes to be abolished. It has always been the essence of all painting to materialize in colour and line the universal, that comes to the foreground on that occasion.’296 Painting therefore becomes a means to approach the structure of the universe. ‘Plastic vision is conscious contemplation, or rather: penetration. It means discrimination, seeing the truth. It leads to comparison and thereby to the vision of relationship, or to the vision of relationship and thereby to comparison. It means seeing things, as far as possible, objectively.’297

The painters of ‘De Stijl’ consider the universal force as the only essential reality, which they attempt to discover again and again: ‘We must see deeper, we must see abstractly and first of all, universally(......). Then, exterior reality will become to us what it really is: a reflection of the truth.’298 The manifestation of this truth should be the aim of all human activity, and painting, in this respect, is in a privileged position. ‘And thus, the base of all life, of religion, science and art, is the striving for a clear vision of the universal.’299 In the dialogue on neo-plasticism, the painter answers the objection that all things in abstract composition would become alike with the following remark: ‘If it is one's intention to manifest what things have in common and not what makes them differ, this is not a drawback, but a necessity. For the particular, which leads us away from the principal, is abolished by this procedure; the common factor remains. The expression of things gives place to the pure expression of relation.’300

The universal force was to be the most important feature in man's vision of

reality. All the domains of spiritual activity tended to emphasize it and in the immediate past had shown the first realizations: ‘Distinctness, clarity, are claims of life and art. Philosophically, distinctness is created by knowledge; though only the highest knowledge interprets the universal. Aesthetically distinctness is manifested by pure plastic vision. Religiously it is faith in the sense of direct contemplation.’301 Modern painting had gradually come to realize this manifestation of the universal: ‘Modern painting has shown, in general, a consistent striving towards liberation from the individual (with increasing consistency and then accelerated speed); it has come (in neo-plasticism) to a clear expression of the universal; doing so, it is a manifestation of the present - even though it is ahead of its time.’302 By this conception the painters of ‘De Stijl’, and Mondriaan in the first place, arrive at an evaluation of their own period as being one of spiritual revolution: ‘Therefore this period is to be considered as the great turning point where humanity no longer tends from the individual towards the universal, but from the universal towards the individual, in order to realize it universally - for the individual becomes but truly real indeed, when it has been transposed into the universal.’303 The fact that their era is considered as a turning point, brings about an additional opposition to tradition, and for this reason Vantongerloo writes: ‘The new artist thus has to part with tradition and become conscious of universality: of the union of spirit and matter.’304

What then, is the universal force hitherto undiscovered and only indirectly expressed by plastic art? It is about the same as the ‘universalia’ of Mediaeval scholastic thought, as the ‘substantia’ of Aristotelean tradition. But it is at the same time energy in the modern sense of the word, as it has been discovered and described by physical science. Painting has proved to be one of the few means of revealing this universal force, the unity of all creation; thus it is painting's task to attempt its manifestation: ‘The exact expression of unity can therefore be manifested, it must be manifested, as it is not apparent in visible reality.’305 This is painting's obligation in regard to its content.

Van Doesburg, whose theoretical argumentation is much less speculative and more concerned with its point of departure, gives an example of the transposition of nature into its universal pattern when stating: ‘That the artist - that is a man who feels a need for communication - is not concerned with the bird or even with the bird's song, but only with the state of mind which has been wrought in him. This is his subject: there is no other. This is not new. But the way in which he embodies this state of mind is. If he is a painter, he will choose the colours and forms by which this state becomes evident. He arranges, multiplies, measures and defines the conformity, the relations, and the results of colour and form in relation to his emotion. This emotion and the inexhaustible source of pictorial means are the only things with which the painter is concerned. Nowhere is there room for the bird... the bird only exists in regard to his emotion; it is not the outward perception of the bird, which moves him, but its content, the universe.’306 This conception of a painting's content leads, of necessity, to the abstraction which Van Doesburg describes in the course of

his article: ‘The artist seeks the common in the particular. To find beauty is nothing more than to discover the general. This common is the divine. Ta recognise the divine in a work of art means to be moved aesthetically. A work could be made from straight and horizontal lines only (......), which could reveal the divine in the shortest time and in the most direct way.’307

Mondriaan endeavours to express the same thought, when he writes ‘In the instability of relations, there is one unchangeable relation: it is manifested plastically by the rectangular position which gives us a plastic hold.’308 And he expounds a similar argument as Van Doesburg's, only more speculatively, about the relation of abstraction and the appearance of life: ‘Pure plastic manifestation is not a reproduction of life. It is its opposite. It is the unchangeable, absolute, in opposition to the capricious, the changeable. The absolute is expressed by the straight line. Painting and architecture, according to the new aesthetics, are the consistent realization of a composition of straight lines in neutralising opposition and therefore a multitude of the duality of the unchangeable rectangular position.’309 The universal force reigns in all the fields of nature and Mondriaan stresses the fact that for him and ‘De Stijl’ artists it is more than a conception of reality; it is reality itself. These lines have the deep and convincing accent of a confession: ‘For the new man of today, the universe is not a vague idea, but living reality, which expresses itself plastically in a visual and audible way. Aware of the impossibility of expressing “the inner essence of existent things”, as this inner essence is pure abstraction, beyond every possibility of plastic representation, man perceives the universal in its appearance within the individual, as it only becomes apparent when tied to the individual. The false conviction of being able to express the essence of existing things by plastic representation has forced painting into symbolism and romanticism, into a passion for “description”. The realists are quite right: only by “reality” everything is revealed. It is therefore the appearance of reality that matters. Neo-plasticism demands a reality which expresses the objects in their totality and as a unity, as an equilibrated, neutralised duality. This excludes any appearance of palpable reality and any expression in which the individual prevails. The objects and things are brought into a universal means of plastic expression, which expresses things without having the pretension of representing them. This new reality is in painting, a composition of colours and non-colours, in music a composition of tones and definite sounds. In this way, subject-matter does not hamper the precision of composition. Composition becomes reality. The result, as a whole, is a complement to nature, which only supplies the exterior appearance.’310

The universal force is the subject of all neo-plasticist painting; and by this subject, all subject-matter falls into disuse. In the age of ‘De Stijl’ it is the task of art to express this universal force as objectively as possible and to demolish all obstacles which may stand in the way of objective expression: ‘Even the most perfect, the most general forms, the geometrical forms, have expression of their own. It is the task of art, the aim of all movement towards style, to abolish this distinct (individual) expression.’311 At the end of this pro-

cess of evolution, an objective expression of art's content, of the universal, will be attained: ‘In spite of all differences, all art, by the progressing culture of the spirit, will become more and more a definite manifestation of equilibrated relations; as equilibrated relations most purely express the universal, harmony and unity, which are the properties of the spirit (......). If we concentrate on equilibrated relations, we shall therefore be able to see unity in nature.’312

Mondriaan again and again stresses the fact that universal vision has become possible by the innovations of his period, but that it has not been sufficiently revealed to human society. The objective expression of universal reality has a long tradition but it only found its direct realization in the beginning of the 20th Century: ‘Objective vision - as far as possible - is the principal claim of all plastic art. If objective vision were possible, it would give us a true image of reaiity. For centuries our vision has been increasingly enlarged through the development of life, science and technology. Consequently, it has become possible to see more objectively. However, intuitively plastic art has always aimed at the universal expression of reality.’313

Even during the second world war Mondriaan stresses the necessity of universal vision and of its expression in painting and it is moving to hear how he clings to his vision of equilibrium and harmony amidst the chaos of the second war he experiences: ‘In our present mechanised world where the opposing factors of life are so strongly accentuated, that only combat can bring a solution, it is illogical to attempt to experience reality through fantastic feelings. At the moment there is no need for art to create a reality of imagination, based on appearances, events or traditions. Art should not follow the intuitions relative to our life in time but only those intuitions relating to true reality. Even in this chaotic moment we can near equilibrium through the realization of a true vision of reality. Modern life and culture helps us in this. Science and technical knowledge are abolishing the oppression of time.’314 In all his later essays he opposes this universal vision, which is only concerned with the fundamental essence of things, to another vision, which takes an active interest in accidental forms, events and appearances: ‘Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same, nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the aesthetic expression of oneself, in other words, of that which one thinks and experiences. The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively.’315 And at another time: ‘Subjective reality and relative objective reality: this is the contrast. Pure abstract art aims at creating the latter, figurative art the former.’316 And he goes so far as to consider every particular sensation an interference with universal vision and its harmony. ‘It must be obvious, that if one evokes in the spectator the sensation of say, the sunlight or moonlight, of joy or sadness, or any other determined sensation, one has not succeeded in establishing universal beauty, one is not purely abstract.’317 But, on the other hand, the universal vision embraces all these determined sensations, they are all included in its equilibrium. Therefore

Mondriaan can write: ‘So we see neo-plasticism not as a denial of full life: we see it as a reconciliation of the duality of mind and matter.’318

Indeed, the artists of ‘De Stijl’ oppose their vision of reality to the traditional one, as harmony is opposed to chaos. A passage from an article by Van Eesteren casts a clear light on this conception: ‘For those who might feel afraid of such abstract beauty, it may be remarked that our nature is capable of recognizing perfection but that it can only temporarily realize it. Thus chaos or the imperfect, amidst which we often feel amazingly well, has been saved. Nevertheless we all strive for perfection and only that which approaches perfection most closely is really beautiful.’319 Perfection is not to be found in nature and it is the task of the artist to reveal it by this universal vision. For Mondriaan, perfection is the ultimate aim as he knows that perfection cannot be found anywhere: ‘Though the universal is manifested by nature as the absolute, the absolute does only occur in nature hidden and veiled by natural colour and form. Though the universal manifests itself as the absolute, in line by straight line, in colour by the plane and the purity, and in relation by the equilibrated, it only reveals itself in nature as the tendency towards the absolute...’320

From this conception of a universal force, which can be manifested by art, Van Doesburg draws the conclusion, when formulating the aims of ‘De Stijl’: ‘Modern art is the direct mediator between man and the absolute. The modern artist abolishes the illusions of delusive relations. His aesthetic conscience only reacts on what is above the relative, on the universal. By the abolition of the illusion of delusive relations in the individual, in nature, he brings to the light the elementary plastic relations to which the world is subjected.’321 And he characterizes this tendency of modern art as the basis of a new conception of culture: ‘How should this unity of style become apparent, if the development of art in general had not forced the artist to employ the general forms and relations, which nature hides for Visual recognition behind a veil of caprice, as the building material for their art. As a building material it is a means, not an aim (......). The forms of the old culture decay, because the essence of a new culture is already intrinsically extant in humanity.’322

The universal force is thus the only content of ‘De Stijl's’ creations and its manifestation is the task of its artists. It is an exclusive task, as the universal force cannot be manifested directly by words, for words still are bound to carry a particular significance: ‘The aim of art - plastic art, music and especially painting - is to express the idea of creation according to its specific ways, by its special means. It therefore stands to reason that the idea of creation or the aesthetical moment cannot be absolutely described. (......) Rather, it is the task of the artist to materialise all the accents of the aesthetic idea. It is the essential value of the plastic work, that these accents become visible, audible and tangible, that is to say concretely apparent to us.’323

Therefore ‘De Stijl’ is not only ta be considered as a new trend in painting, as a formalist or aesthetic movement, but as the plastic manifestation of a new and yet very old conception of life: universalism. None of ‘De Stijl’ artists has stressed this fact as explicitly as Van Doesburg has done: ‘The painters of this

group, wrongly called “abstractionists” do not have a preference for a certain subject, knowing well enough that the painter has his subject within himself: plastic relations. For the true painter, the painter of relations, this fact contains his entire conception of the world. That is why he can do without any subject-matter (in the usual sense).’324

It would therefore be a mistake to consider ‘De Stijl’ exclusively from the point of view of art history, that is to say as a consistent development of the life of forms. Its content is as important as the form it has logically given it. ‘De Stijl’ thus aims at establishing and manifesting a new conception of the Cosmos. As so many movements in the early 20th Century - anthroposophy, theosophy, the revival of the rosicrucian movement - it attempted to exceed the limitations of time and space and to attain a notion of the structure of the universe. Every period makes its efforts to create an image of the Cosmos; to write or to paint its own cosmogony. It is not surprising that the 20th century in doing so, has found its symbols in the field of mathematical abstraction. ‘De Stijl's’ desire to manifest this cosmic force has been quite explicitly expressed: ‘Thus it interprets in a stronger way the cosmic rhythm, which flows through all things.’325 It is Mondriaan who thus formulates ‘De Stijl's’ desire and Van Doesburg finds another definition: Here representation (imitation) comes to an end; here begins the aesthetical transformation (rendering) into another reality that is deeper than the particular one: a cosmic reality.326 And in his essay of 1930 Mondriaan once more hints at the infinite expanding value of his subject: ‘That which art conveys and makes us see and feel by this purely plastic expression is difficult to determine. Byit, art expresses beauty, truth,goodness, grandeur and richness - the universe, man, nature.’327 The root of this sweeping statement may already be found in Mondriaan's article in the first number of De Stijl: ‘The truly modern artist consciously discerns this emotion of beauty as being cosmic, universal.’328 And in the same number of De Stijl Van der Leck, whose few articles are of a great importance and clarity, emphasizes the same conception: ‘This is the positive result of modern painting's destructive character: that it pursues the representation of visual reality with its tragic accents, to cosmic values of space, light and relations, in which all earthly plasticism, or “the case” is contained and presupposed.’329

Before this vast conception of the universe, the individual emotion has to be silenced. ‘De Stijl's’ universal conception is, more than anything else, the reason for its anti-individualistic tendency. Mondriaan in his later essays expresses this feeling: ‘It must be emphasized however, that art is expressed through universal emotion and is not an expression of individual emotion. It is an aesthetic expression of reality and of men realized by universal perception.’330 And elsewhere, but in a very similar way: ‘In order to express universal reality, traditional conception starts from individual limiting forms; modern conception starts from the perception of universal reality. The form becomes really a “meeans”.’331 The first quotation regards the individual properties of the subject, the second those of the object; in both cases, the individual aspect is considered as an interference with universal reality. Both forms of prevailing individualism

can be abolished by conscious perception of human situation in the universe: ‘Only conscious man can be a pure mirror of the universal; he is capable of being consciously one with the universal and thereby rising consciously above the individual.’332

Van Doesburg, in his defence of an essentially objective and serene art, goes even further; he rejects all forms of emotion, as being contradictory to universal equilibrium. ‘The spiritual, the completely abstract, expresses the human essence with precision, whereas sensitivity does not even reach the level of the intellectual qualities and must therefore be considered as belonging to a lower degree of human culture. Art should not move the heart. Every emotion, be it grief or joy, implies a rupture of harmony, of equilibrium between the subject (man) and the object (universe). The work of art should create a state of equilibrium between it and the universe; sentimental emotions do create exactly the opposite state. They are the consequence of a confused, inadequate conception of life, which is a result of our individualism, of our attachment to nature. All sentimental emotions should be reduced to pure proportions of space.’333

Similar ideas can be found with all of ‘De Stijl’ artists, as the universalist conception is an essential property of ‘De Stijl’. Oud has formulated this idea in the first volume of De Stijl: ‘Paradoxically speaking one could say that the struggle of the modern artist is a struggle against sentiment. The modern artist aims at the general, whereas sentiment (subjective vision) leads towards the particular. The subjective is the arbitrary, the unconscious, the relatively indefinite, that can be sublimated, by consciousness, to relative distinctness. To this end, the subjective is to be regulated and organised by consciousness, so that it may lead to style by its relative distinctness. This organising and establishing of distinctness is the aim of modern art.’334

By the preceding quotations, ‘De Stijl's’ aversion to emotion and individualism has become clear; it results from a universalist conception which has brought ‘De Stijl’ in opposition to all artistic tendencies which base themselves on the emotional approach to reality. ‘De Stijl's’ approach to reality is quite different; while it aims at an objective view of the universal force, it has to exclude all casual aspects of its object as well as every influence of the subject, which could interfere with the validity of the result. The aim of ‘De Stijl’ in its search for objective reality is truth; and as it aims at truth and not at sincerity, its method of approach has to be strictly objective, that is to say, as exact as the methods of science or logies. ‘De Stijl’, in its attempt to present an objective manifestation of the universal force, has done away with the traditional ‘licentia poetae’ and has established a method that should equal science and abstract philosophy in its objectivity. In the Manifeste of concrete art Van Doesburg in 1930 writes: ‘The predominance of individualism, as well as the predominance of the local genius, have always been a great obstacle to the birth of a universal art’335 and he continues: ‘The work of art is not created by the fingers nor by the nerves. Emotion, sentiment, sensibility, have never helped art on towards perfection. Only thought (intellect) creates, at a speed unquestionably higher

than that of light (......). The evolution of painting is nothing else but an intellectual research into truth by optical culture.’336

Thus painting is placed similar to logies or science, or to any other intellectuel research; for painting is concernd with objective laws, which have to be established and cannot be established but by means of reason. Van Doesburg had already hinted at this conception as early as in 1918, in the first volume of De Stijl: ‘The plastic laws of art are at the same time the fundamental laws of nature. Thus in pure plastic realization the essence (the universal harmony) and not the outward aspect of nature comes to complete expression in the artistic phenomenon.’337

Art and science follow parallel roads - this fact, hitherto not admitted, is stressed by ‘De Stijl’. Vantongerloo formulates it as follows: ‘Science and art have the same laws’338 and in his book Art and its future: ‘I do not therefore intend to say that art is nothing but the science of plastics. But it is inevitable to know this science in order to create a work of art. It is indeed impossible to manifest unity by a composition which is not subject to the plastic laws.’339 He then describes his research, which led him to the discovery of some of these laws: ‘The spectral analysis of the absolute shows us different successive and well characterised manifestations: sound, warmth, light or colours, chemical rays are, to different degrees, manifestations of the spectrum of the absolute.’340 And in his article in the first volume of De Stijl, he ventures on a similar analysis of reality: ‘The invisible in creation becomes visible for our spirit and the visible part of creation shows us the invisible. The visible and the invisible together constitute harmony or the laws of unity. They are based on these laws and therefore proclaim the glory of creation (......). These are the laws of nature and he who desires to create must obey them.’341

Vantongerloo considers the plastic laws equal to the laws of science; Van Doesburg and Mondriaan compare them to the laws of abstract philosophy, of logics. Van Doesburg: ‘As we try to understand these relations by reason, we try to contemplate these same relations by way of beauty, that is to say, by art.’342 And Mondriaan: ‘Pure plastic vision leads to the notion of construction, which is the foundation of everything existing.’343 And elsewhere: ‘Neo-plasticism has found the new reality in painting, by abstracting the outward superficial appearance and only expressing (crystalizing) the inward essence. It has established new reality by the composition of rectangular planes of colour and non-colour, which take the place of representation of limited forms. This universal means of expression makes it possible to give the exact expression of a great eternal lawfulness in relation to which the objects and all existence are only its indistinct embodiments. Neo-plasticism gives expression to this law-fulness, to this ‘unchangeable’ by an exact, distinct, i.e. a rectangular relation.’344 In his Bauhausbuch Mondriaan stresses the parallelism between philosophy and art: ‘Philosophy as well as art manifest the universal; the first as truth, the latter as beauty (......). Some progressive spirits entirely reject logies. Does that mean liberating art? Is not art the visible materialisation of logics?’345 And this trend of ideas is once more resumed in his later essays, when he writes: ‘Abstract art is

in opposition to the natural vision of nature. But it is in accordance with the plastic laws which are more or less veiled in the natural aspect. These laws determine the establishment of equilibrium, opposition, proportion, division, relationship, etc.’346

