Theo van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) was a Dutch painter, architect, and critic who co-founded De Stijl with Piet Mondrian in 1917 and became the movement's most energetic publicist and polemicist. Born Christian Emil Marie Küpper in Utrecht, he adopted the pseudonym Theo van Doesburg. The fourteen paintings in this batch date from his pre-De Stijl period (1900–1904) and show a competent if conventional young artist working through landscape, portraiture, and figure painting in a late Impressionist mode: landscapes with windmills and churches, river views with steeples and mills, a female nude, portraits including Portrait of Agnita Feis (his future wife), and figural subjects. These early works are primarily of biographical interest, showing a technically competent painter who had not yet found his direction. The decisive transformation came after his encounter with Mondrian and the development of De Stijl, through which he moved toward the primary colour grids and pure geometric abstraction for which he is remembered. He taught briefly at the Bauhaus and his concept of diagonal composition—which he called Elementarism, and which Mondrian rejected—led to a split between the two artists in the late 1920s.

The early van Doesburg is a conventional late Impressionist: his landscapes use broken colour and atmospheric effects, his portraits are solidly constructed. There is no anticipation of the geometric rigour that would define De Stijl. His colour is warm and naturalistic. These works represent the academic foundation from which his radical break would eventually depart.

Van Doesburg's importance rests not on his early naturalist paintings but on his founding role in De Stijl and his tireless promotion of the movement through the journal he edited, through lectures across Europe, and through his architectural collaboration with J.J.P. Oud and others. De Stijl's influence on the Bauhaus, on modern architecture, and on twentieth-century graphic design is immense.