De Stijl

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 2 min read

De Stijl ("the style" in Dutch) is the art movement born in the Netherlands in 1917 around the magazine of the same name, founded by Theo van Doesburg with Piet Mondrian. Painters, architects and designers were looking for a universal language, reduced to the essentials, that would work equally well for a painting, a piece of furniture or a house.

The protagonists

The original group included the painters Bart van der Leck, Vilmos Huszár and Georges Vantongerloo and the architects J.J.P. Oud, Jan Wils and Robert van 't Hoff. In 1918 the cabinetmaker and architect Gerrit Rietveld joined the movement and carried its ideas into objects and architecture.

Neoplasticism

Mondrian called this research Nieuwe Beelding, Neoplasticism. Its vocabulary is extremely strict: only straight horizontal and vertical lines, rectangular surfaces, the three primary colours (red, yellow and blue) together with white, black and grey. No decoration and no imitation of nature: the composition comes from the balance between lines, surfaces and colours.

The Red and Blue Chair and the Schröder House

Rietveld's Red and Blue Chair is the movement's manifesto in the form of an object: designed in 1918 in natural wood, it took on the colours that made it famous in the early 1920s. Slats, seat and back remain separate elements that cross without merging.

In 1924 Rietveld built the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, the only building made entirely according to the principles of De Stijl, with sliding walls that transform the interior. Since 2000 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The diagonal and the end of the group

In the mid-1920s van Doesburg proposed Elementarism, which introduced the diagonal line to give the composition dynamism. Mondrian, faithful to right angles, broke with the group. Meanwhile van Doesburg spread the ideas of De Stijl in Germany, with the courses he gave in Weimar in 1921-22 alongside the Bauhaus, and in France, with the interiors of the Aubette in Strasbourg (1929), made with Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp.

With van Doesburg's death in Davos in 1931, the movement came to an end. Yet its legacy is everywhere: in graphic design, in modern architecture and in many objects that still play with clean lines and primary colours today.