The artists of ‘De Stijl’ were deeply concerned with the universal force and with its laws. As they intended to establish and to materialize these laws, it is not surprising that they felt, above all, attracted by mathematics. Mathematics had already developed a method, permitting man to penetrate the laws of the universe, to understand the activity of cosmic motion. It is again Vantongerloo who emphasizes the parallelism between these two methods of approaching the universe: ‘Philosophy talks about a point, a line, a plane, a volume, about light, colour, in order to demonstrate the universe. The man of science uses these means in order to show the force of universe. The artist employs the same means, in order to show the splendour of the universe. Philosophy, science, and art strive for unity by means of evolution’.347 And more specifically about mathematics: ‘As mathematics are the clearest means by which to understand things objectively, art is the most proper way to feel things aesthetically.’348

But this notion is not only proposed by Vantongerloo; Mondriaan as well as the other artists of ‘De Stijl’ are in complete agreement: ‘By painting in itself the artist became aware that the appearance of the universal, cast in its mathematical form is the essence of all pure aesthetically plastic emotion of beauty’349 and in the same context: ‘It is precisely by the culture offormal expression that one has come to see that the abstract - the mathematical - manifests itself by and in all objects, though it does so indistinctly - in other words: modern painting by itself came to the distinct manifestation of the universal, which reveals itself from out of its veils, in and by the natural appearance of things.’350 Mathematical abstractions - the straight line, the right angle - thus appear in the works of ‘De Stijl’ not for their own sake, but as they are the most proper means of manifesting the universal force. This may well be the reason why the famous passage from Plato's Philebos (section 51 c), which is so often used in the defence of abstract art and which was certainly known to Van Doesburg, does not occur in De Stijl. On the other hand, two other quotations may be found which give a clear indication of the relation of the abstract means of expression to the universal content of ‘De Stijl's’ works: One is quoted from St. Augustine: ‘The number is all in art’,351 the other, even clearer, from Ecclesiastes: ‘Omnia in mesura et numere et pondere disposuisti.’352

The laws of the universe, their definite establishment, the knowledge of the abstract method of expression - all these factors lead the artists of ‘De Stijl’ to their goal of a definite manifestation of the universal rhythm. In their works, this rhythm is to appear as harmony, as equilibrium, as an adequate reflection of universal harmony. The manifestation of this harmony is the aim and the content of all ‘De Stijl's’ works. Van Doesburg has given a definition of this aim in his lecture, which has been reprinted in a German translation in his Bauhausbuch: ‘Though we are not capable of seizing perfect harmony, the absolute equilibrium of the universe, everything in the universe, every object is

nevertheless subordinate to the laws of this harmony, this equilibrium. It is the artist's task to trace this hidden harmony, this universal equilibrium, in all things and to express it, to show its lawfulness, etc. The (truly exact) work of art is a comparison of the universe, by artistic means.’353 This is one of the most revealing texts in De Stijl's early history, since it shows quite clearly the intimate relation of the artistic results with their universalist content. The universalist conception of ‘De Stijl’ - too often neglected by historians on behalf of purely aesthetic aims - is the more essential as it is the common property of all the artists of ‘De Stijl’ and their principal tenet.

To Vantongerloo, equilibrium is the aim of the universe: ‘Since its first movement, lost in the infinite, nature seeks its equilibrium’354 and therefore equilibrium or harmony, is to be the principal aim of art as well. Mondriaan emphasizes, in many of his articles, that harmony is the essence and the aim of art: ‘The essence of art is the plastic expression of - indescribable - life in all its fullness and richness. Its deepest consciousness has at all times been called “hamony”. Harmony has always been set forth as the first demand of art. It is achieved by the equilibrium of relations of line, colour and form.’355 In his trialogue he gives an example, as to the way in which harmony may be approached in nature: ‘Night - the stars in a clear sky above a wide sandy plain - (......). We see now that there is another reality than the petty human commotion. We see clearly its insignifiance; all seclusion has ceased to exist. We see unity and set against the instability of human ambitions we contemplate the unchangeable.’356 But nature and its relative harmony are only a point of departure for the artist's vision. Once he has acquired the sense of harmony, he can do without the motive: ‘But finally the artist no longer needs a definite natural fact in order to arrive at an image of beauty. As the universal becomes more active within him, because the individual has lost its dominating influence, he expresses equilibrated relations - perfect harmony, i.e. the aim of art - by his increased consciousness. He has lodged exterior reality in himself - therefore it is still in him, in order to move him.’357

By this evolution of aesthetic capacities ‘De Stijl's’ art comes to maturity; the artist has learnt the laws of harmony from nature, but once they are in his possession, he is free to dismiss the objects he has learnt from; he may now handle the laws by their own right. Thus abstraction is turned into free creation. ‘However, in new art the laws of harmony no longer realize themselves in the way of nature; they appear more independently than they are visually revealed in nature.’358 This evolution towards a contemplation of the universal laws, independently from nature, does not only regard the artist; the spectator is to be concerned with it as well: ‘Though the order in nature is not immediately apparent, at least not to the untrained eye, nevertheless it is this equilibrated order which causes the deepest emotion of harmony in the spectator(......). As the spectator has come to a definite consciousness of the cosmic harmony, he - that is, the artistic temperament - will long for the pure manifestation of harmony and for the pure manifestation of equilibrated relations.’359

Thus the universal force and harmony in art are two manifestations of the

same principle. Van Doesburg stresses this fact by writing: ‘Pure intuition, that is the clear vision or experience of the universal, which is beauty, must manifest itself directly.’360 Harmony is the aim and the content of ‘De Stijl's’ art: ‘Unity, harmony (not naturalistic, but aesthetical) is the subject of painting and of art in general.’361 It is Mondriaan, as we have seen before, who had claimed the development of art towards harmony as the principle of artistic evolution and who characterizes harmony as having always been the essential in art: ‘In all times the painter sees one and the same thing in and through all things: though his vision changes, it is always the one beauty which moves him in and by all things. This unique beauty is the opposition of what makes things to be things: it is the universal which appears to us by way of things. Consciously or unconsciously the painter tries to manifest this different side of what he visually sees - that is the reason why a work of art is so different from nature.’362

The universe, as we have seen, is ‘De Stijl's’ content, its subject. We have seen that abstract means have been claimed for the manifestation of this force, in a parallel to science, to logics and mathematics. The artists of ‘De Stijl’ formulate this claim quite explicitly: ‘To realize spirituality, a spiritual form is needed; thus an abstract form (......). Spirituality is universal, as it has no limit. Therefore a universal form is needed to obtain in unity an equilibrium with spirituality.’363 Next to Vantongerloo, Mondriaan develops a similar argument: ‘If indeed the appropriate elaboration of the expressive means and their use, that is composition, is the only pure expression of art, then the means of expression are to be in complete conformity with what they have to express. If they are to be the direct expression of the universal, then they cannot but be universal, that is to say, abstract.’364 By these means of expression, an appropriate, a real manifestation of the universal can be brought about. ‘Neo-plasticism might as well bear the name of abstract-real painting, as the abstract (as in mathematics, but without reaching the absolute) can be expressed by plastic reality’365 and elsewhere: ‘Let us rather call it real art, though this may bring confusion to the existing conception of “real”. For ancient art has only apparently been real, it rendered reality (the ego and the non-ego) not as it is, it only gave an illusion, or part of it. It did not manifest reality in its whole, not purely.’366 As abstract-real art, ‘De Stijl's’ artists' work stands between reality and the absolute and they lead the way towards the universal aim: ‘It is not as abstract as an intellectual abstraction and not as real as tangible reality,’367 for in ‘De Stijl's’ conception, harmony indeed lives in both these realms. But it can only be realized by abstraction, as Kok writes: ‘Essentially plastic beauty can only be expressed through the abstract, through the spiritual.’368

There is still one point in ‘De Stijl's’ conception of the universe, which needs further comment. As an early 20th century conception, ‘De Stijl's’ ideas on the universe were based on contemporary science; they therefore dealt with universal forces and not with bodies. ‘De Stijl's’ conception of harmony therefore means a dynamic equilibrium of forces, and not a stable balance of bodies. This conception becomes apparent in pictorial composition: harmony is at-

tained by ‘equilibrated relations’ of lines (which after all are only ‘directions’) and pure colours, that is by the relation of forces of colour and line and no more by the counterweight of forms and bodies. The equilibrium in ‘De Stijl's’ composition is essentially dynamic, or, in other words, dialectic. Several quotations may help to emphasize this side of the problem. Mondriaan hints at this question in the first annual of De Stijl: ‘Art - one of the revelations of truth - has always expressed the truth of opposition, but has only realized it creatively in this era. We have to acknowledge the division between old and new painting, as soon as we understand that natural painting only manifested this truth in a veiled and unbalanced way, whereas neo-plasticism manifests it definitely and in equilibrium.’369 Another instance: ‘At present, painting reaches what has always been its essence, but what had not been materialized: the plastic realisation of the unity of reciprocal action of oppositions.’370 Van Doesburg too, formulates his conception of dialectic polarity: ‘The struggle which is based in the structure of life is a struggle of two opposing forces. We could call them nature and spirit, the male and the female principle, negative and positive, static and dynamic, horizontal and vertical - they are the unchangeable forces, on which the contradiction of our life is based and which appear in instability. The abrogation of this struggle, the neutralisation of the extremes, the abolition of polarity is the content of life and the elementary subject of art.’371 Equilibrium is therefore the synthesis of opposing forces and it is the essential task of art to achieve this synthesis by plastic means: ‘For neither the new plastic means nor the pure relations are the essence of the plastic expression of art. The essential is the equilibrium that can be reached by these means.’372 Or, as Van Doesburg terms it: ‘We have to perceive the essence of plastic conception in the notion of neutralisation. Neutralisation of the one by the other.’373

This striving for dynamic dialectics was the reason for Van Doesburg's creation of elementarism, which resulted in the schism of ‘De Stijl’. Mondriaan wrote in 1924: ‘Symmetry marks things as being separated; therefore the expression of the universal for the sake of the universal excludes symmetry. Abstract-real expression is to re-model it into equilibrium, proceding by the constant opposing of position and measure, by the manifestation of relation, which changes one into the other.’374 Van Doesburg explains contra-composition, the more dynamic form of neo-plasticism as follows: ‘In contra-composition, equilibrium in the plane plays a less important part. Each plane is part of peripheric space and construction has to be more conceived as a phenomenon of tension than as one of relations in the plane.’375 But in his later work, especially in his American period, Mondriaan also has stressed the primary importance of dialectic dynamism: ‘Abstract art emphasizes the fact that in plastic art the expression of reality cannot be similar to that of palpable reality. The dynamic movement established by the opposition of forms and their colours constitutes the expression of universal reality’376; and even more clearly: ‘First and foremost there is the fundamental law of dynamic equilibrium, which is opposed to the static equilibrium necessitated by particular form. The im-

portant task then, of all art, is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one.’377

In the preceding pages, we have examined the content of ‘De Stijl's’ work. We have seen that it aimed at the manifestation of universal reality and that it adhered to the old scholastic axioma ‘universalia sunt realia’. In agreement with the universalist trend of philosophy and in opposition to nominalist tendencies, it denied the essential value of individual appearance. We have seen how ‘De Stijl’ adapted its means to the realization of its aim and how equilibrium in painting became an expression of universal harmony. We have tried to demonstrate that this equilibrium is of a different nature than this harmony had been in preceding trends of painting, that it is characterized by its dynamic dialectic properties. We have attempted to show, that ‘De Stijl's’ conception of universal reality was to result, in art, in the creation of universal beauty, or universal harmony. We may be permitted to quote once again frorn Mondriaan's writings: ‘In life, sometimes the spirit has been over-emphasized at the expense of the body, sometimes one has been preoccupied with the body and neglected the spirit. Similarly in art content and form have alternately been over-emphasized or neglected because their inseparable unity was not fully realized. To create this unity in art, balance of one and the other must be created. It is an achievement of our time to have approached towards such balance in a field in which disequilibrium still reigns. Disequilibrium means conflict, disorder. Conflict is also part of life and of art, but it is not the whole of life or universal beauty. Real life is the mutual interaction of two oppositions of the same value, but different aspect and nature. Its plastic expression is universal beauty.’378

In a later essay Mondriaan emphasizes the importance of this realization of equilibrium for humanity: The clarification of equilibrium through plastic art is of great importance for humanity. It reveals that although human life in time is doomed to disequilibrium, notwithstanding this it is based on equilibrium. It demonstrates that equilibrium can become more and more living in us. Reality only appears to us tragical because of the disequilibrium and confusion of its appearances.379

Here, the relation of ‘De Stijl's’ aesthetic ambitions with the moral and social structure of humanity is touched upon. As we have seen that ‘De Stijl's’ aesthetical innovations are in intimate relation to its conception of the world and of life, this problem should be examined in the following pages. It is slightly linked up with ‘De Stijl's’ conception of accidental and universal reality, with its ambition to reduce everything to the absolute. And when reading the sentences which Mondriaan puts into the mouth of his opponent in the trialogue, we already hold the key of this problem: ‘The beauty of nature does not satisfy me entirely - I cannot enjoy a beautiful summer evening, for instance. Perhaps then I feel, in a manner of speaking, how everything ought to be, while at the same time I am aware of my own impotence to make it so in my life.’380 ‘De Stijl's’ striving for perfection, for equilibrium and order is not limited to art; on the contrary, it aims at life as a whole.

Art and life - The Utopian prospect

The manifestation of the universal force, as we have seen in the preceding pages, was ‘De Stijl's’ content. The realization of equilibrium, a consequence of the former, was the aim. We have seen that to the artists of ‘De Stijl’ a work of art was a ‘comparison of the universe’, that in a work of art the forces and Iaws of the universe should be revealed and made visible to the beholder. These aspects of ‘De Stijl's’ art have already pointed to the fact that ‘De Stijl's’ art exceeded the narrow boundaries of a ‘l'art pour l'art’ conception, that truly ‘De Stijl's’ work was to fulfill a mission towards humanity and towards life. Not in the traditional sense though, that art should be tied to a part of human activity or to a stratum of human society in order to propagate its aims: ‘De Stijl’ refused to be the ‘ancilla’ of any one or anything at all, with as the only exception, The universal force. To serve this very essence of life and universe, ‘De Stijl’ was not only willing but it considered itself well-prepared.

It is a fact of great importance, that ‘De Stijl’ - very much the offspring of ‘l'art pour l'art’ - had engaged itself with the problem of the relationship of art and life and that it did no longer consider art as a state of complete freedom, endowed with privileges, but without any responsibility. ‘De Stijl’ however, approached the question of art's relation to life from a different point of view than the usual one. Its starting point, in this matter as well as in others, is its conception of universal unity, of art essential homogeneity of art, life and the universe: ‘(Abstract-real art) produces a process of life, which is reflected in artistic expression. In general, man considers a work of art too much as an article of luxury, as something pleasant, even as a decoration, as something besides life. But art and life are one: art and life are both expressions of truth.’381

From this point of view a subordination of art under part of life's activities is impossible and art, in its turn, is concerned with the manifestation of life as a whole. Consequently, the works of ‘De Stij’ appeal to man as a whole and not only to his religious or mythological or historical interest: the aesthetic interest which they evoke, embraces all these particular aspects of human interest. ‘The evolution of the individual continues towards its “completion”. In “complete man” the individual features are resolved in the individual, he is capable of seeing and hearing universally. The consciousness he has attained will alvvays demand distinction. Thus the need for a distinct manifestation of the universal comes into existence.’382 But the artists of ‘De Stijl’ are well aware that man is still far from being the ‘complete man’, that universal perception is still a postulats ideal and not yet a fact: ‘Only when the new spirit of time appears more generally, neo-plasticism will become a generally felt need. Only then the factors are all present for it to cuIminate.’383 But in the meantime ‘De Stijl's’ conception of art cannot betray its source, it remains faithful to its universal inspiration, not-withstanding the fact that there will be little resonance for the striving and its results: ‘When the new consciousness of life reaches distinctness in art in a time in which this consciousness of life is still slumbering in the masses, and there-

fore cannot become an attitude of life - then artistic expression is ahead of time and stands alone, at least it seems to do so. It does not adapt itseif to life. On the contrary.’384 This divergence between the actual conditions of life and ‘De Stijl's’ uncompromising ambition towards universal vision accounts for ‘De Stijl's’ innovating force in regard to its surroundings - it accounts as well for the Utopian tendency which will be reviewed in the following pages.

Mondriaan, who revered the universal with an almost religious fervour is - by this fact - the champion of the Utopian tendency of ‘De Stijl's’ ambitions towards life. His exclusive concentration on the universal left but little room for a direct engagement in his actual surroundings. The marvelous perfectionism, which made him devote months on the ultimate completion of his paintings, did not encourage him to spend his energy on superficial improvements of life in fields, in which he felt a somewhat timid stranger. But though he did not concern himself with incidental improvements, he devoted much of his thought and his energy to the solution of the problem which was essential to him: the future development of art and life towards the aim, that universal vision had revealed to him.

This aim was universal harmony; to be realized in art, but in life as well. In art and in life, it means the reign of serene, unchangeable equilibrium. A state of mind which excludes sorrow as well as enthousiasm, which is everlasting certainty. It is indeed the undisturbed ecstasy of the ‘unio mystica’ and Mondriaan finds words of a religious glow to describe it: ‘As the immovable, equilibrium stands above all grief and all happiness. By our immovable, we resolve with all things. The changeable disturbs our equilibrium, it divides and separates us from everything that is different from ourselves. From this equilibrium, from the unconscious and immovable, art arises.’385 And Van Doesburg describes the same state of mind: ‘The aesthetical moment is the instant, when we are - by art - in complete balance with ourselves and the world; the instant when opposing sentiments of desire and annoyance are neutralized’386 and Mondriaan, when writingon colour: ‘...it is of principal importance that colour is free of the individual and of individual sensations, but that it only expresses the peaceful emotions of the universal.’387

For Mondriaan, the experience of equilibrium, of harmony, is essential: only by this emotion can man touch this perfection. ‘In vital reality of abstraction, new man has surpassed the feelings of desire, of joy, of ravishment, of grief and of horror. In the constant emotion of beauty these feelings are purified and deepened. He attains a much deeper vision of sensible reality.’388 Consequently, the establishment of equilibrium, which has been realized in art, should dominate the whole of human society. ‘...when all attention is concentrated upon the universal, the separate, the individual will disappear in artistic expression, as painting has shown. When the individual does no longer stand in the way, the universal can manifest itself purely. Only then the universal consciousness (intuition) - the origin of all art - can express itself and a pure artistic expression arise. But it does not rise before its time. The consciousness of time determines the artistic expression; the artistic expression reflects the consciousness of time.

Only the artistic expression which expresses today's - the coming - consciousness of time, is indeed really alive.’389

It is indeed a feature typical for ‘De Stijl’, that Mondriaan identifies today's consciousness of time with the future attitude towards life. It is a sign of his Utopian vision which concentrates on a future and better life, a life that has already attamed equilibrium.

