Doesburg, Theo van

Doesburg, Theo van (b Utrecht, 30 Aug. 1883; d Davos, Switzerland, 7 Mar. 1931). Dutch painter, designer, architect, and writer on art. His early work was influenced variously by Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism, but in 1915 he met Mondrian and rapidly underwent a transition to complete abstraction. In 1917 he was one of the founders of De Stijl and he devoted the rest of his life to propagating the association's ideas and the austerely geometrical style it stood for, seeing himself as a crusader fighting to cleanse the world of cultural impurities. He spent much of the 1920s travelling to promote his beliefs, particularly in Germany, and from 1922 to 1924 he taught intermittently at the Bauhaus. By the mid-1920s he had abandoned the rigid horizontal-vertical axes insisted upon by Mondrian and introduced diagonals into his paintings in a series of works entitled Counter-compositions; he called this new departure Elementarism. In 1929 he moved to Paris and designed a house and studio for himself in the suburb of Meudon in a stark and stripped style (1929–31); he thought that an artist's studio should resemble a medical laboratory. In 1930 he published a manifesto of Concrete art and in 1931, shortly before his death from a heart attack, a meeting of artists in his new studio led to the formation of the Abstraction-Création association.

Van Doesburg died a disappointed man, feeling that his ideas had been rejected, but only five years later Alfred H. Barr gave De Stijl a central place in his book Cubism and Abstract Art (originally published to accompany an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and described van Doesburg as ‘painter, sculptor, architect, typographer, poet, novelist, critic, lecturer and theorist—a man as versatile as any figure of the Renaissance’. Although he has a secure place in history, he has provoked conflicting opinions: ‘Some historians and critics have visualized and described van Doesburg as a scorned prophet, shouting the truth in a wilderness of conventional deceit, while others now view him as just one of the many self-proclaimed messiahs who shouted their way through the 1920s’ ( Theodore M. Brown in Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, 1982).