Landschap

Theo van Doesburg's Landschap from 1901 predates by nearly two decades the founding of De Stijl — the movement that would make him one of the most influential figures in European abstract art. In 1901 he was still a student painter working through the influences available in the Netherlands, and this landscape shows him in dialogue with the Dutch Post-Impressionist tradition. The work's interest lies partly in what it reveals about the artistic formation of a major modernist before his revolutionary ideas coalesced — the conventional subject matter and handling that preceded his radical geometrical abstraction.

The landscape shows van Doesburg working in the conventional Dutch naturalist tradition of the period, with observed colour and tonal values rather than the pure primary colour and geometric abstraction of his mature De Stijl work. The brushwork has an Impressionistic fluency that would be entirely abandoned in his later career.