But his optimistic belief already notes Symptoms of improvement in actual society. Indeed the development of 20th century life, the inventions of science and technique, are the base from which Mondriaan's Utopian vision rises; he sees progress in modern society and he only continues the line of progress towards an aim of perfection: ‘But man, who develops in the direction of the balance of his duality, will create equivalent relations and therefore, equilibrium in an increasing degree. Social and economic life already today show his striving for exact balance. Material life will not always be threatened and doomed to tragedy, nor will our spiritual life beconstantly suppressed by the domination of material life.’390

Consequently, the realization of universal equilibrium amounts to the same thing as the abolition of the tragic and tragedy, by necessity, springs from natural reality: ‘if we approach nature by natural, visual observation, a tragic vision is inevitable. Therefore a deeper vision is needed. Escape from tragic emotion is only for man, who has learned - by the development of pure plastic vision - to transpose the individual into the universal.’391

Mondriaan has experienced this tragic vision and the discussions about tragedy in his dialogue are drawn from his own experience which he describes as follows: ‘I recognised that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites. I felt that the tragic is created by unequivalence. I saw the tragic in a wide horizon or a high cathedral.’392 The same trend of thought is expressed in a passage of his trialogue: ‘X. The capricious is beautiful. Z. Beautiful, but tragic. When you keep following nature, you will only be able to abolish the tragic in your art to a small extent. Natural painting malces us feel the harmony which surpasses the tragic, but it does not express it distinctly, as it does not manifest equilibrated relations only. Natural appearance, form, natural colour, natural rhythm and even in most cases natural proportion, they all cannot but manifest tragedy. Y. When I compare this landscape with the preceding, where these capricious groups of trees were not visible, I do feel indeed, that capricious natural form does not express the great calm, about which you have been talking.’393 Another passage from the same trialogue deals with the abolition of the tragic: ‘Subjectively it is the domination of the natural within ourselves, objectively the domination of the natural without ourselves, that causes the tragic. - And this is only to be abolished by the growth of our entire being, of our interior and exterior, our nature and our spirit, by the way of speaking? - To abolish... we can reach even now a more equilibrated relationship of the one and the other, but it takes a very distant future to abolish the tragic within us, as well as the tragic governing our surroundings, entirely.’394 In another article he says quite clearly: ‘Only the pure appearance of the

elements (in equilibrated relations) can diminish tragedy in life and in art.’395

Neo-plasticism has indeed realized equilibrium and has abolished the tragic aspects in art. And Mondriaan defends it by this fact: ‘As the abolition of the tragic is the aim of life, it is illogical to oppose neo-pIasticism.’396 And Kok expresses the same idea: ‘The natural - beauty, ugliness - is always ried up with the tragic. But art is the spirit, it is emotion itself. It has nothing to do with the tragic. It is emotion by the contemplation of the eternal, the free, the universal, the spiritual.’397 Though neo-plasticism has surpassed the domination of tragedy, its power and importance have not yet been sufficiently realized: In general one is not sufficiently aware that disequilibrium is a curse to humanity and people diligently continue to cultivate the feeling of the tragic.397a But tragedy is deeply rooted in our human behaviour: ‘The relative, the changeable creates in us the desire for the absolute, the immovable (......). As this is unattainable, we return to the relative and we attempt to make it permanent - impossible. Therefore, the immovable is once more sought, even by passing over the relative. Thus it has been in the course of centuries. The desire for the extreme causes the tragic in life (expressed in art by lyricism).’398

Indeed, tragedy is considered as a moving force, but universal vision has given man the means to bring its reign to an end: ‘But we can escape the tragical oppression through a clear vision of true reality, which exists, but which is veiled. If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision.’399 It has been the aim of ‘De Stijl’ to create this clear vision of universal reality and it can therefore be a help in abolishing the tragic: ‘Art, being abstract and in opposition to the natural and concrete, can precede the graduai disappearance of the tragic. The more the tragic disappears, the more art gains in purity.’400 The abolition of the tragic, by the creation of universal equilibrium, has been the achievement of ‘De Stijl’; in painting at least, the domination of the tragic has been reduced to terms: ‘Some time ago someone said: All art poses a question to fate, out of the desire for a better knowledge of itself; art is the last word of the human conscience. This is typicai for the old spirit. The new spirit on the contrary, is characterized by certainty, it does not question, it offers a solution. Human consciousness clearly rejects the unconscious, and expresses itself in art in such a way that - by creating equilibrium - it excludes every question. The domination of the tragic has ceased. Ancient painting has been an art of “the soul”, therefore of the tragic; new painting is an art of the spirit, and therefore free from tragic domination.’401 Tragedy and the equilibrium therefore exclude one another. The art of ‘De Stijl’ has been directed towards equilibrium - and it has succeeded in realizing it. By this fact, painting gains its great importance for life, for society; here the origin can be found for ‘DeStijl's ’ - and mainly for Mondriaan's - Utopian conception: ‘Tragedy is only abolished by the creation of (final) unity; in external life this is far less possible than in abstract life. In art the unity of the one and the other can be realized abstractly: therefore art is ahead of life.’402

By these lines - and in others which will be quoted - the moral and social significance of ‘De Stijl's’ aim is expressed: painting, by creating equilibrium,

was the first to realize the laws of universal structure; it has given a demonstration of equilibrated relations and it should therefore be capable to serve as a paradigm for all the other sectors of human life which have not yet succeeded in realizing perfect balance. Owing to a lack of obstacles, it had been possible for painting to realize equilibrium: the other fields of human activity should profit from this advanced manifestation. ‘Thus painting could realize in artistic expression what the new consciousness of time is still busy realizing in external life.’403

A new task has been created for art and especially for painting - and this fact is one of the most important achievements of ‘De Stijl’: to art the task was allotted to be society's vanguard in a hitherto undiscovered field. Never before in art history has the name of ‘avant-garde’ for an artistic movement been so full of meaning as for ‘De Stijl’. It has been ‘De Stijl's’ intention to be a vanguard not only of the art of painting, but of human society as a whole. Mondriaan, in his study Art and Life of 1931, which is chiefly concerned with this problem, writes as follows: To our benefit, art has abstracted the rhythm of the contrasting oppositions of the straight line from the particular forms. For, being a universal representation of these forms, art makes us conceive that a more or less natural reality, after its having been transformed into a more universal aspect, still remains ‘reality’.404 By leading man towards a new vision of the world, neo-plasticism prepares a new society, a new and equilibrated order which is to be a reflection of the cosmic order and its laws: ‘Pure plastic vision must build a new society, as it has built a new expression in art; a society of equivalent duality of mind and matter, a society of equilibrated relations.’405 This conception of the constructive force of the universal idea leads to the Utopian imagination and the tenets of the future which Mondriaan has framed. Speculative as these Utopian conceptions may be, they are nevertheless of a great importance, as they do indeed indicate the way for the aesthetic development of humanity. It should not be forgotten that in the 18th and 19th century Utopian conceptions prepared the way for actual human progress and that, in the course of history many a Utopian act of faith has become reality. When Mondriaan writes on the liberation of man from the oppression of the subjective, he adds: ‘This fact, proved to us by art, is of the utmost importance to life, because it tallies exactly with the basis of progress and indicates the way of it.’406 On the other hand, it is symptomatic for the early 20th century - and perhaps even more for the Dutchmentality, that ‘De Stijl's’ or rather Mondriaan's Utopia is based on aesthetic thought, whereas all the preceding Utopian conceptions were built on moral, social or political principles: the flight from realities - which have proved disappointing - into the world of art is a symptomatic feature of the early century. But be that as it may, art has acquired a new function, and the artist has become again the seer, the path-finder for human society.

But it is not only Mondriaan, who sets this task for art: Van Doesburg too expresses this thought: ‘Art is not a sham representation of nature. Nature is a question, art is the answer. The natural form has not yet got as far as the artistic

form. The artistic form has surpassed natural form. Art breeds another world.’407 And even clearer, he considers art as a preconception of future reality: ‘The plastic idea precedes the appearance and as this becomes apparent by itself at present, the essence of new culture becomes evident. In plastic art the new conception of culture has reached the state of its appearance. All other functions of human consciousness will only be able to develop if they keep the new plastic art in mind.’408 And Huszar, as well, writes in De Stijl: ‘We, the artists, can prepare equilibrium for society.’409

But it is indeed Mondriaan, who voices this Utopian creed and the consequent task of art, most clearly of all: ‘Art is ahead of life; that which we are able to detect in present life is only the preludium to New Life. Therefore, let us observe the course of human culture in the free domain of art, to wit: its progressing towards the real liberation of any forms and the equivalence of their mutual relationship - towards a life of true equilibrium.’410 Or, in the same context: ‘It is only in man integrally human, i.e. in man on the pinnacle of human culture, that this balanced rhythm will be realized in the material and immaterial domain. Because of its being freer than life, art has already been able to manifest it.’411

Mondriaan's Utopian ideas are however, not vague at all but quite positive and precise: he knows what he is talking about. And he considers abstract life as a reality, which can already be found in the life of his own time. Abstract art is its consequence - but its means of realization as well: ‘As abstract-real painting is the expression of abstract-real life, this life can reciprocally maintain itself by leaning on the truths which have been realized in this trend of painting.’412 And more specifically: ‘The culture of life has been anything but finished. In a very few works of art however, plastic art's culture has come to a terminus. This is the reason why this art is able to enlighten us.’413

There is, in his booklet Art and Life an impassioned passage which illustrated quite positively Mondriaan's vision on art's task. By these lines, it becomes clear that for him - and for ‘De Stijl’ as a whole - art is indeed a ‘comparison of the universe’, a comparison which is to be realized by man in the sense of the biblical parable: ‘In order to get conscious of the necessity of another social organisation, we can hardly ever follow assiduously enough that which the culture of art has shown to us. Let us repeat in this connection that the essential content of art consists in the annihilation of the individual oppression by form as well as in the creation of the rhythm of universal expression (......). The rectangular planes of different dimensions and different colours demonstrate satisfactorily that internationalism involves no chaos at all, in which monotony is going to be the dominant feature, but that it will lead us up to a unity, that is well-ordered and sharply divided. There are even very pronounced limits in neo-plasticism. But these limits are not really closed: the straight lines in their rectangular opposition intersect constantly, in order that their rhythm may continue in the whole of the work. Equally, in the future international order, the various countries because of their being mutually equivalent, will then own their proper and equivalent values. There will be just frontiers, exactly in pro-

portion to the value of each country in relation to the general federation. These frontiers will be clearly limited but not “closed”: no customs, no passports.’414

But art does not only forecast life's development; it indicates also the line of conduct for humanity and for every individual: ‘To see reality clearly as it is and not the way we like to conceive it, that is what New Art teaches us. On its marvellous progress as to science and technics, life gradually advances towards the acquisition of this capacity. But equally New Art has revealed to us - and this is of the utmost importance - that we ought to abstain from passing for anything we are not. It has disclosed that frankness and sincerity are the primordial conditions of New Life.’415 These are the moral implications of neo-plasticism, leading up to as well as towards ‘New Life’.

‘New Life’ - the realization of universal equilibrium in human society - is the ultimate aim and painting acts as a fore-runner of ‘New Life’ - a strange but not unusual Johannean conception. ‘Art is now partly in decay; but its end would at present be premature (......). Great truths, which have been uttered, are no more realized in their art. It is as if people were afraid of their own consistency. The new is proved to be not yet ripe in those who have promoted it. However, the great beginning has been made. By this beginning, the great consistency has been able to manifest itself. From this new motion, neo-plasticism has proceded: a totally different art, a new plasticity. As purified art it shows clearly the laws generally valid, on which new reality is to be built.’416 And another passage from one of his later essays: ‘If we conceive of truly human life as continuous enjoyment in discovering and creating concrete equilibrium, then this equilibrium becomes essential to us. All abstract expression in life, like science, philosophy and all abstract creations like art, may be regarded as only so many means to attain equilibrium. “Art” is only a “substitute” as long as the beauty of life is still deficient. It will disappear in proportion as life gains equilibrium. Today art is still of the greatest importance because it demonstrates practically in a direct way, liberated of individual conceptions, the law of equilibrium.’417 And the idea of art as a substitute is emphasized already in an article in De Stijl: ‘During centuries art has been a substitute, which reconciled human nature with outward life. “Represented” beauty kept up the belief in “real” beauty. It causes - though on a limited scale and in a limited way - the contemplative vision of beauty. Where “faith” demands a superhuman abstraction for its life in harmony, where science is able to show harmony by reason, art makes us experience harmony by our entire human nature. Thus it can imbue our nature with beauty, till beauty has become at one with us. Then we shall realize beauty in everything: our external surroundings will reach equivalent relations with our human essence.’418 And in his last essays, when describing this ultimate phase of art, he sounds an apocalyptic note: ‘Culture produces relative consciousness of the changeable expression of reality. When this consciousness is attained, a revolt takes place: the beginning of that deliverance from the expression of reality. Destruction of its own limitations follows. The culture of the intuitive faculties has conquered. A clearer perception of constant reality

is possible. A new realism appears. All this is manifested in the course of the culture of plastic art. We see the culture of the form ending in a struggle for the deliverance from the limitations of form.’419

Mondriaan has voiced ‘De Stijl's’ notion of art as a moving force for the future development of society. This motion implies as we have seen, the liberty of art from all social or political ties in ‘De Stijl's’ own period. Mondriaan, in his messianic ecstasy, did not pay much attention to this problem of his own days, Van Doesburg, however, advocates an art that is not dominated by social features, but which sets its seal on the social development of humanity: ‘Art, as we postulate it is neither proletarian not bourgeois. It develops forces which are strong enough to influence the whole of culture, instead of being influenced by social relations.’420 And his utopian notion - though projected in his own time, finds a strong and convincing accent with Van Doesburg: There is no art created by proletarians, as the proletarian, when he has created art, ceases to be a proletarian and becomes an artist. The artist is neither a proletarian nor a bourgeois and what he creates belongs neither to the proletariat nor to the bourgeoisie. It belongs to everyone. Art is a spiritual activity in man, with the aim to deliver him from the chaos of life, from tragedy. Art is free in the application of its means, but bound by its own laws and by nothing but its laws. As soon as a work is a work of art, it exceeds by far the class difference between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.421 The law of universal unity, which has been manifested by art, is going to abolish the differences of the classes - there is a new proof of ‘De Stijl's’ universal vision and its utopian consequences. The whole trend of thought is summed up in a passage from one of Mondriaan's essays: ‘Even in spite of us, we participate in the grand and perfect composition of life, which - if only we are keen in observing it - establishes itself according to the development of art.’422

This conception of life leads to a utopian vision of the future, to a projection of all solutions of moral and social problems into a utopian future. For it has to be emphasized that Mondriaan was well aware of these problems, and that he - a delicate and susceptible character with a great and untrammelled sensibility, - suffered deeply from them. There is no better proof than a passage from his booklet Art and Life: ‘One of the worst vices of man is the exploitation of his fellow-men. (......) In our to-day's society the exploitation of others is practised in so cunning a way, that this vileness almost manages to remain unpunished. (...) The exploitation of others is indeed a theft. (...) Nothing but life itself will do away with the abuse. The progress of civilization - though often effecting it - will render it impossible in the end. Warranting man an independent existence in the material as well as in the immaterial domain of life is the most urgent task, to which we have thus to apply ourselves first of all. New Life will never liberate man but for his continuous cultivating of the individual and its mutual relations.’423 New Life, that is the messianic solution to these problems and New Life is already heralded by neoplasticism. In this context one fact, which has been commonly disregarded, cannot be sufficiently emphasized: the dedication of his, Mondriaan's pamphlet of 1920: ‘Le Neoplasticisme’, ‘aux

hommes futurs’.424 Additional emphasis is given to these words by a passage from the same pamphlet: ‘For let us not forget that we are at a turning point of culture, at the end of the old; the separation is absolute and definite.’425 And in an article, dating from 1927, we find a phrase of meaning that we had already come across before: ‘our time, that is to say, future, claims pure equilibrium and that is not possible except in one way.’426 Indeed Mondriaan is so absorbed in his vision of perfect reality, that he does no longer consider it as distant or only promised: he already lives in the New Era. His universal vision has become a reality for him. ‘For new man, the universal is not a vague idea, but a living reality, which manifests itself visibly and audibly.’427

For new man and his achievements Mondriaan finds words of enthusiasm and deep confidence: he will embody the perfection of progress: ‘Yes, this interior life will create its exterior manifestation; abstract-real life will realize itself in external life and, consequently, in all external appearance. Then the new man will find his exteriorisation and thereby complete his happiness (......). An image of beauty, more freed from the material, must re-create material society.’428 Never has an aesthetical, a universalist conception gone so far as to create a new image of society and an image of new man. Yet, this image exists quite positively: ‘At present production by the worker is mass-production and it needs to be so. This production is led by intellectuals or artists; from these a new art may be expected. The worker, by way of speaking, is too much of a machine and like bourgeoisie or aristocracy, too much concerned with material things only. It is the new man, the result of the worker, the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, but entirely different from these, out of whom neoplasticism is to materialize and for whom it is intended. Only he will be able to realize the new spirit of the times in the sense of beauty as well, in society and in plastic expression.’429 And elsewhere in De Stijl: ‘The new man needs indeed to be quite different from the man of the past. “New Man” performs all material business but he performs it by necessity. He performs it just as well, but he takes a different attitude towards it.’430

Man of to-day is to build the New Life. And the New Life is to be as different from the old one, as the new man from his predecessor. ‘Art demonstrates that new life is not in the least the simple creation of new forms and new relations in the individual, social, political and economic range, - though they will be so much the more for all that - but too that the status of purification serves only to make them more and more susceptible to the constitution of an entirely new organization abolishing by its creating of equivalent relation, all those particular concerns detrimental to others.’431 In this new organization the mutual relations will be established according to universal equilibrium, as neo-plasticism has already manifested it: ‘New Art grants an independent existence to the line and the colour in the sense of their being neither oppressed nor disfigured by the particular form, but shaping their own limitations by themselves and this in the exactest appropriation to their proper nature. Thus society will equally grant an independent existence, homogenous to its proper character to every individual in the future New Life.’432 ‘New Life’ indeed bears all the hall-marks

of utopia; the more so as it is built up according to one leading principle: universal harmony, as manifested by neoplasticism. ‘Mankind is going to see the day that the individual will be capable of governing himself. This too has been proved by New Art. (...) A general concentration upon the proper and mutual relationships will solve all social difficulties. Those among mankind who have been most rightly disgusted at the misery of man's concrete life, have never stopped taking refuge in the action of creating or of contemplating the mutual relations of the planes, the lines and the colours, which because of their neutralizing the descriptive properties of the forms, establish beauty independently from concrete life. (...) If these representations in art are able to touch mankind to so extreme a degree, why are they so utterly uncared for in life? Fugitive interests, though being yet useful to human evolution for a small space of time, are the cause of this neglect - fugitive interests, inherent in concrete life, which we are only too glad not to meet in art.’433. Life therefore, should develop towards a similar disinterestedness, towards an equal degree of abstraction as in neoplastic art. ‘In order to reach unity, life will have to grow from external into abstract - real life. At present this life forms a period of transition between the old and the new time. Abstract real life is no longer an exclusively natural life and still it is not unnatural either. Nor is it an exclusively spiritual life and yet the spiritual is its content.’434

Art is to be the guide towards this better and more illumined era; art, having first discerned and then materialized the laws of universal equilibrium, is to lead the way. It is important indeed, that the universal - and utopian - conception of life and the world has re-integrated art into a general pattern of human activity. It has indeed re-assigned to art a task, which leads further than the creation of a work of art, - though it implies this creation. It is one of the important achievements of ‘De Stijl’ to have revised - by its universal conception of human existence - the orientation of art: ‘Full comprehension of the equivalence of the contrasting oppositions of the rhythm of art is able to support us in our working towards the edification of a truly human life. For it is exactly this establishing of the equilibrium by means of the equivalence of the two fundamental oppositions, that which man takes the least trouble of. Yet it is this equivalence which creates individual freedom, delivers us from suffering and liberates us from the limiting material and immaterial forms.’435

Art is to lead the way, but it can do even more: it can create a material environment for man which, by its harmony, inspires him continually to recognize it as such. ‘The application of these laws (of denaturalisation) will abolish the tragic outlook of the home, the street and the city. Joy, moral and physical joy, the joy of health will spread by the oppositions of relation, of measure and colour, of matter and of space, which are to be emphasized by the relations of position. With a little goodwill it will not be so impossible to create an earthly paradise.’436

Art is to lead the way towards an earthly paradise by manifesting the laws according to which it is going to be built and by confronting man with its works which already announce the future beauty. But then, once this task is accom-

plished, there will be no more room for art in human society. Mondriaan's aesthetic utopia implies the end of art: ‘Art will remain a manifestation and a means until this equilibrium will be (relatively) attained. It will then have done its work and harmony will realize itself in exterior surroundings as well as in exterior life. The domination of the tragical in life will have come to an end.’437 Art is to end: its moral and social task accomplished in the future, perfect era, the ‘new life’ in which there is no need for a mediator between universal harmony and man. There, harmony will appear unveiled and art would run a risk of diverting the attention from perfection, i.e. universal beauty. Art, in the society of the future has no reason to be used as a refuge, as it is in the present day: ‘Environment as well as life show their own inferiority by their defective state and barren necessity. Art therefore, is the refuge. In art people try to find beauty and harmony and not, or vainly so, in life or in their surroundings. Thus beauty and harmony have become “ideals”, unattainable ones, they have been isolated from life and surroundings by becoming “art” (......). Thus attention has been diverted from real life and from true beauty’.438 This phase of the evolution of art, in which art is a refuge and a mere substitute for beauty, universal beauty to come, has been termed by Mondriaan the age of ‘Lyricism’. Lyricism only bars the way to universal beauty, as it is still imbued with tragic emotions; neoplasticism has destroyed its domination. ‘Neoplasticism only has replaced lyricism by pure plastic expression. Art can be almost “super-human” and universal by the profound, but varying rhythm of relations only, by an almost mathematical means of expression. And this is possible, even now, for in our time, art is ahead of life.’439

But when life proceeds still further, and approaches the realization of universal harmony, art will become superfluous. This period marks the beginning of the new era: ‘By the realization of aesthetics in matter, an attitude towards life will result, which is to abolish the division between the Beyond and reality. This manifestation of life as a totality, sponsors the beginning of a new culture.’440 It is Van Doesburg who wrote these lines and Vantongerloo shares his views on the future, though with a different accent: ‘The new era will perhaps, give art to society. And society is everybody. It is anonymous, it has no owner. It has only workers and owners of brains. Society will bring forth a work of pleasure, that will be a source of intelligence instead of dullness. This new era will permit us to carry on our own evolution, while our present civilisation lead us into a blind alley.’441 And elsewhere: ‘But the time will come, the pure plastic manifestation of art will lead us towards a pure and universal aesthetic solution. (...) Everything progresses, everything develops and the time is not far off, when art and science will be a homogenous union.’442 In Vantongerloo's terms, this comes down to practically the same that Mondriaan had predicted: the end of art.

