Stijl, De

Stijl, De (Dutch: ‘the style’). The name of a group of mainly Dutch artists founded in Leiden in 1917 and of the journal they published to set forth their ideas. It was a very loose association, held together mainly by Theo van Doesburg. The other members were, like him, mainly painters (Mondrian was the most important), but they also included the sculptor Georges Vantongerloo and the architect and designer Gerald Rietveld (1888–1964). Their common aim was to find laws of equilibrium and harmony that would be applicable to life and society as well as art, and their style was one of austere abstract clarity (see Neo-Plasticism). The journal was founded by van Doesburg and Mondrian in 1917 and van Doesburg continued to edit it until 1928 (it appeared roughly monthly, but irregularly; the place of publication—befitting van Doesburg's peripatetic career—also varied). A final issue (number 90) was published in 1932 by Mme van Doesburg in memory of her husband, after whose death in 1931 the group disbanded. At first the journal was devoted exclusively to Neo-Plasticism, but a Dadaist element crept in. Mondrian ceased to contribute to De Stijl after 1924 and in 1926 van Doesburg published the manifesto of a splinter movement that he called Elementarism. Despite this lack of cohesion, De Stijl was probably the most influential of the many avant-garde publications in Europe between the two wars. It was, however, in architecture and the applied arts (including furniture design and typography), rather than painting and sculpture, that it had its greatest influence—notably at the Bauhaus and in the clean-lined architectural style known as ‘International Modern’, of which Rietveld's Schröder House in Utrecht (1924) is an early and famous example.