Collection: De Stijl

De Stijl, The Style, was the Dutch movement founded in Leiden in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960), Georges Vantongerloo, and the architects J. J. P. Oud and Robert van 't Hoff. The eponymous magazine, edited by van Doesburg from 1917 to 1932, disseminated the movement's principles across Europe.

The visual programme reduced painting to horizontal and vertical lines, the three primary colours red, yellow, and blue, and the non colours black, white, and grey. Mondrian called this Neoplasticism. The aesthetic extended into architecture and design through Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), whose Red and Blue Chair of 1917 and Schröder House of 1924 in Utrecht remain the canonical applied works. Mondrian broke with the group in 1924 after van Doesburg introduced the diagonal in his Elementarism, an addition Mondrian rejected as a violation of the original principles. Van Doesburg's death in 1931 effectively ended the movement, but its influence on the Bauhaus, postwar concrete art, and the International Style was decisive.