Neoplasticism is the first announcement of this new era; its appearance marks the turning point. ‘Neoplasticism is ahead of time, the plastic expression of a turning point in human evolution, of the era of equivalence of the one and the other. When this era will have come about, art will pass into real life’.443 And

elsewhere: ‘When art transforms itself into real life. then only the end of our present-day's art is come. But it will take a long time, before even neoplasticism to its whole extent has been digested by humanity - this art implies the end of art but actually it is a beginning.’444 Art, in the future development of culture, will thus be relieved by life, in regard to the realization of harmony: ‘As long as the individual dominates the consciousness of time, art remains tied to everyday life, and is in the main, an expression of this life. But once the universal dominates life, it will be so imbued with the universal, that art - so unreal in comparison with this life, - will fall into disuse, a new life will take its place, which indeed realizes the universal.’445

The full significance of Mondriaan's Utopian vision, of the end of art is made clear from an important passage from the third volume of De Stijl: ‘One day the time will come, when we shall be able to do without all the arts, as we know them now; beauty will then have ripened into palpable reality. Humanity will not lose much by missing art.’446 And Van Doesburg voices the same idea when he writes: ‘There will be no longer any need, in a collective culture, for this licentiousness of sentiment. On a higher level of culture, free painting and sculpture will simply cease to exist.’447 And in a letter to Anthony Kok, (dated February 11th, 1915, well before the foundation of ‘De Stijl’) he writes: ‘Van Domselaer said that later there would be no need of art; all images and all sounds will be superfluous. There are moments when I already live in this “later”. Oh, that these days may come soon!’448

The ultimate aim of this evolution, therefore, is the superfluity of art, its disappearance. For the time being, neoplasticism is to continue on the road towards the realization of harmony; demonstrating the laws of universal balance, creating an outward reality, which confirms these laws and announces a brighter future. In his dialogue, Mondriaan deals with this immediate future, this period of transition as follows: ‘A.: You do then leave some room for natural painting, as well as for melody in music. But do you think that the future will outgrow these expressions? B.: As one begins to experience harmony more purely, the relations of colours and sound will be manifested more purely too, this seems only logical to me. A.: Neoplasticism, therefore, is the end of painting? B.: In so far as it is impossible to manifest equilibrated relations even more purely in art. Neoplasticism has only been born lately, it still has to culminate.’449 Neoplasticism however, marks a new period, the beginning of development towards this pre-established future... ‘Ancient art is the art of infants, neoplasticism is the art of adults.’450

But the more culture develops, the less neoplasticism will be limited to painting; painting has only discovered the possibility of plastically realizing universal equilibrium, the other branches of the arts will have to realize this in their turn, in order to create a harmonious environment for man. ‘At present, neoplasticism manifests in painting, what will one day surround us in the form of architecture and sculpture.’451 And with regard to architecture: ‘As long as there is no completely new architecture, painting has to do what architecture - as it appears now - has been too backward to realize: create equili-

brated relations or, in other terms, to be a truly abstract manifestation (......). Our surroundings will still keep off abstract reality for a long time to come. But this is exactly why abstract real painting, is for the time being the rescueing substitute.’452 Another passage is also very revealing: ‘The fact, that our time is not yet ripe for the materialization of architecture as a whole, so that neo-plasticism has still to be presented in painting, will be of influence on the abstract - real creation of to-day.’453 And writing of the possibility of creating a building which will be able to retain its aesthetic values, in spite of the march of time, and the passing of generations, Mondriaan says: ‘It is possible, or at least, it will soon be possible, to create by buildings a pure manifestation of the immovable, i.e., that which remains the same to every generation.’454

But not only architecture and painting - for all arts in the future are to dissolve into real life, when the phase of the realization of harmony in life has been attained, no one manifestation of art in life will have the right to a separate and secluded existence. ‘For the new man, the theatre is, if not a nuisance, at least a superfluity. The new spirit, when it reaches its culminating point, will interiorize gesture and mimics; it will realize in everyday life what the theatre has shown and described externally.’455 And the same about the dance: ‘In new art, the dance will suffer the fate of the gesture and of mimics. It will pass from art into life. One will renounce the spectacle of the dance, (ballet, etc.), as one realizes rhythm by itseIf.’456

In De Stijl, Mondriaan gives a description of the place where neoplasticist music will be performed: This description is a fascinating example of spiritual and utopian imagination of a scene, entirely corresponding to the universal vision, almost devoid of all material and sensual attraction. The description culminates in this passage: ‘In short, it will no longer be a theatre or a church, but an open and airy edifice, which will satisfy all the demands of beauty and usefulness, of mind and matter.’457

The vision of the future, the utopian thought, sometimes verges on the religious: we have seen that Mondriaan's vision of the future quite often floats on a messianic current of thought. But it is Van Doesburg as well who voices these feelings, when writing: ‘As only modern, abstract art is capable of realizing this mediation (between man and the absolute, (ed.)), because the natural (particular) has been annihilated in it, this most perfect expression of art is to be the future substitute for the ritual acts of religion, dissolving them into pure aesthetics in other forms, such as, f.i., the figures of a dance or plastic gestures.’458

To Mondriaan and to his fellow-artists of ‘De Stijl’, art had indeed an almost religious significance. Their belief in the universal force, in the laws of harmony, brought forth a vision of the future which may well be termed messianic. On the other hand it should be remembered that art, for the artists of ‘De Stijl’, was not subject to any religious doctrine; it was, on the contrary, the direct mediator between the universal force and man. Therefore, the artists of ‘De Stijl’ and most prominently amongst them Mondriaan, felt an almost sacerdotal vocation. In a way which perhaps was linked with his Calvinistic origin and its source in the Old Testament, he devoted himself to what he must almost have felt as a

ministry. This attitude of devotion to some kind of holy office revealed itself in his entire behaviour; it is shown clearly in his work, in his writings and in his life. For Mondriaan, the practice of an artist's profession meant more than the inner urge to create works of art; it implied a constant striving for an ‘unio mystica’ with the absolute, and the zeal to preach this mystical union to his fellow-men. For Mondriaan, art meant more than a communication of his own feelings to humanity: as a priest, he was to subdue his own emotions for the sake of what he called the absolute. It was the absolute which inspired all his works and actions; art, to him, was the service, through which life is sanctified.

It is so moving therefore to read the following passage on the realization of equilibrium from his trialogue and to think at the same time of his work and his completely self-denying life: ‘By being strong enough to start by not considering the material as the main issue... but that calls for sacrifices! We have to begin by sacrificing ourselves, for an ideal, for a new society now is nothing but just that. We ought to begin by creating, in every respect, an image of what society is one day to realize (......). When the new man will have recreated nature to conform to what he will then be: nature and non-nature in equilibrated relations, then man - and you too - will have “re”-gained Paradise on earth.’459

All his Utopian views an ideas are but the consequence of this self-denying and indeed, heroic faith. And all his later formulations of a Utopian future are but elaborations of this almost religious conception. When Mondriaan writes, at the end of his life and during the war, his essay Liberation from oppression in art and life, he strikes the same chord: ‘In plastic art, we see the mutual oppression of forms and colours annihilated by the creation of mutual equivalent values. Whereas in art this is a moral struggle, in life the struggle is physical as well. In life the physically strongest seems to dominate. How is oppression to be vanquished? How is equilibrium to be created? How are equivalent values to be established? Time must solve these problems. For those who can see, the way is revealed in life and in art. Life, being intrinsically in equilibrium, ends oppression through the resistance created by itself. Then a new and better life becomes certain.’460 It is therefore the same, dialectic law which he and the artists of ‘De Stijl’ have established in art, that will lead to a better future. And the experience of neo-plastic works of art will facilitate for humanity the road towards this future: ‘Though neo-plasticism expresses the end of human culture as an accomplished fact, this end indicates us at the same time the next steps we are going to take. And though the mutual equality, which has been manifested by neo-plasticism cannot be realized in the life now prevailing, yet New Art has shown us that even in our days it is possible to constitute pure forms as well as pure relations and establish a new organization by means of them, allowing a life of greater liberty already in our time, a life, which as a consequence will be more unified at any rate, indeed.’461.

In this sense, Mondriaan's Utopism has to be understood. It is in connection with this moving passage from De Stijl that the following phrase from one of his later essays, of 1942, might be quoted: ‘Our way leads towards the search

for the equivalence of life's unequal oppositions. Because it is free of all utilitarian limitations, plastic art must move not only parallel with human progress, but must advance ahead of it. It is the task of art to express a clear vision of reality.’462

Mondriaan knew well enough that ‘the new image of the world’ - his image and not Dr. Schoenmaekers' theory - was still to remain Utopian for a long time. But without this sacerdotal zeal, without that almost priestly vocation and the Utopian, or rather Messianic, conception resulting from it ‘De Stijl’ would have never been able to lay the corner stone of a brighter and clearer outer world. Mondriaan has himself expressed this confidence in the progressive vision of ‘De Stijl’: ‘I have always opposed the individual in man and have tried to demonstrate the value of universal vision, but it must not be concluded from this that I am an advocate of collectivism in the present time. Collectivism in its broadest meaning is for the future. Luckily enough even a single individual is capable of universal vision.’463

Mondriaan was indeed capable of universal vision. He has expressed it in his works, in his essays and in his imaginings of the future. All three facts have been, each in its way, an important contribution to the artistic development, to the actual work of ‘De Stijl’ in realizing a brighter world in its own period. Mondriaan's vision of the future has certainly been essential for the realization of ‘De Stijl's’ practical task of purifying and brightening the face of the world today. Van Doesburg describes it as follows: ‘The future style will above all be a style of deliverance and of vital repose’464 and this would not have been possible without Mondriaan's vision of the future and his consciousness of an artistic ministry. It was in view of this realization, which we must examine now, that Mondriaan wrote in 1931: ‘But what a fine task still lies ahead of art, preparing this future.’465

The realization of ‘De Stijl's’ conceptions

Up to this point we have examined the growth and the crystallisation of ‘De Stijl's’ conceptions. We have considered the rise of neo-plasticism in painting, and the Utopian consequences, which had been extracted from it principally by Mondriaan. We have seen that Mondriaan had postulated a new human environment, based on the manifestation of universal equilibrium, which painting had realized through neo-plasticism: ‘The work of art is to be the way towards realizing a new manifestation of our surroundings.’466 But this thesis has remained a postulate one, based on speculative thought and on a conception of the universal. The aprioristic notion that art is a visual expression of universal truth had led Mondriaan to make his moral claim: ‘What is true in art must also be true in human life.’467 And it is the same universal conception which inspired his almost religious faith in the force of these universal laws: ‘Art leads the way, where formerly religion led; essentially, religion implied: the digestion of the natural’468 And also: ‘Art, being superhuman, cultivates the superhuman

element in man and hence has become a means for humanity's evolution, of equal importance as religion.’469 It is once more the aprioristic conception of the universal force which made Mondriaan believe in the practical usefulness of neo-plasticism: ‘The purely plastic and logical solution is always in agreement with practical needs, because the one and the other are both only a question of equilibrium.’470 It is this universalist, aprioristic conception which finds an expression in Mondriaan's ‘New realism’ and in Vantongerloo's mathematical mysticism, expressed in a phrase, as, for instance: ‘Art is concerned with life (......). Art starts from unity, and therefore it cannot, by itself, reflect anything but unity or harmony (......). Now, modern art tries to create a culture of an interior character. The artist starts from a (speculative) content of nature, that is to say from the spirit. Visible nature is but an intermediary element. The artist works from within towards the outward, instead of working from the outward towards the inner world.’471

Mondriaan and many others of ‘De Stijl’ were sincerely addicted to this universalist conception of the outer and inner world and for a certain time, during the last years of the first world war, this conception appeared to be ‘De Stijl's’ fixed rule of conduct. It is perhaps the influence of the spiritual atmosphere of Laren which led towards the acceptance of this trend of thought; Van Doesburg writes about it as follows: ‘Laren seems to me a wonderful place for quiet thought. Many people who live there concern themselves with abstract life. I know for certain that they would find your ideas very good, that is to say, pure.’472

It is necessary to cast another quick glance at this aspect of ‘De Stijl's’ attitude, as there is still another side to ‘De Stijl's’ conception and activity, which is to be treated in the following pages. The aprioristic and therefore Utopian conception always prevailed with Mondriaan and during the time when he still lived in Holland - that is to say until 1919 - it even dominated ‘De Stijl's’ conception of life and of the world. This domination is one of the reasons why Van der Leck left ‘De Stijl’ so soon, as we shall see later. With Mondriaan, however, this universalist conception reaches its culminating point and its clearest formulation during the last years of his life, when he lived in New York. Thus, the passages from Mondriaan's essays on art and its significance to life, quoted here, are for the greater part about 11 years later in date than the end of ‘De Stijl’ - they represent, nevertheless, a trend of thought which had dominated its activity at its very beginning. ‘Plastic art establishes the true image of reality, for its primary function is to “show”, not to describe. It is up to us to see what it represents. It cannot reveal more than life teaches, but it can evoke in us the conviction of existent truth. The culture of plastic art can enlighten mankind, for it not only reveals human culture, but being free, advances it.’473 This passage of 1942 has, however, been preceded in 1920 by the final lines of Le Néo-plasticisme, expressing more or less the same thought: ‘So man creates a new beauty by the new spirit, while formerly he sang or represented plastically only the beauty of nature. This new beauty has become indispensable to the new man, as it expresses his own image in opposing equal values. New Art is born.’474 And it is from this point of view that Mondriaan considers the question of art's

task in human society: ‘...is art still necessary and useful to human society? (......) (......). The new art is, however, still very necessary to life. In a clear manner, it established the laws according to which a real balance is reached. Moreover, it must create among us a profoundly human and rich beauty, realized not only by the best qualities of the new architecture, but also by all that constructive art in painting and sculpture makes possible (......). It is a great pity that those who are concerned with social life in general do not realize the utility of pure abstract art.’475 And in the same context he writes ‘What is certain is, that no escape is possible for the non-figurative artist; he must stay within his field and march towards the consequences of his art. This consequence bring us, in a future perhaps remote, towards the end of art as a thing separate from our surrounding environment, which is the actual plastic reality. But this end is at the same time a new beginning. Art will not only continue, but will realize itself more and more. By the unification of architecture, sculpture and painting, a new plastic reality will be created. Painting and sculpture will not manifest themselves as separate objects, nor as “mural art” which destroys architecture itself, nor as “applied art”, but being purely constructive, will aid the creation of an atmosphere not merely utilitarian or rational, but also pure and complete in its beauty.’476

Mondriaan's conception of art's task in human society implies a future realization of ‘unification of architecture, sculpture and painting’, resulting in the creation of ‘an atmosphere not merely utilitarian or rational but also pure and complete in its beauty’, and besides this, the task to lead the way ‘towards a clearer establishment of the content of art: the uniting of man with the universe.’477 This second task had already been set out in an article in De Stijl in 1920: ‘The artist of today must lead the way in every respect in the direction of his period.’478 It is emphasized again in one of his later essays, in a passage previously quoted: ‘All abstract expressions in life, like science, philosophy and all abstract creations like art, can be regarded only as so many means to attain equilibrium. “Art” is only a “substitute” while the beauty of life is still deficient. It will disappear in proportion, as life gains in equilibrium.’479 It therefore implies an orientation of art in the direction of the objectivity already attained by science and logics. This conception of the task of art was formulated by Mondriaan most clearly in 1936: ‘Not only science, but art also, show us that reality, at first incomprehensible, gradually reveals itself, by the mutual relations that are inherent in things. Pure science and pure art, disinterested and free, can lead the advance in the recognition of the laws which are based on these relationships. A great scholar recently said: pure science achieves practical results for humanity. Similarly one can say that pure art, even though it appear abstract, can be of direct utility for life. Art shows us that there are also constant truths concerning forms. Every form, every line has its own expression.’480

This is the tenet of ‘De Stijl's’ creed, which has been most clearly and courageously emphasized by Mondriaan: To discover and to manifest, for the benefit of humanity, the pattern according to which life and the universe continue on their course. It is a new and a most important task for art. It is, indeed, a ‘revalua-

tion of values’, that art should go before and influence human development, instead of following after, as it had done so far. In a letter, addressed to Van Eesteren, and dealing with his booklet Art and life, he writes: ‘I have added an introduction to my booklet, as people do not see why a painter should concern himself with the laws of life; they do not understand, that the laws of life realize themselves perhaps most clearly in art. In the art of the past they are vague, but in modern art and especially in my work, they show clearly. Thus I can develop things and record laws, according to which life proceeds, and everything that concerns equilibrium and happiness in life becomes real and not illusionary. I have built up everything on observation, but as observation implies a whole culture, it is painting that is so well adapted to show balance and happiness, as the art of observation has come to the end of its culture, and we are able to review all of it.’481 These lines do indeed characterize Mondriaan's views most clearly. He was concerned with the laws of life, with a ‘new image of the world’, and his whole development, from his early naturalistic painting to the very last works of his American period, is nothing but an unerring and constant evolution towards this end. The results of this development have truly changed the aspect as well as the meaning of contemporary art: the aspect in so far, that the abstract elements of painting - straight lines in rectangular opposition and primary colour - became the exclusive means of expression. The meaning of art, its significance, changed in an even more revolutionary sense: painting did no longer follow the trends of nature or of human thought, but aimed at establishing, by its own means, the laws which nature and the human mind obey. The artists' activity had become very similar to the work of a man of science or of a philosopher: these are both engaged in the search for a solution of what man has called for centuries ‘the world's enigma’. In science this research tends to be experimental, in philosophy and art rather more speculative; in any case, it is concerned with the universe and not with any particular phenomenon. To have made painting the medium of demonstrating of its own accord, that equilibrium which he considered to be the law of the universe and of human life, has been Mondriaan's unswerving aim and daring achievement.

