De Stijl, or Neo-Plasticism as it is sometimes called, was a movement in both architecture and design that arrived on the shirttails of the Bauhaus movement and spread from Germany throughout Western Europe. De Stijl, which means "the style," was spawned... [more]
De Stijl, or Neo-Plasticism as it is sometimes called, was a movement in both architecture and design that arrived on the shirttails of the Bauhaus movement and spread from Germany throughout Western Europe.
De Stijl, which means "the style," was spawned in Holland by the Dadaist ideas of the 1920s. An undercurrent of Theosophism flowed from their strongest ideas, many of which never got further than the drawing board. De Stijl turned out to be an exploration of form that involved both formal and spiritual minimalism.
The De Stijl group relied on explicit use of primary colors. The "Red/Blue chair" by Gerrit Rietveld is well-known in Modernist circles and now stands as an icon for the De Stijl movement. It is essentially a Mondrian painting realized into a three-dimensional form. With its primary color scheme, hard-edged horizontal surfaces, and angular placement of the seat in relation to the arms, it rose above traditional art and into abstraction -' a point they believed would bring them closer to metaphysical synthesis. [show less]