Mondriaan's entire thought and energy were concentrated on this one problem: the establishment of equilibrium. Since he had discovered - with Van der Leck and Van Doesburg - the laws of abstract composition in 1917, and after his establishment of neo-plasticism in 1920, his pictorial evolution shows but few oscillations: right up to the end there is only a steady and consistent course towards perfection. This perfectionism is typical of Mondriaan, of his personality as well as of his conception of life: it is a constant effort to come closer and closer to the absolute, to objective truth. Once he had discovered the problem, which was essential to him, he concentrated all his efforts on its solution. And once in possession of this solution - the realization of equilibrium by abstract means - in the field of painting, he devoted his thoughts to the application of this solution to various other branches of the arts, such as the theatre, dancing, etc.

His series of essays, from his first articles in De Stijl to his final publications

in 1942, are a continuous repetition and elaboration of one idea, applied to the most divergent currents of human activity, but all starting from one aprioristic point and developing to still greater perfection; like many men of science, he became almost possessed by this idea, more so as he felt that the future and the happiness of humanity was at stake. But, again like many scientists, he was little concerned with the practical realization of his ideas: in his utterly modest, almost timid way he left that to others. He saw the aim, but its realization remained for him a promised land, Utopia. He always lived rather apart from society, like one of the spiritual hermits which, in the 19th and 20th centuries, have become less rare a phenomenon: his contemplative spirit was distracted by the irrelevance of casual social contact. In 1916 already, Van Doesburg wrote of him with some exaggeration: ‘Mondriaan, however, is not a man to have friends; he prefers to remain apart and does not like to make the acquaintance of others.’482 In his Paris studio, 26, rue du Départ, he became one of those solitary and ardent fanatics of an idea. Such men generally are universal by the power of their idea, and restrained by the fact that everything apart from this idea is beyond their reach. It is the power of this idea, the ardent faith in its truth and validity, and the universal reach of his thought, that made Mondriaan the great artist he was. It is his rectilinear thought-a ‘one track mind’ indeed-that was such an indispensable contribution to establish and to carry on ‘De Stijl’, the foundation and development of which is inconceivable without Mondriaan.

Mondriaan's limitations, on the other hand, emphasize even more the importance of the other contributors to ‘De Stijl’: Van Doesburg, Oud, Van der Leck, Rietveld and Van Eesteren. The reason why their names have been brought together in chronological order here, is that they have all, more or less, participated in the ‘incarnation’ of ‘De Stijl’. Indeed, with Mondriaan alone ‘De Stijl’ might have remained an idea. It is the very important and greatly underrated contribution of these other artists, that they have concerned themselves with the realization, with the incarnation of this idea, which had come to clearer delineation by their joint efforts and studies. This realization of ‘De Stijl's’ ideas on the various arts has produced results which in their turn have stimulated the further development of ‘De Stijl’ as an idea and as practical discipline. The history and the character of ‘De Stijl’ are therefore by no means exclusively the development of an idea and its application to reality extant - it is at least as much a question of the continuous reaction of its realization on the original conception of the artists. It is the continuous interrelation of the realization with the leading idea, of the varying personal approach with the constant objective rule, which gives such an intense and dynamic life to ‘De Stijl’ during its short career - barely 15 years. But ‘De Stijl’ as an historic fact, is more than a consistent universal ideology, or a collection of essays, which, together, have established a new conception of art. It is a series of specific realizations which are - to be sure - the consequences of this conception. The foremost importance of the other artists' contribution, however, is to have realized the principal aim of ‘De Stijl’: the creation of a brighter and happier

environment for mankind. Their work did not attain the aim of universal equilibrium to the same extent as Mondriaan's; they did, however, succeed in effecting what was ‘De Stijl's’ first and essential aim, the aim from which it derived its name: ‘style’.

It was Van Doesburg, who selected this name for his periodical and for the working group, which was the result of its foundation. He had abandoned his original idea of calling his review The straight line and had named it De Stijl. This fact, by itself, is perhaps already an indication for the direction in which Van Doesburg intended to lead his review and its work. Van Doesburg, the leader of ‘De Stijl’ has usually been characterized as ‘De Stijl's’ theorist. This conception, which is but half a truth, threatens to confuse the image of ‘De Stijl’. Of course, Van Doesburg was a brilliant lecturer who indefatigably explained the principles of ‘De Stijl’ in lectures and at discussions, congresses and meetings all over Europe. He feared neither fatigue nor criticism, he dealt gladly and wittily with attacks - even quite obvious ones. His extensive lecturing and informative activity gained him the reputation of ‘De Stijl's’ theorist, This pronouncement should be revised: Van Doesburg's theoretic activity was but the result of his main ambition: to achieve. This main preoccupation of his is well expressed in an article in De Stijl: ‘The first task of the younger generation is: to proclaim that creative work of all kinds is the right of everybody, at the same time convincing the great masses systematically of the sanity and validity of their principles and achievements.’483

Van Doesburg, from the point of view of ‘De Stijl's’ idea, was much less a theorist than Mondriaan. In spite of the consistency of his ideas, he did not know that fanatical allegiance to one dominating idea, the idea of universal equilibrium. His qualities were not the exclusive, the almost monomaniac concentration on that idea - he was a man of expansive vision and character, who loved to conquer wide fields of human cultural activity for the realization of ‘De Stijl's’ ideas. In fact, so overwhelming was his expansive energy, that he had to split it up into three different individuals (Van Doesburg, I.K. Bonset, Aldo Camini) in order to realize the different aspects of his vast and varied personality. But one quality dominated all of its aspects: the desire to achieve results.

Van Doesburg was much less a purist than Mondriaan - his broad and extensive interest made him well aware of the impossibility to apply an idea uncompromisingly to every aspect of nature and life - but he always remained faithful to the original conception of ‘De Stijl’, which he developed and even altered as a result of its progressive realization.

There is one essential feature in Van Doesburg's character and personality, which qualified him for the leadership of that conglomeration that was ‘De Stijl’; Van Doesburg was never a specialist, not of any particular idea or of any particular discipline, but he executed his varying tasks - the realization of ‘De Stijl's’ idea in the different domains of life - with an indefatigable enthusiasm and a self-denying devotion which is the heritage of all true dilettantes.

Van Doesburg's personality and his ambition for results has left its mark on

the face and on the development of ‘De Stijl’. It was he who directed ‘De Stijl's’ machinery: as the editor of De Stijl he selected the articles to be published; as the leader of the group he accepted new ‘members’ and, sometimes, estranged and lost old ones. But during almost 15 years of ‘De Stijl's’ existence, it was always Van Doesburg who inspired the realizations of the other members, who encouraged them and helped them, through his generosity, to materialize their ideas. This is why a short note on Van Doesburg's personality had to introduce the pages, dedicated to ‘De Stijl's’ realizations. An appreciation of the contributions of the other artists will be found in the discussion of their work. Part of this work, though quite personal and independent, has nevertheless been inspired and instigated by Van Doesburg. And it is certainly due to him that ‘De Stijl’ found its orientation, which has given it its importance with regard to contemporary life: the realization of style, that is to say the creation of an artistic expression, capable of reflecting and expressing the period's character while at the same time satisfying its needs.

This orientation towards the realization of ‘De Stijl's’ principles implies a different conception of the artist's task; it no longer means the preparations for Utopia, but an active concern with man's present surroundings and the striving for its improvement, its perfection. The artist's first task is active intervention in imperfect conditions and a contemplative preparation of future perfection takes a second place.

The artist is to be more concerned with mankind of his own period than with the ‘man of the future’. But the fact that both these attitudes coincided in ‘De Stijl’ gave it its power to develop both an ideology and a concrete realization.

Van Doesburg has worded this, far less absolutist, conception in his lecture The new movement in painting: ‘Life is in continuous motion; art, the subject of which is life's content, as well. If, therefore, we keep pace with it, the time will never come when art becomes incomprehensible to us. As soon as expression in art becomes incomprehensible, we can safely assume that we have come to a standstill while art has moved ahead of us.’485 Therefore, his own art and ‘De Stijl’ as well had to be kept in continuous movement: a constant dynamism was its most outstanding feature. Equilibrium, in the absolute sense of Mondriaan's conception, was excluded; there too, lies the reason for Van Doesburg's ‘elementarism’ and the estrangement between Mondriaan and himself. In 1926 Van Doesburg writes about this aspect of evolution: ‘This equilibrium as a new culture would not permit any further developments. This equilibrium, being a new form and manifestation, could not be improved upon or developed. Equilibrium once attained, in this case would be absolute instead of relative, stable instead of variable, it would be eternal and unchangeable. This, of course, is impossible.’486

His conception was not the result of his dispute with Mondriaan; it had already been expressed in 1917, in his New movement in painting: ‘It stands to reason, that the new principle in painting will not remain valid for ever. When everything has been expressed on the level which painting as a plastic art has now attained, new aesthetic possibilities will proceed from it. They will enlarge

the field of expression and will move the human spirit in an upward direction.’487 Van Doesburg's positive conclusion from these negative statements-the impossibility of constant equilibrium-is the following; ‘Although there are no objective and absolute laws, independent from the ever deepening and changing vision (laws which, if they existed, would cause a stultifying dogma), no fundamental objective truths, no truth at all, still the specific gravity of our spirit has become computable.’488 On this relative, but acceptable value ‘De Stijl's’ further efforts are based.

In this no man's land between speculative and Utopian universalism and its realization in the community of its own period, ‘De Stijl's’ principle of evolution may be recognised. Indeed, the speculative element prevailed in the first years of ‘De Stijl's’ existence, emphasized by Mondriaan and backed by the authority of Dr. Schoenmaekers' positive mysticism. Its dominance had to a certain extent estranged Oud from ‘De Stijl’; it had, from the very beginning, repelled Van der Leck. This is still fairly obvious in ‘De Stijl's’ third manifesto of 1921 for instance, containing the following phrases: ‘The international spirit is of an internal nature, it is inexpressible. It does not consist of words but of plastic deeds and of inner strength. Spiritual strength. Thereby the new world scheme is shaped.’489 And also: ‘Concentration and property, spiritual and material individualism were the foundations of the Old Europe. She has imprisoned herself in them and she cannot free herself any more. She is going to rack and ruin and we look on calmly. Even if we were able to help, we would not want to help. We do not want to prolong the life of this old whore. A new Europe has already begun to grow within us.’490. When comparing the general attitude of this manifesto with the fifth, published in 1923 and signed by Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren, the change in tone and in attitude will be immediately apparent: the opening and closing phrases of the manifesto are sufficiently characteristic: ‘By means of collective work, we have examined architecture as a unity created by all the arts, by industry, by technique etc.... and we have determined that the consequences will bring forth a new style (......). The period of destruction has come entirely to an end. A new period begins, one of construction.’491 Indeed, the re-orientation of ‘De Stijl’ towards the realization and away from speculative universalism, was the result of the collaboration of Van Doesburg with Van Eesteren and Rietveld. We shall have to come back to its results, but its essential feature must be stressed here. Once Oud - who had always opposed Utopian theories in architecture - had left ‘De Stijl’, the re-orientation from Utopian speculation towards actual realization became, for a good deal, Van Eesteren's contribution. He, also, contributed to ‘De Stijl's’ work a new feature, which becomes apparent in the 1923 manifesto: the application of analysis and experiment as a contrast to aprioristic speculation, in other words, a different attitude towards the outer world. This new attitude and its importance to ‘De Stijl's’ achievement must not be underrated. Van Doesburg, who had always been eager to realize, was the first to go ahead, with his characteristic enthusiasm and force, in the new direction.

The desire to achieve in the present surroundings, to be ‘modern’ instead of

‘universal’, induced a sharp polemic accent against the remnants of tradition. Van Doesburg voices it clearly: ‘The old culture, the culture of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the culture of the heart, the uncultured culture of a petit-bourgeois intelligentia and its hairy apostles, Morris and Ruskin; the concentric culture, the culture of “I” and “mine” is not yet completely a corpse.’492 He is aware that a possible change has to emanate from society and that a style, a general realization of plastic principle, will only be possible in a form of society, which has a common spiritual depth: ‘The aesthetic deficiency is rooted in the whole construction of a society, which began by denying the spirit. We are aware that only one radical improvement is possible, i.e. the destruction of this individualist form of society. Through this it would be possible once again for art to become an organic part of life. If everything in our life would take on an aesthetic form, on a universal base, man would of course grow up from the cradle surrounded by beauty and style.’493 And to this criticism of the present situation, he opposes another vision of the future - but not a Utopian vision: ‘This manifestation is the plastic expression of a principle of life which is dormant in everybody, based on the abolition of a classical and historical duality. The mathematical development of modern society, which is still in its dynamic stage, is subject to the same conception of life. The increasing generalisation of life, prepared by the old culture, will - guided by the new experiences - produce economic relations which will make it possible to realize communally and plastically the new conception of life. This will be the foundation of a new plastic culture.’ 494 He had worded this idea already in the first volume of De Stijl: ‘Neo-plasticism will be proved fit to merge into the whole body of the new society. Thus it will be more closely connected with man than was the old representation of the appearances.’495 But the new society for Van Doesburg is not Utopia, it is the form of society, of which he sees the first offspring in his own period. In their further growth he has every possible confidence. The style he aims at is to be the expression of this new - and more enlightened - period: ‘Style means: to contemplate truth calmly. The unrest of this era is characteristic of a period which precedes a new style (therefore we can perceive the beginning of a new style in work which shows repose in movement). As the future style will be principally determined by psychic cubism (neo-plasticm), we have (......) to develop our new consciousness from this (......) artistic expression.’496 It is clear from his passage, that the new form of aesthetic expression, which is neo-plasticism, has been a starting point for Van Doesburg, in order to realize his aesthetic principles by a materialisation more deeply anchored in reality than his painting could give. So he turns to architecture and explains his views in an article, which he has given the characteristic title: ‘From new aesthetics to material realization.’497

By this new conception, which puts every emphasis on the achievements, on the artist's practical activity and much less on his contemplative faculties, the task of the artist has indeed been changed. Van Doesburg wrote of this evolution: ‘What is happening in architecture and in the renovation of our homes, has already been prepared for a considerable time by the plastic arts; but every-

thing formerly developed in the isolation of the studio, is now realized in public, in the streets, and in our immediate surroundings. This is indeed a proof of my theory, evolved in 1916 already: that every work of art formulates a claim which will be realized in life sooner or later. This is the educating and creative force of a work of art.’498 The artist therefore helps to realize the social system of the future. Van Doesburg sees the essential task of the artist thus: to express the need of mankind, which will be satisfied by the development of the social system, and to satisfy these needs directly by the realization of a brighter, better environment for man: ‘The new culture is revealed by a few. They are the heralds of a new world, a new period. Appearance is replaced by essence. Vagueness becomes distinctness, shade becomes colour. Illusionary space becomes space. Illusionary depth, real depth. Emotion becomes consciousness. Passion becomes reason. War becomes law. Nature becomes style.’499 The artist is the forerunner of human society, as the artist is capable of expressing the needs and the desires which others definitely feel without being able to express them: ‘The new culture, which is only vaguely present in the masses as yet, is enlightenment in a few persons, artists and thinkers. They have brought it to its logical expression.’500

There is another passage in Van Doesburg's writings, which expresses this conception even more clearly: ‘...that the artists are the organs of humaniry (not of the masses), that it has always been and will always be the artists who have quickened the latent needs of humanity, by presenting them plastically.’501

The artist, to Van Doesburg and to ‘De Stijl’ is therefore more than the craftsman or the artisan, who produces upon explicit commission. It is his task to feel the needs of society, to answer the as yet unasked questions. It is the same thought which Lissitzky formulated when writing about his artistic conception, ‘Proun’: ‘It is the strength of the Proun to set forth aims. In this fact the freedom of the artist in opposition to science exists.’502

Indeed, it had hitherto never been the artist's task to produce the aim: his was only to demonstrate and to comment aims which had been set by others. But in the history of human civilisation many examples are known of aims, which had not yet been formulated by general consciousness, by public opinion, but which nevertheless were urged for the common benefit. Vaccination, compulsory education, present-day hygiene are examples of this kind of need, formulated and achieved by a few persons, who were aware of these needs ahead of time. A similar role is allotted to the artist by Van Doesburg's and ‘De Stijl's’ far-sighted conception: they were aware of the need for the well-organized and bright environment for mankind, which technical development had made possible. They were aware of this need before it had made itself felt to the majority of their contemporaries. But the latter fact did not release them from completing this task: on the contrary, it became even more urgent owing to the opposition, shown by their contemporaries.

Plastic art had therefore been given the task of consciously assisting in the moulding of the face of its epoch. And this task implied very important moral values. Van Doesburg writes about them to Anthony Kok: ‘I still am convinced

that art is an independent element, an independent force, which is ethical as well as aesthetical in its display. Practice tells me so. De Boer wrote me repeatedly that he had observed that peoples's faces had lighted up, so to speak, when they passed coloured houses and that they were filled with a joyful feeling. I am convinced that the moral worth of man will increase in a properly solved environment.’503 At that time, in 1922, Van Doesburg had already been trying to build up this new environment.

The difference between Van Doesburg's and Mondriaan's conception of the task of art is therefore greater than it may appear at first sight. Yet both trends, by their mutual influence, brought about the results of ‘De Stijl’. Without Mondriaan's speculative conception, on which neo-plasticism was based, the results in painting would never have been attained. But without Van Doesburg's principle of the active task of art in society, neo-plasticism might, in fact, have remained an isolated experiment in painting without any consequences, without any realization in contemporary architecture and without any influence on the ‘face of society’. In order to gain a clearer definition of Van Doesburg's aim, we must be permitted to quote a few more passages from his writings.

One of the fundamental passages, published in De Stijl runs thus: ‘Art is, like science and technique, a method of organising life in general. We have come to the conclusion that art in our day ceases to be a dream, in an opposing direction to the actual world; that it ceases as well to be a means for discovering cosmic secrets. Art is an overall and real expression of creative energy, which organizes the progress of human life, i.e. it is a tool of the general process of labour.’504 And in a similar context, Van Doesburg defines what he means by ‘creative’: ‘That which in its consequences essentially changes real life (including the discovery of or the invention of new materials). Every object is a claim. In opposition to an application of given results, without the setting up of new claims, without the realizing of new possibilities.’505 The difference between this conception and Mondriaan's is indeed great. According to Van Doesburg's point of view, art is concerned, not with leading the way for humanity, but - quite practically - with making its road. It is the task of art, to create the environment of man, to build up his surroundings. This may - once again - be a Dutch conception, but it is striking that the term ‘work of art’ (kunstwerk) is applied in Dutch not only to the result of artistic creation, but also to the constructions wrought by engineers, such as bridges, sluices etc. The significance of Van Doesburg's conception is summed up in a passage in De Stijl: ‘Gradually the old dream of primitive man becomes reality: to be the master of his surroundings.’506

For this domination of man's surroundings, of nature, a working method is required and ‘De Stijl’ has found this method in abstraction. Van Eesteren - whose importance in this context is not to be underrated, as we shall see - has worded this conception as follows: ‘Without this abstract reality (mental image) it is impossible to attack and to dominate existing reality (speculation, prejudice, laziness, etc.).’507 This theory is based on the perception, that human activity and human spirit have always used the mental image, in order to attain an aim,

whereas in nature the so-called mental image, the goal of evolution, has only been presupposed, or even substituted, by man. The mental image, the intellectual abstraction, is therefore a characteristic feature of human activity and as such, opposed to nature. Van Doesburg gives a striking example of this opposition on which he bases his conception: ‘A flight by airplane can convince one of the great difference in method between nature and human spirit, when one compares countryside and town. Wherever human spirit has intervened, as in the latter case, a totally different order reigns, based on totally different laws and expressing itself in entirely different forms, colours, lines and tension. Equally contrasting, equally hostile as the relation of town to countryside, is the relation of the structure of the human spirit to the structure of nature. The spirit is the natural enemy of nature (paradoxical as this may sound), though there need not be the question of a dualism.’508 ‘De Stijl's’ conception of a realizatian in human surroundings has been based on the acknowledgement of these facts and on the analysis of the laws of human thought.

This view of the method and the task of art is, in consequence, quite different from Mondriaan's conception: it is neither speculative, nor aprioristic. To speculation, to a universalist mysticism, the new trend of ‘De Stijl’ opposes a fresh method: experience. The essential document of this re-orientation is an article Towards a collective construction by Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren: ‘We have to understand that art and life are no longer two separate domains. This is why the idea of “art” as an illusion separated from real life must disappear. The word “art” no longer means anything to us. Instead thereof, we demand the construction of our surroundings according to creative laws, resulting from a stable principle. These laws, parallel to those of economy, mathematics, technique, hygiene, etc., will lead to a new plastic unity. In order to define the relations of these reciprocal laws, it becomes necessary to understand and to determine them. Until now the domain of human creation and its constructive laws have never been examined scientifically. It is impossible to regard these laws as imaginary. They exist. One can only define them by collective work and by experience (......). Our epoch is hostile to every subjective speculation in art, science, technique, etc. The new spirit, which already governs almost all modern life, is opposed to animal spontaneousness (lyricism), to nature's domination, to artistic flummery and cookery. In order to construct a new object we need a method, that is to say, an objective system. If one finds, in different objects, identical qualities, one has found an objective standard.’509

This re-orientation of ‘De Stijl's’ towards the achievement in the immediate surroundings of an objective rule, is to a great extent the work of Van Eesteren; in his collaboration with Van Doesburg, he always found Van Doesburg eager to achieve and test his achievement against existing reality. But the method of this new form of realization is due to Van Eesteren's realistic and scientific approach to nature: a healthy dash of nominalism had been added to the universalist conception of ‘De Stijl’. Since Van Eesteren's membership, reproductions of engineering works became more frequent in De Stijl's pages, the admiration for the severe and objective beauty of bridges, hangars and similar constructions

increases and the aesthetic principle, in its universal sense, is less emphasized. Van Eesteren did not easily find the words to express his ideas; he expressed them, however, in collaboration with Van Doesburg, who became a protagonist of this movement, which tallied so well with his desire for achievement. And even Mondriaan was, to some extent, convinced: his later writings in the years between 1927 and 1933 show an advance towards this standpoint: in his last years only he consciously reverts, once again, to a more speculative universalism. There is a definite change in the content of the review De Stijl after 1922, though: the 6th volume has a different key-note. It is not exaggerating to attribute this changed attitude to the membership of Van Eesteren.

The most important feature of this re-orientation is the emphasis on the need to build an environment suitable for modern man and to build it in a way, independent of nature, obeying only the laws of human intelligence. Or, as Van Doesburg expressed it by opposing the past: ‘All preceding systems thought to be able to neutralize the enmity between organic nature and human intelligence, either by an interval, or by equilibrated relationship.’510 This passage is to some extent directed again at Mondriaan's idea: ‘Culture transforms feeling and therefore nature as well; it brings about unity between the spirit and nature.’511 Mondriaan though, had written in the same context: ‘Culture therefore stands more or less in opposition to nature, as the universal is opposed to the individual.’512 It is only in his booklet Art and life (1931) that Mondriaan stresses more than before the active capacity of human intelligence to transform the surroundings of man: ‘It is evident that during the whole of its evolution the human rhythm will oppose the outward natural rhythm and this is the more so according to man's own progressing. Therefore it is logical that man has transformed as far as he has been able, the natural aspect and the natural life in order to create a rhythm outside of himself. This effort can be retraced in art and to some extent it accounts for the imperious necessity of the transformation, it has been submitting the natural aspect and the particular form to, though be it in an abstract and free domain. But it is of even far greater importance that man should transform the rhythm of life of which he participates.’513 And in the same context: ‘Because concrete life is “real” to us, it is logical that the expression of plastic art is becoming more and more “real” too. At the very least however, we ought to conceive this reality in art as a reproduction of the aspect of the reality surrounding us: we ought to see it as a reality created by man. Thence we understand that the expression of art, whilst getting more and more abstract from the point of view of nature, is growing more and more concrete from the standpoint of art. Art will neither meddle nor make with the natural appearance any longer, no more than with the vague sentiment on the cultivating of which man used to be so extremely keen. Art constructs, composes, realizes. The expression of art follows the trend of life, and not that of nature.’514

Mondriaan's striving for a realisation of these principles still appears somewhat remote and airy, whereas Van Doesburg emphasizes and realizes its actual and practical aspect: ‘Too long the idea, approved by everyone, has dominated man, that the artist, as a kind of savage, should live separate from the world, in

order to produce, in self-centred egoism and under the spell of the fear of life, works of art which stand apart from life. We have entered a new period, in which the artist, along with his aesthetic task, obeys an educational and social vocation. The artist shares in the culture. He shapes it.’515 And it is the educational task to which Mondriaan as well, gives his attention: ‘Due to man's present inequality, the one of us suffers from the other. Nothing but the development, education and cultivation of mankind can deliver us from this affliction.’516

Van Doesburg had already voiced his confidence in the possibility of improving human conditions today, when he wrote in the first volume of De Stijl: ‘So neo-plasticism is the first manifestation of a frank, sincere, but in the first place logical attitude of the new humanity towards life, which, excluding individualism as a system of living, will therefore not suffer from the consequences of this sentimental system.’517 And Mondriaan's conclusion, which seems similar, but is, in fact quite different in its tendency, is the following: ‘The consistent assertion of this artistic expression can be nothing but its realization in our tangible surroundings. For the time will come when, owing to the changed demands of life, “painting” will be dissolved in it.’518

Van Doesburg's - and therefore De Stijl's desire for achievement sometimes goes so far, that he considers interest in art as a danger, as it is liable to oppose the concentration on life and on the active task of the artist and of all other human beings. A passage from the 6th volume of De Stijl is typical: ‘As scientific progress has been hampered before, in the Middle Ages, by religion and its official representatives, the development of real life is nowadays hampered by art. The place formerly taken by religion, is now taken by art. Art has poisoned our life. Aestheticism has infected everyone (alas, ourselves as well). You cannot touch an object without its being contaminated with art. (......) Let us refresh ourselves with things which are not art. (......) Men do still exist, who are capable of making beautiful things without art. These are the progressive minds. But they are hampered by art-parsons, their ingenuity is paralyzed by art. For the sake of progress we ought to suppress every notion of “art”, every aesthetical speculation.’519 These almost iconoclast lines are inspired by his admiration for the creations of engineers and the respect he paid to their social function. And at the same time these lines throw a bright light on the difference between Van Doesburg's and Mondriaan's views: where, to Mondriaan, art becomes irrelevant before the universal idea, to Van Doesburg it was to make room for progress, that is to say, man's self-styled evolution. Van Doesburg's view of art as a danger is still more revealed by an earlier passage, where he quotes Otto Flake: ‘Art is dying, as religion has died,’ and continues: ‘Indeed, art has said everything in individual form. It can only repeat itself, as it has formerly repeated nature. It has exhausted itself in intentional creation. Art, i.e. intentional creation, has outlived itself.’ 520 It is indeed surprising to hear this downright denial of ‘l'art pour l'art’ from somebody who had started out from the further-most consequence of this principle. But he-and ‘De Stijl’ - have developed this principle to such an extreme, that an ‘engagement’ of art again presents itself; the cause in which ‘De Stijl’ was prepared to engage itself, was human progress,

the improvement of human life. This new attitude is reflected in the following lines: ‘The time of abstraction has passed. Is not an elementary painting, that is a definite,by itself organic composition of flat colours, much more concrete than a similar composition, veiled by the illusion of a natural and organic form? (......) Abstract is as a matter of fact, only what happens within the isolation of our thought(......). Abstract and real are relative, if not changing notions.’521

The tendency of ‘De Stijl’ to serve human progress has not only been expressed by Van Doesburg. Huszar also, writes in the first volume of the review: ‘He (the plastic specialist) does not want to sit dreaming in his studio any longer, but he demands through his work an active part in society.’522 And Van Doesburg resumes the parallel expression of his friends by writing: ‘The great struggle, which starts with elementarism, consists of the following: to abolish completely the illusionist conception of life in all its forms (religion, anaesthesia by nature or by art, etc.) and to build, at the same time, an elementary world of exact and splendid reality.’523 To this end, the existing pattern of outward truth was to be changed entirely, all the arts were to perform their task communally, to create a new form of human environment: ‘By a consistent pursuit and development of this complementary union of architecture and painting, it will be possible, in the future, to realize on a purely modern foundation the aims of monumental art; to place man amid(instead of opposite to) plastic art, thereby letting him take part in it.’524

In view of this violent attack on Jean Jacques Rousseau, it becomes clear in which direction Van Doesburg sought to realize his - and ‘De Stijl's’ - conception: the road led in the opposite direction of Rousseau's ‘Back to nature’; it had been indicated by a peremptory demand, away from nature. ‘Matter is transformed, denaturalized, by modern technique. The forms, which spring from this process, thus entirely lack the rural features of ancient forms. On this de- or rather transnaturalization, the style of our period is based.’525 Mondriaan, in his later essays, has employed the same term and he has underlined the fact of the denaturalization of modern life by means of examples: ‘As denaturalisation is the principal point in human evolution, it is also most essential in neo-plastic art. The important fact about this art is that it has plastically demonstrated the necessity of denaturalisation. Neo-plastic painting has denaturalized the means of expression as well as its composition. That is why it is, indeed, abstract painting. Denaturalisation means abstraction. By abstraction one arrives at pure abstract expression. Denaturalisation means deepening. Denaturalisation is reached consciously or unconsciously. An example of the latter may be seen in the progress of fashion; not only do we see that the forms of dresses are becoming purer, but that they come into opposition to nature as well. And facial make-up shows an aversion to the natural skin.’526 Mondriaan's conclusion, in this article of 1927, comes down to the following: ‘Man has a rhythm of his own. He opposes it to nature, and creates an environment of his own - in opposition to nature.’527 And he sums up the outcome of this tenet in the following lines: ‘The more man ripens, the more he will become a “creator” and the more he will oppose natural matter and those, who are still dominated by it.

He will select his own surroundings and create them. He will therefore not regret the lack of nature, as the masses do, who have been forced in spite of themselves to leave it (......). He will build cities, hygienic and beautiful by a balanced contrast of buildings, constructions and empty space. Then he will be quite as happy indoors as outdoors.’528

These passages show that Mondriaan has accepted the later development of ‘De Stijl’, but he has not gone as far as Van Doesburg, who has built his conception of art's task on this attack on nature: ‘We are convinced, that it is a feature of “high culture”, when these organic functions are transformed into mechanical functions and already we look down more or less on those, who function in a completely organic, natural way. This contempt is chiefly incurred by their complete unity with organic nature; what we miss in “natural” man is opposition, contrast, resistance, struggle or in a single word: spirit (......), we see that the human spirit has a totally different structure and that in the general aspect of life's technique (formerly called drama) nature now can only be considered as a contrast and not an opposition to the spirit.’529

But Mondriaan, in his booklet Art and life (1931) scores an important point: he stresses, in this context, the significance of the straight line and its relation to the aims of ‘De Stijl’: ‘In nature, these undulations manifest themselves i.e. we detect them after having thrown a stone in a pond, in the transverse section of a tree trunk, etc. The cadence of straight lines in rectangular opposition, however, has to be created by man.’530 By these lines he emphasizes ‘De Stijl's’ works and ideas as a mode of expression for man, deliberately in opposition to nature. This opinion is shared by other artists of ‘De Stijl’, we need only quote Vantongerloo: ‘Knowledge unveils the mystery; today men of science are agreed that the imitation of nature does not lead us far. Examples are numerous: a modern airplane is far from being an imitation of a large bird.’531 And another, very important passage in the same book: ‘The abstract road owes its eternity to evolution and if man had preferred to substitute the path of nature, we would still be running about naked and sleeping in the open (......). The meter, the second, mathematics, etc., are abstractions which have enabled us to develop materially. Our conception would be sterile, if we did not know how to materialize what we feel. And we can only realize our feelings, or conceptions through abstraction.’532 From this excerpt it may be seen, that abstraction had indeed become an attitude towards life.

A closer consideration of this attitude will remove any surprise, that the artists of ‘De Stijl’ were attracted by machinery. On the contrary, we have already attempted to point out the importance of technical development as regards the birth of ‘De Stijl’. But in a later phase of its development, this attraction gains a greater importance for, then, ‘De Stijl’ is more concerned with achievement. It is once more Van Doesburg who characterizes the importance of machinery, the new mode of expression: ‘If it is true that culture, in the widest sense, means independence from nature, we ought not to be surprised that the machine takes a principal part in the cultural desire for style. The machine, more than anything else, is the phenomenon of spiritual disci-

pline. Materialism, as a conception of life and art has considered handicraft as a direct mental expression. The new spiritual conception of art has not only been sensible of the beauty of the machine, but it has immediately acknowledged its infinite expressive possibilites in art. For a style, the task of which no longer exists in the creation of individual details such as single pictures, ornaments or private homes, but whose attack embraces - according to the economic circumstances - whole districts, sky-scrapers, airports, construction by means of handicraft is out of the question. Only the machine is adequate here; handicraft corresponds to mainly individual conception of life, left behind by evolution (......). The application of machinery to artistic aims should be guided by the artistic spirit. In consequence of the spiritual and practical demands of our period, constructive distinctness has become a condition. Only machinery can achieve this distinctness. The new possibilities of machinery have brought forth an aesthetic value, typical of our time, which I have characterized as “mechanical aesthetics.” 533 These mechanical aesthetics sometimes produce a marked preference of “De Stijl” for engineering works etc. as compared to works of art. This conception is most important as well for the evolution of industrial design, a branch of artistic expression by which Van Doesburg felt attracted because of its distinct opposition to “decorative art”: “It is remarkable, that the essentially new manifests itself most purely in simple objects of daily use and in the general aspects of life; there it appears without deliberate intent or consideration of a human sentimental nature”534. This preference for the objective realization commences to point to functionalism, which is closely linked with what Van Doesburg had termed “mechanical aesthetics.” A passage written by Severini, in the fifth volume of De Stijl only emphasizes this fact; “All the elements of matter, which compose a motor for instance, are arranged by a single will, i.e. the inventor's (......). The process of construction of a machine is analogous to the process of construction of a work of art.”535 This idea of an objective and almost scientific construction of a work of art, which finds its example in the later paintings of Van Doesburg, has another consequence: the increasing importance of precision. It is Vordemberge-Gildewart - the only “Stijl” painter who had not had a more or less naturalistic past but started immediately from abstract construction - who voiced this contention in De Stijl: In spite of all the fuss and the defence of the problem of mechanics, I note, that the most important and essential point has been left out of the reckoning and remained un-observed: the abolition of chance (whereby the way has been cleared to liberated material). The “individual” temper and the charming way of adoration for persons, both elements alien to art, have thus been excluded once and for all.’536 Mondriaan, as well, approaches the problem, though from a different angle; in his booklet Art and Life he writes about the need for precision: ‘Although new morality and reason are able to guide us and art is capable of going ahead, we have to insist that “relation” is the first thing and that New Life is created by those very qualities, which are apparently but simple and insignificant factors, though virtually of the utmost importance. Let us mention for instance the value of exactitude and neatness, as they are shown to us by New Art, proving thus

the possibility of their being extant in life. Notwithstanding the fact that exactitude and neatness of execution always realize the work in all art, in New Art these qualities not only reach their pitch of perfection, but moreover, here they are conceived in quite a different way as they were in the past. In spite of all precision, everything was confounded in past art. In New Art however, everything shows itself in a clear way: neutral forms, planes, lines, colours, relations. It has been by its neatness and exactitude of execution that New Art has established in a real way the mutual equality of composition: the equilibrium. As to life, this fact shows us the great truth that the new forms and the mutual relations have no real value but for their being realized in an exact and precise way. Exactitude is one of the most urgently needed instruments as to the realization of the New Life.’537

For Mondriaan these thoughts and similar ones which he has formulated in Art and Life, were the ultimate conclusions of what he had written in 1918: ‘Among the things to be demonstrated in regard to neo-plasticism, the reasonableness of neo-plasticism stands in the first place. For it is, above all, the reasonableness of a thing that modern man demands. The reasonableness of neo-plasticism as an art in general should be clear to him, but he ought also to be aware of its reasonableness as the art of our time.’538

To Van Doesburg it was principally his desire for realization and his ardent interest in all the spheres of human life, his social concern, which urged him to emphasize practical achievement: ‘The artists ought to take care not to follow the leaders, but to show the masses that society today needs art, which is clear lawful and sane. The masses ought to be made aware of the unhealthy features of the bourgeois art. In the society of the future the people should demand our art, in other words we should have our share in the people, and the people in us.’539 Inspired by these lofty, exalted feelings and, as always, eager to realize his conceptions, Van Doesburg took up architecture; he was conscious of the fact that architecture was the obvious way of influencing human life directly. He was however, well aware that a task of this importance would exceed everyone's power: ‘As to accomplishing the tasks set by contemporary life, the initiative of the individual is no longer sufficient. Collective collaboration is a practical necessity.’540 This passage dates from the year, that he started his collaboration with Van Eesteren, the practical results of which we will review in the ensueing pages. Their efforts were based on the principle of neo-plasticism, but equally and to a considerable extent, on what Oud had already done in the first years of ‘De Stijl’ when the latter still participated in its activity. Oud had written about the aim of this architecture as follows: ‘Its aim has therefore been to realize an architecture, which belongs to its period, and would adapt itself and its forms to the modern expressions of life; an architecture from which a new style could spring through its unity with its surroundings. A programme therefore, which is as actual today as it was then.’541

This conception was the base of Van Doesburg's architectural ambition, evidence of which - though indirect - may be found already in the first volume of De Stijl: ‘Architecture, more than any other branch of art, is linked up with

economic relations; as this connection makes itself felt so earnestly in our time and manifests itself in standardisation and provisional architecture, it is of very great importance to pay attention to construction (......). The architect of today more than ever stands among the people. He is more than ever united with their soul. If he really has social feeling, he will put away his personal preference and choice and try to create building units with the existing materials, such as concrete, iron, stone, glass; units, which satisfy the needs of the people in the practical, hygienic as well as the aesthetic sense.’542 It is therefore quite logical, that the main accent of ‘De Stijl’ activity shifted to architecture, as being the realization of its ambitions, but it is logical as well, that this change was only possible after the definite establishment of neo-plasticism in painting, that is to say, in 1920. Until this date all ‘De Stijl’ painters were too absorbed by the solution of the pictorial problem. Van der Leck only had taken a few steps in the field of interior decoration with his project for a room in 1917. The three original ‘Stijl’ architects however, Oud, Van 't Hoff and Wils, had drifted more or less away from ‘De Stij’; Oud in 1920, the two others already in 1919. This estrangement did not find its cause in a divergence of artistic aim; it can be motivated more precisely by personal disagreement and by the concentration of ‘De Stijl’ on pictorial problems, which were, at that time, strongly dominated by Mondriaan's universalist conception. So the architectural activity of ‘De Stijl’ in its first years has been discussed in the preceding chapter, dealing with the origin of the movement. The importance of the first architectural achievements has been weighed up there; the effect they have had on European architecture will be examined in the following chapter.

Oud had, in 1921 already, foreseen the architecture of the future. In a lecture on ‘Future architecture’, delivered in February 1921, therefore after leaving ‘De Stijl’, he said: ‘Summing up, it may be concluded that a new art of building, rationally basing itself on modern living conditions, will form a contrast in every respect to the present-day art of building. Without taking to an arid rationalism, it will, before all else, be efficient, but it will also be immediately inspired by a higher sense of aesthetics. It will be the sharpest possible contrast to the non-technical shape- and colourless products of the present-day inspiration, as we know it; it will accomplish the task it has been set, in complete submission to its aim, in an almost impersonal, technically expressive manner, in organisms of clear shape and pure proportion (......). The tendencies of the architectural development therefore point to an art of building which is essentially more bound to matter than formerly; but it will in appearance rise above it. It will develop, free from all manifestation of impressionism, in the fullness of light, to a purity of proportion, a fairness of colour, and an organic clearness of form, surpassing classical purity by its absence of all accidental circumstances.’543

And Van Doesburg too, wrote - in 1919 - the following lines, when discussing the summer-house of Van 't Hoff in De Stijl: ‘...the rational, intentional solution of functional parts determines its plasticity, and the mutual relations of the masses. The house thus achieves harmony in itself. It forms a contrast with

nature.’544 These lines are an almost accurate description of the houses he was to design more than four years later.

In 1924 he defines the new architecture which he had realized in the meantime, as follows: ‘The base for the healthy development of architecture and of art in general is the subdueing of any indication of form in the sense of a preconceived type. Instead of using earlier types of style as a pattern, thus imitating former styles, it is necessary to set the problem of architecture wholly anew. New architecture is elementary, that is to say, it develops from the elements of building, in the widest sense. These elements, i.e. function, mass, plane, line, space, light, colour, material, etc., are at the same time elements of plastic expression. New architecture is economic, that is, it organizes its elementary means as efficiently and economically as possible, without any waste of means or material. New architecture is functional, that is to say it develops from the precise definition of practical requirements, fixed on a clear ground plan. New architecture is shapeless and yet distinctive, that is to say it ignores any preconceived aesthetical scheme, any form, in the sense of pastry-cooks, in which it casts its functional space, i.e. the sum of practical living conditions (......).’545

New architecture, as Van Doesburg describes it, has sprung from neo-plasticist painting: ‘Only in our time the leading art - painting - has ever indicated the way which architecture has to go in order to materialize like painting and sculpture, in a mechanical and disciplined manner, what already exists imaginatively (aesthetically) in the other arts. It should not amaze anyone, that the art which from the beginning of the 20th century, had led the way, i.e. painting, has a posteriori created an ideal aesthetic value.’546

This boils down to the same thing Mondriaan wrote when looking back over this period: ‘In our time there exists a tendency to suppress aesthetic feelings. Nevertheless these are essential in order to guide any realization, so that our physical and normal needs may be satisfied. A new aesthetic for our actual environment, which exerts such a profound influence on our mentality, can be deduced from the principles of pure plastic expression in art. In the future, the realization of pure plastic expression in palbable reality will replace the work of art.’547 These lines however, were still influenced by Mondriaan's Utopian conception, whereas Van Doesburg realized his conception in his own, and not in a future environment. But Mondriaan had already indicated the direction in an article in the third volume of De Stijl: ‘Architecture has only to realize in tangible reality what painting has demonstrated abstractly in neo-plasticism. It is the architect and the engineer who are in the future to create for us a harmony between ourselves and our surroundings (......). What surrounds us now? We live as strangers in someone else's house; with someone else's furniture, carpets, vessels, paintings. When we walk through the streets these too, are someone else's. When we go to the theatre, there, as well are others. The Cinema? With its antiquated morals on one hand, and its “nature” on the other? It is not of our time either.’548 New architecture's primary ambition however, was to be of its period and to express this period frankly and sincerely. And ‘De Stijl's’ period, the era between the two wars, aimed at object-

ivity and efficiency and claimed the same qualities for architecture. Mondriaan stressed this fact in the essay he wrote for the 1938 exhibition of abstract art in Amsterdam: ‘Therefore it is such a joyful fact, that modern rational architecture, urged by the practical demands of this period, and led by new material, has almost excluded the expression of subjective sentiment. Though it cannot be for practical and financial reasons an “art”, yet it is much closer to the realization of a universal artistic expression than the “art of building” was in former times. For, considered from an aesthetical point of view, it has now become the pure manifestation of spacial relations.’549

Mondriaan, who was entirely absorbed in this conception of equilibrium, did perhaps not fully appreciate the constructive base of ‘De Stijl's’ new architectural trend, but rightly he emphasized its source in painting: ‘As neo-plasticism is the realization of the principles of neo-plastic painting in whatever surrounds us by way of constructions, it already implies the beginning of the accomplishing in life of a more universal order. Therefore neo-plasticism is of cultural importance. For its realization in matter is convincing.’550

But he still projects its definite outcome into the future: ‘As our time is not yet ripe for amalgamating the whole of architecture, as neo-plasticism is still to be achieved in painting, these facts must be of importance to today's abstract-real art. Each artist is to find his way of manifestation of colour, adapting himself to time and place. If he does not take into account today's surroundings, his work will give an unharmonic effect, at least when it is not considered entirely by itself. However, this unharmonic effect will perhaps open the eyes to a vision of today's environment, as indeed it mostly appears in its traditional capriciousness.’551

The same projection into the future becomes clear from a letter by Mondriaan to Van Doesburg, written in 1922: ‘I do entirely agree when you write that the interior is going to be “the” important thing. But in the future... I am convinced that we are now only capable of doing it on paper, on account of these rotten architects, valets of the public.’552 And again in an article in 1927: ‘In order to arrive at the creation of a new city, the new home will have to be created first. However, neo-plasticism considers the home not as a place for seclusion, a place to find a refuge in, but as part of the whole; as a constructive element of the city (...). It is precisely through fear of disharmony and through adapting the past, that progress is insufficient in our days. One should not adapt, one should create.’553

Mondriaan indeed did not deny his ideas: he lived in his studio, which was entirely designed by him in accordance with his plastic principles. These lines however, bring up the whole problem of the realization of interior design. ‘De Stijl’ had already been concerned with this problem in its early years: Van der Leck and Huszar had designed interiors as from 1917 and 1918 on; cf. the apartment of Til Brugman in The Hague. But Mondriaan, in his uncompromising way, goes further, at least theoretically: he claims the exclusive importance of the interior: ‘The question would be solved even better if one no longer made individual paintings! If people, who felt attracted towards neo-

plasticism, would have their interiors designed accordingly, the neo-plastic painting could vanish gradually. Neo-plasticism is even more really alive when “around” us. In execution, both a painting and an interior are equally difficult.’554

Van Doesburg is less concerned with the future. When he writes about the interior in De Stijl, he discusses an existing example, the interior designed by Huszar in The Hague in 1921. And as we have seen before, he emphasizes the moral properties of the new architectural conception: ‘The effect of colours in their spacial relation, the unity between furniture, curtains, carpets, have been so harmoniously balanced against one another in the execution, that the resulting effect is not only aesthetical, but ethical as well.’555 But in the same lecture he strongly opposes the intentional creation of beauty, emphasizing at the same time the beauty of utilitarian production, where the urge towards beauty plays but an unimportant part. The objects which are used in daily life are to determine the aspect of the homes to be designed; about these objects and their unintentional beauty he writes as follows: ‘No decoration, nothing that is superfluous, nothing that is artistic in the sense of accent on beauty, which has been added from the outside, after the completion. But only the sincerity of the object by itself. Above all, truth, function, construction, and no defects caused by individualist reflection.’556 From this conception springs his high praise for Rietveld's furniture: ‘This piece of furniture answers, by its novel form, the question as to which part sculpture is to play in the new interior. Our chairs, tables, cupboards and other objects of use are the “abstract-real” sculptures in our future interior. As to its construction, Mr. Rietveld wrote us the following lines: With this chair an attempt has been made to have every part be quite simple, that is to say in the most primary form in accordance with the nature of the function and with the material, the form, therefore, which is most susceptible in attaining harmony in relation to the rest. The construction assists in connecting the parts themselves, without any mutilation, in such a way that one does not dominatingly cover the other, or that one is subordinate to the other; thus the whole thing stands freely and clearly in space and the form stands out from the material.’557

So interior decoration and furniture are one of the first lines in which ‘De Stijl’ realized itself. Rietveld must be considered the pioneer here. His designs of furniture are indeed the first actual realization of ‘De Stijl's’ ideas. Therefore the importance of his chairs and other objects cannot easily be overrated. His+ first armchair, dating from 1917, has been reproduced in De Stijl's second volume (Pl. 22) as the first example of furniture made according to the principles of+ ‘De Stijl’ and reproductions of the sideboard and the other armchair follow in the third volume (Pl. 7). These first pieces of furniture are all the more important as they have demonstrated that the principles of ‘De Stijl’ were not only confined to the field of aesthetical speculation and to the somewhat remote art of painting, but that they could also be realized in objects pertaining to daily life. The historical significance of these works is therefore great indeed - quite apart from the fact that these early pieces of Rietveld's design show a simplicity and a purity which has not been surpassed in the course of later develop-

ment. They arouse in the spectator the immediate sensation of beholding a masterpiece: nothing could be added or substracted, or even changed in colour or shape - they are perfect in their simple and sober purity. As to their function: they are indeed perfect in another way. By their transparentness they do not obstruct space at all. As to the other function of a chair, the sitting accommodation, this seems indeed to be a denial of the universalist ambitions: sitting still seems to be such an extremely individual action, that Rietveld's chair is an ideal accommodation for some people, while most unpractical for others. However, the most important problem for ‘De Stijl’, the solution of the aesthetic problem of furniture in its relation to space, has been attained by Rietveld in a perfect and revolutionary way. Rietveld's interior (ill. De Stijl III, pl. 14) will be discussed simultaneously with his architectural achievements; besides, this design was not quite as completely detailed as ‘De Stijl's’ articles would have us believe. Huszar, in collaboration with Wils, designed a few interiors which are reproduced in the fifth volume of De Stijl (pp. 14, 15, 78); they all date from 1921, and show a consistent treatment of the interior as a spacial composition in colour and form. It is the conception which, after all, is typical of ‘De Stijl’: to give a definite shape to an interior without leaving anything to chance or to individual temperament.

Interior decoration has been one of the results of ‘De Stijl's’ desire for actual achievement; town planning was another one. Van 't Hoff had already hinted at the problem in the first volume of De Stijl: ‘Owing to the existing conditions in towns, it is not possible for the new trend to realize anything or very little at the most. This trend can be brought forward in due course, through the construction of new towns or the expansion of existing ones; i.e. by the building of blocks of houses or isolated buildings. Architectural unity in an already existing town is impossible.’558

And Oud, in the same volume, arrives at about the same conclusion: ‘Anarchism in the building trade by lack of aesthetic concern as well as by its over-emphasis, may be checked by an application in the best sense, of mass-production (......). The architect will then act as stage-manager, who directs the different results of mass-production into an architectural unity: the art of relationship. For anyone, who still feels the need, there remains the possibility of indulging in his aesthetical passion by private building.’559

There are a few lines by Mondriaan as well, alluding to the problem: ‘The work of art cannot at present but stand by itself. Of course, neo-plasticism may only be entirely realized in a quantity of buildings, as a town. But its rejection, for the reason that this is not possible today, is not justified.’560

But the essential contribution, theoretically as well as practically to ‘De Stijl's’ urbanism, is Van Eesteren's: ‘All our modern big cities or industrial areas are chaotic. Instead of increasing the joy of living of the individual, the technique tends to smother it. Some architects understood this. They started to consider how this chaos could be overcome. They did not, in doing so, begin by thinking about the form of a town, but primarily tried to discover the reasons behind the origin of this chaos (......). The modern town-planner therefore

occupies himself with giving shape to the town, to the increasing stretches of country that are built over, as symptoms and expressions of modern life. He acknowledges this freely. He is aware that the old form has got to give way. He has got hold of something positive of which he is convinced that it is better than the old form which has to disappear since it has been exhausted.’561 Van Eesteren has delivered the proof of his ability to realize these ideas. He has done+ so, brilliantly, in his project for ‘Unter den Linden’ in Berlin, where the clear solution is the result of a profound analysis. He has done so more soberly in his project for solving the Rokin problem in Amsterdam where he has acknowledged the fact, that a change in the historic pattern of a town implies a different solution for its beauty. He is still doing so in planning the new quarters of Amsterdam and in his search for the answer to problems, created in an old town by modern life.

The main problem of ‘De Stijl's’ striving after realization however, was that of architecture itself. The artists of ‘De Stijl’, through bitter experience, had been made aware of the fact that the time had not yet come to build new districts or to plan a new town. In a letter, probably written in 1920, Oud writes to Van Doesburg: ‘In the actual town there is no chance. Only in the isolated building we can be pure. This is rotten indeed, but it has been proved to me by the facts.’562 The first isolated buildings of ‘De Stijl’ (the Katwijk house Allegonda by Oud and Kamerlingh Onnes, the two houses at Huis-ter-Heide by Van 't Hoff and the hotel at Woerden by Wils) have already been discussed in the+ preceding chapters, and the projects, such as Oud's esplanade architecture and+ his factory at Purmerend, have shown how closely architectural development was linked up with painting. These first manifestations had indicated the way in which ‘De Stijl’ was to continue. But for some years the architectural activity of ‘De Stijl’ was forced to the background, by its concentration on the problems of painting and by the fact the three original ‘Stijl’ architects had drifted apart. But the course had been set. Oud was to write in 1924 about this period: ‘The importance of the new artistic movement is, that what it stood for is more striving for form than an already existent form.’563 He had characterized its principles by writing: ‘It may be said with certainty that the form of its appearance will not be based on the exterior features of old forms in appearance, but that it will grow from the essence of modern technique and modern society, because this has always been so. This is the reason why its character will be totally different from that of any preceding period of style. The modern architect should therefore, above all, be technically well prepared - or at least he should possess a pure notion of the technique of modern building - and have as well a profound knowledge of social conditions in the broadest sense.’564 And Mondriaan had characterized the task of architecture when he wrote: ‘It is the great task of architecture to present us perpetually with universal beauty in a clearly visible manner, thereby forming one whole with the arts of sculpture and painting.’565

But in spite of this clear knowledge, only a very few projects have been realized in these years. Rietveld had built a jewellers shop in Amsterdam (De Stijl V,

opp. p. 24) in 1922 which has, alas, been destroyed since and Oud's small+ building for the overseer's office of ‘Oud Mathenesse’ dates of 1922 as well. The development of neo-plastic painting and of neo-plastic theory absorbed the artists of the group and Van Doesburg was more than occupied by the international contacts of ‘De Stijl’ and his lecturing tours to Belgium and Germany. It took several years before the realization of ‘De Stijl’ architecture came to light, but 1923 saw, simultaneously, four revolutionary manifestations of a new but already mature architecture. These were the project of a private+ house, designed for the art dealer Leonce Rosenberg by Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren, with a model from the hand of Rietveld - Oud had been asked originally to design this house, but he had declined this commission, as there was no ‘terrain’ to build the house on, and Oud was opposed to ‘Utopian building’ which did not start from given facts; - the project for an artist's+ house by the same team; the house of Mrs. Schröder at Utrecht by Rietveld,+ and the project for a house on the river by Van Eesteren. A long period of collaboration between the three architects, especially between Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren, had preceded these sudden phenomena. It is essential to follow the development of this collective effort, as it is the basis of these results and the source of the architectural conception formulated in the manifesto Towards collective construction quoted above on p. 149. In short, the development of this collective work leads, in a series of fascinating drawings, ranging from Utopian to practicable architecture. The guiding principle of this development is the method of analysis, of experience, which van Eesteren's collaboration had introduced into ‘De Stijl's’ methods. The work starts with a study in space (repr. De Stijl 10th anniversary number, p. 111) in order to establish the spacial relations and laws of architecture. The following drawings, which are called ‘scheme for an architecture’, deal with the elaboration of the spacial relations. By this time the abstract analysis has already materialized as an architectural shape: it has come to distinctness. Yet, the drawings are still a study in abstract space and not in concrete dwelling space. The further analysis of the demands made by a special situation leads to a well-defined ground-plan and the ground-plan, in its turn, determines the spacial and plastic appearance of the house - in this case the model (De Stijl VI, opp. p. 84, verso). Seldom has a masterpiece of architecture been developed with so consistent an objectivity and such a clear insight in the complexity of the problem. In this communal effort, not only a house has been designed, but architecture as a whole has been rebuilt from its very foundations. It is difficult indeed to get a clear vision of the personal factors of this collaboration and it is perhaps even quite unimportant as the results, by themselves, are so extremely important. But is it by no means a coincidence, but indeed striking, that the adoption of a new method - analysis - coincides with Van Eesteren's joining ‘De Stijl’. The new, scientific approach to architectural problems is indeed Van Eesteren's contribution to ‘De Stijl’ and this fact is again confirmed by a comparison of his method of designing the project for ‘Unter den Linden’. There also, a+ rigorous scientific analysis is applied to the problem and the solution has been

based on its results. Another aspect of this solution, however, is unquestionably due to Van Doesburg: the principle of architecture's need for colour. Van Doesburg had realized the use of colour in architecture as early as 1920, in Drachten, when he collaborated with De Boer. The project for the hall of a university (De Stijl VI, opp. p. 85), dating from 1923 also, has been solved in colour by Van Doesburg, in collaboration with Van Eesteren, who had designed the spacial aspect. There as well as in the artist's house, colour and architecture have truly been united. Colour has not, as in former buildings, been added to architecture, but both are quite inseparable: colour has become an architectural means of expression, through the effort and the experience of Van Doesburg. It is a great pity, that none of these three projects was ever executed.

The only two executed projects of this period are Rietveld's house at Utrecht and Van Eesteren's house at Alblasserdam. The last named has been so disfigured by use and by the war, that it is difficult to get a clear impression of its+ essential qualities. However, the plans demonstrate again how the analyses of space and of function have led to a perfect equilibrium of composition. On the+ other hand, Rietveld's Utrecht house (De Stijl VI, p. 160) has recently been returned to its original state, so that all its qualities of balance and harmony stand out clearly. The most striking fact about the building is the unity between its interior and its exterior appearance: it does not have a façade, as all the three outer walls are faithful reflections of the organisation of the interior. And there, in the house, space has not been secluded or divided into compartments - the whole house is but one spacial unity. The bold manner in which constructive elements are brought into view and have been used in the visual composition, is as revolutionary as it is successful. Colour has been used here as well and it gives a bright and lively aspect to the house; it is a further experience, after Oud's and Van Doesburg's use of colour in a hostel in 1917. In opposition to the projects by Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren, the Rietveld house gives the impression of being not so much the result of long analysis and calculation, but the lucky result of an initial and daring attack on the problem. As with Rietveld's first chair, his first large construction bears all the marks of a perfect masterpiece: in its sober and radiant simplicity it attains perfection and complete beauty. And it has, through the whims of fate, the merit of being the first realized achievement of ‘De Stijl's’ new architectural trend.

In the following years only a few outstanding results can be cited: the interior of a doctor's house by Rietveld (De Stijl VI, opp. p. 40) in 1924; the façade of the restaurant ‘De Unie’ in Rotterdam by Oud, of 1925 now alas destroyed by the war; Oud's blocks in Hoek van Holland have been designed in 1924 and completed in 1927, - they still are a conspiciuous monument of ‘De Stijl's’ first architectural trend; and a work of a very transient nature: Kiesler's design of the theatre exhibition in 1925 (De Stijl VI, pp. 142, 143, 145, 147), an ingenious solution of a difficult spacial and constructive problem. The last important realization of ‘De Stijl's’ architectural conception is Van Doesburg's house at Meudon, on which work was started in 1929. It was completed

shortly before his death in 1931 (De Stijl, last number, pp, 38-44). This house shows a further development of the 1923 efforts towards greater simplicity and restfulness, as it is not the result of a first and complicated research for an architectural solution, but the consequence of ripened experience: the problematic features of the 1923 projects have disappeared, but the same spacial clearness and distinction is characteristic in this building as well. Van Doesburg had intended it as his studio, which was to be, at the same time, a centre for ‘De Stijl's’ collective activity. His death prevented the realization of this plan - but the house reminds us of Van Doesburg's clarity of vision and of his desire to accomplish which he realized in the last years of his life.

Each of the realizations of ‘De Stijl’ have been accompanied by a theoretical commentary. So have its architectural results. Van Eesteren characterized ‘De Stijl's’ new architectural trend when he wrote about the beauty of the modern city: ‘The beauty which we can attain will be built on today's attitude of life, on its scale and dimensions.’566 And Oud had already formulated in advance the principles of this architectural conception, which his colleagues started to realize in 1923: ‘The subordination of the utilitarian to the idealistic aspect would be detrimental to the cultural and general values and would only hamper the striving for style. For the development of an architectural style, a good house (in the sense of technical and practical purity) is therefore of greater importance than a beautiful house.’567 Van 't Hoff had already expressed a similar thought in the first volume of De Stijl: ‘In order to attain a style in architecture, the art of building must reach complete technical perfection and every notion of “art” should, in connection with this development, be kept in the background.’568 It was Van Doesburg who realized - by his experience as a painter - the synthesis of these two different trends: he did so practically in his collaboration with Van Eesteren, and theoretically in his writings, from which the following passage is a characteristic example in this context: The ideal aesthetics of one art realize themselves in the material of another; ideal and mechanical aesthetics, premeditated artistic expression and utilitarian construction unite in a perfect equilibrium. This equilibrium is ‘style’.570

In architecture, therefore, ‘De Stijl’ artists have realized what they had conceived as a style; the union of artistic expression with utilitarian construction. But this definition cannot, without difficulty, be applied to the other branches of art and yet it was ‘De Stijl's’ ambition to create a style for all the plastic arts. Still, this definition of style in architecture tallies well with what Van Doesburg had written in 1918: ‘Style is created by achieving a well-balanced relationship between the inward and the outward by means of a common consciousness of life.’571 And elsewhere in the same booklet: ‘The development of modern art towards the abstract and universal idea, i.e. away from outwardness and individuality, has - by joint efforts and common insight - made it possible to realize a collective style which - beyond person and nation - expresses plastically and really the highest and deepest and most general desire for beauty by all nations.’572 A small group of artists has achieved this balance, which is style, but they have done so on behalf of mankind.

Van Doesburg has formulated this fact when writing: ‘The maximum of plastic possibilities is only grasped and understood by a few. The history of culture contains many examples; when a new dimension has been conquered in life by someone, a new conception of art is evolved from it. But it requires a great deal of conscious preparation of a great many, in order to turn this conception into a general cultural expression, a style.’573 It is the task and the privilege of the artist to make these discoveries and to communicate them to mankind. For the artists of ‘De Stijl’, art is not to be isolated at all, on the contrary, it is intended to be communicative, to be a language. But - as we shall find - a precise language. It is this desire for communication that makes the artist: ‘There is a great need for the communication of these impressions and whereas any other man might content himself with a casual remark or a gesture, the artist is not satisfied until his inner impression has assumed ashape in one material or another.’574 And elsewhere, he goes into further detail: ‘The activity of a plastic artist consists of the following: To transform the crowd of plastic impressions, the multiplicity of relations, into an orderly and calm aesthetic whole. Only a work, which has come into existence organically in this way can be called a plastic work of art and can perform its aesthetical function free from every obstacle.’575

Style may therefore be considered as the language in which the artist is capable of expressing and of putting his impressions in order - into which he translates the contents of his experiences. This language, though wrought by the artist, is within a relatively short space of time comprehensible to everyone. But the language seems to differ from one branch of art to the other. It seems to be so - but the system of the languages is nevertheless always the same. It has been ‘De Stijl's’ ambition, to bring the way of expression of the different arts to a zenith of purity and independence: ‘De Stijl's’ activity was to be a ‘prism of the arts’, breaking up the common artistic light into the several pure colours of its different branches. Therefore ‘De Stijl’ artists have so violently opposed any vagueness as to the limits between the arts. Mondriaan has expressed this ambition of ‘De Stijl’ so well: ‘As the content of every art is the same, the possibilities of manifestation are different in each art. These possibilities must be found by every art in its own province, and they will remain confined ta that province. Each art has its own means of expression, the use of this plastic means is therefore to be found by each art for and by itself and it will remain confined to its limits. Therefore the possibilities of one art should not be judged by the possibilities of another, but by themselves and exclusively with regard to the particular art. Each art has its own accent, its proper expression: by this fact the existence of different arts is justified.’576 It has been ‘De Stijl's’ ambition to analyse these means of expression and to purify them from external influence. This is the way that has led ‘De Stijl’ to the purification - and the abstraction - of the elements of expression, that has led to the exclusion of all literary, subjective and extra-pictorial elements. Richter, when writing on the problems of a new visual language in abstract cinema, puts it as follows: ‘We have arrived, beyond our individual problems, at the fact of the

posing of objective problems in art (......). This task leads (by the scientific way of examining the elements of art) towards a different aim than a better picture or a better sculpture: towards reality.’577

Among ‘De Stijl’ artists Van der Leck has been the champion of this struggle for objectivity of the elements for the objective structure of the artistic language. We have already seen, that his ambition for objectivity has played its part in the first stages of ‘De Stijl's’ existence. In the first annual issue of ‘De Stijl’ he published a short and precise article, in which he explains this conception. From this article we quote: ‘To each art, separately and by itself, its own means of expression are sufficient. Only when these means of expression of each art have been reduced to purity, i.e. in connection with their nature and function, so that each art has found its essence as an independent entity, only then, a mutual comprehension, a relationship will be possible, in which the unity of the different arts will manifest itself.’578 And, writing more especially about painting and architecture: ‘Now it (painting, (ed.)) is architectural, because it serves in its own way and by its own means of expression the same idea: space and plane, as does architecture. Thus it expresses ideally “the same”, but in a different way as does architecture. And therefore it forms a differentiated unity with architecture.’579 It is that differentiated unity which is only possible by the purification of the expressive means of the different arts, which is the essential condition for a future style, or as Van der Leck terms it, for monumental art. On behalf of this prospect, the means of expression are to be reduced to their elementary purity or, in other words, to an objective, controllable condition. The tendency towards this objectivity characterizes the development of ‘De Stijl's’ painting in the years after 1924.

Until 1924 Mondriaan had led the way in ‘De Stijl's’ painting, by the creation of neo-plasticism and the further perfectioning thereof. Van der Leck had already left ‘De Stijl’ in 1919 and Van Doesburg had been much too absorbed by various occupations in connection with ‘De Stijl’ to be able to devote much of his energy to painting. Thus Mondriaan by himself, had developed and elaborated neo-plasticism, in the lonely seclusion of his Paris studio, 26, rue du Départ. It is this phase to which Van Doesburg alludes when writing in this retrospective article: ‘by the suppression of every form in the sense mentioned above, including Euclidian geometry, “De Stijl” had completely broken with the past and its exhausted forms of expression. It considers painting the privileged means for the manifestation of constant relations (harmony). Thus painting has indicated the line of conduct to the other arts.’580 But in 1925 Van Doesburg had realized elementarism, based on a much more dynamic conception and had added the diagonal to the expressive means of neo-plasticism. Van Doesburg writes about the elementary counter-composition: ‘It adds a new oblique dimension to the rectilinear, peripheric composition. Thus it solves the tension of horizontal and vertical in a real way (......). In counter-composition, the equilibrium in the plane plays a less important part. Each plane is part of peripheric space, and the composition has rather to be considered as a phenomenon of tension than as one of relations in the plane.’581

The counter-compositions - the most important of which is to be found at+ the Municipal Museum in The Hague - are a further step from the stable repose of painting in the direction of its dynamic activity. A further step is marked by the most important work of painting - though not easel-painting - of this+ period: the coloristic solution of the interior of the Café l'Aubette in Strassbourg. Van Doesburg writes about this important achievement: ‘The track of man in space (from the left to the right, from front to back, from above to below), has become of fundamental importance for painting in architecture (......). In this painting the idea is not to lead man along a painted surface of a wall, in order to let him observe the pictorial development of space from one wall to the other, but the problem is to evoke the simultaneous effect of painting and architecture.’582 The results, achieved in the Aubette, which are now alas destroyed, have indeed been convincing. Large planes of vivid, mostly primary colour, arranged in a diagonal rhythm on the large wall opposite the window, gave a vivid and violent appearance to the entire room. The impression of a bright, modern and optimistic atmosphere was emphasized by the fact, that the rooms had been reconstructed and painted in an old 18th century building of pale red limestone; the classic and rather stern façade was a strange, but inspiring contrast to the bright shining interior, where plastic rhythm had not been achieved by subtle details or by various nuances, but by the striking contrast of forceful colour and bold linear movement. The destruction of the Aubette is indeed one of the most serious losses which modern art has suffered in the last few years; apart from Van Doesburg's work in the large hall, it also has lost an important series of works by Jean Arp and Sophie Täuber-Arp, works which, though not belonging to ‘De Stijl's’ conception, did by this very fact and by their immediate vicinity emphasize the essential properties of Van Doesburg's work: its objectivity, its clear and rigid construction, and the bright and joyous qualities, made to stand out by the striking purity of the work. To anyone who has not seen the Aubette, the issue of ‘De Stijl’ dedicated to it, can only give a very slight reflection of the work's brightness: this fact in itself proves, how important colour and its skilful use have been in this realization of ‘De Stijl's’ ideas; it shows as well the importance of scale and the degree of command which Van Doesburg was capable of exercising. The year after the Aubette's completion was not marked by any special event in the domain of ‘De Stijl's’ painting. Still, the younger painters of ‘De Stijl’, Vordemberge-Gildewart and Domela, gave proof of their maturing evolution during this period. Mondriaan, who no longer belonged to ‘De Stijl’, continued his consistent, but slow evolution toward a still greater perfection of his neo-plastic paintings. All the same, 1929 marked a new turning-point in Van Doesburg's development. From his dynamic counter-compositions, the culmination of which had been the large paintings in the Aubette, he reverts to a still more objective, controlable construction of elements. A letter to Anthony Kok illustrates better than any explanation the new direction of Van Doesburg's research: ‘As I could not visualize composition of equilibrated relations as the ultimate result of more spiritual painting, I arrived, about 1924, at counter-

composition. I have formulated these results in my manifestoes of elementarism (cf. De Stijl, Nos, 73-76). Thus I had proceeded from composition to construction, whereas I have now, in 1929, totally finished with any arrangement or composition guided by sentiment. At present, I can see no more difference between the manner in which a milliner, a florist or a confectioner finds an equilibrated arrangement according to feeling, and the artist who also composes by sentiment. The manner of a bit more here, a bit less there, here a bit of this, there a bit of that, some red here and there again, some blue, etc., is too uncertain, too much connected with taste, with arrangement, than that it could satisfy me any longer (......). I have now found a great assurance in abandoning the idea of “the modern” and accepting the “universal”. What I am trying to realize, is a universal form, which entirely corresponds to my spiritual vision. As such, I accept the pyramid, a universal form which is still beautiful, because it is elementary and impersonal and which therefore remains and is ever reborn in the eye of the spectator. Such a universal form is always controlable because the construction is mathematical. It is such a controlable structure, which I claim for painting, for sculpture, for architecture; my latest painting, on which I have already been working a long time, is black, white and grey: a controlable structure, a solid surface without chance or individual caprice. Without imagination? Yes. Without feeling? Yes, but not without spirit, not without universality and, as I think, not empty...’583

This evolution culminates in his ‘arithmetical composition’ of 1930 and in the domain of theory, in the Manifeste de l'art concret. A few passages from the manifesto follow here: ‘Construction, in relation to the proper surface of the painting or in relation to space created by colours, is controlable through the eye. Construction is totally different from arrangement (decoration) and from composition according to taste. The majority of painters work in the manner of pastrycooks or milliners. We on the contrary, work with mathematical (Euclidian or non-Euclidian) and scientific data, that is to say, with intellectual means. Before its materialisation, the work of art exists completely in the spirit. It is however, necessary that its execution show a technical perfection equal to the perfection of its conception. It should not show any trace of human weakness: no trembling, no lack of precision, no hesitation, no unfinished parts, etc. (......). If one does not succeed in tracing a straight line by hand, one takes a ruler. Typewriting is clearer, more legible and more beautiful than handwriting. We do not want an artistic handwriting.’584 Both the ‘arithmetical composition’ and the manifesto are a further step towards an objective method in art, towards what Van Doesburg and his friends understood by style. And though Van Doesburg did indeed, in those years depart from a desire for modernism towards a more universal tendency which he worded in his letter to Anthony Kok, his very striving towards objectivity, towards an art that should be independent of the vicissitudes of the individual temperament, is an expression of his time, of 20th century thought. It is this realization of the period's spirit (the common consciousness of time) which has always been ‘De Stijl's’ primary goal. Van Doesburg had already formulated this thought in his Three lectures

of 1919: ‘The content of our modern culture is different from the content of preceding cultures and the artists are now working to find a general form of expression for this content. The general form of expression of the present culture's content is style.’585 In the same context he asserts that the modern artists have already found this expression: ‘In a more extensive survey of preceding cultures which since the memory of man have known art, the modern work of art will appear to us as the shape of the spirit of our modern time.’586 Mondriaan, already in his early writings, had emphasized the same point: ‘As the artistic expression ought to be a living reality for man today, it ought to be the pure expression of the new consciousness of time (......). Since neo-plasticism is to interpret the new consciousness, it ought to be homogenous with all its manifestations in life.’587

It is this complete agreement with all the manifestations of modern life, which ‘De Stijl’ and above all, Van Doesburg, have always sought. He wanted to go further: it was his aim to summarize all the aspects of modern life in the achievements of ‘De Stijl’ and thus to create in painting, in architecture, etc., and in the co-operation of these arts, a visible stamp of the period. This realization was to be typical for all the trends, which characterized the modern era such as: clearness, organisation, abstract thought, mathematical formula, etc. In his retrospective article of 1929 - exactly during the time when he was occupied with his ‘arithmetical composition’ - therefore, he wrote: ‘The square is, so to speak, the form of the shapeless appearance, mark or signature of the absolute and the relative in one, and it is therefore the basic scheme of the new consciousness of time, as the cross was during the Middle Ages. Every stylistic period of the past can be summarized in one schematic figuration. The least individual basic scheme of modern times is the square.’588 The achievements of ‘De Stijl’ thereby acquire a symbolical significance, which it has certainly not been their principal intention to realize. Yet, this symbolical characterization of ‘De Stijl's’ realizations may quite well be extant. The intention however, has from the very beginning been, not to create a symbol, but an expression of their era; by confronting man with his own thoughts and ideas rendered visible by the artists, ‘De Stijl’ artists hoped to contribute to the further progress of human culture. As Van Doesburg writes in the Manifeste sur l'art concret: ‘A work of art, thus conceived, achieves a clarity which will be the base of a new culture.’589

Clearness, objectivity, have indeed always been the principal aim of ‘De Stijl’. From the very beginning, attacks on indistinctness, on the veils of nature, on individual confusion have been a recurrent part of ‘De Stijl's’ phraseology. The lack of precision, the interference of chance and of individual temperament, have always been the objection of ‘De Stijl’ against all preceding artistic realizations. According to ‘De Stijl's’ tenets, art is to become the precise instrument of the human spirit; an instrument that is to be so well-stringed that it permits maximal precision and perfection of execution.

‘De Stijl's’ activity, during the 14 years of its existence, was devoted to the construction of this perfect and reliable instrument; in other words, to the building of a permanent artistic language. By the reduction of the artistic means

of expression to their elements, the artists of ‘De Stijl’ have been able to discover the system of their combination, that is to say, they have been able to write the grammar of this artistic language. Of course, a knowledge of grammar does not imply a command of the language, as the command of a language does not necessarily include a capacity for artistic, poetical use. But it is indeed a most important achievement of ‘De Stijl’ to have established the synopsis of an artistic language, a system which may be applied equally to painting, sculpture, architecture, cinema, etc.

The younger members of ‘De Stijl’ who were influenced less by the universalist and Utopian thought of the first period, formulated these ideas in De Stijl. Richter, when explaining the principles of his abstract compositions for moving pictures, wrote as follows: ‘The “language” (language of forms) which is spoken there, is based on an “alphabet” which has been derived from an elementary principle of contemplation: polarity. Polarity as a general principle of life is identical with the method of composition to be followed by every formal expression.’590 Speaking more generally about art, he asserts in the same context: ‘It has to be emphasized again and again that art is not the subjective explosion of an individual, but the organic language of man, of a most serious importance; therefore it is to be as free from error and as concise as possible, in order to be really used as such: as the language of humanity (......). For this new art it is absolutely necessary to dispose over definite elements. Without these a (most attractive) game can be brought about, but never a language.’591 And another of the younger artists, Graeff, hints at the same problem, when explaining his ideas on a language of signs for traffic: ‘Beware of symbols! Beware of arbitrariness! One leads to decoration, the other to indistinctness. A language is to be developed. A resounding, clear language, capable of being augmented. Mere agreement is insufficient. The question is therefore, to realize the sense of the sign starting from the visual elements, from the essential elements of form and colour. The elements of form are: square, circle, triangle. These cannot be mistaken one for the other. By their concise form they permit colour to stand out most intensely. Among the colours, it is only red, yellow and blue and the neutrals black, grey and white which are individual and not to be mistaken one for the other.’592 A similar conception would never have been possible without the realizations of ‘De Stijl’. Among all its realizations, the constitution of a basis for an artistic language is perhaps the most important achievement.

By creating the elements of an artistic language, ‘De Stijl’ has indeed realized its initial conception: the creation of a universal means of expression. For language - any form of language - is indeed a real, a substantial realization of a universal conception. One does not need to be a convinced nominalist to admit that the ‘universalia’, the general notions of mankind, do exist as ‘nomina’, as words, even if they have no real substance. Language therefore, as a form of abstraction, is not only capable of describing or representing, it is capable as well of creation, of realization. Schoenmaekers, the philosophical godfather of ‘De Stijl’ had formulated this knowledge: ‘Uniformity in our thought is possible in the results of our thought. In a “language” for instance, this fact is

clearly proved.’593 And the last writings of Van Doesburg which we know, clearly emphasize this aim of ‘De Stijl’ as the most important; in the Manifeste sur l'Art concret of 1930, which may almost be called Van Doesburg's artistic testament, the first paragraph closes with these words: ‘If the means of expression are liberated from all particularity, they are in harmony with the ultimate end of art, which is, to realize a universal language.’594


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