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Biography of Theo van DoesburgName: Theo van DoesburgBirth Date: August 30, 1883 Death Date: March 7, 1931 Place of Birth: Utrecht, Netherlands Nationality: Dutch Gender: Male Occupations: artist Theo van Doesburg The Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) was one of the founders of the modern art movement called de Stijl and the chief promoter of its ideas.Theo van Doesburg whose real name was C. E. M. Kupper, was born on Aug. 30, 1883, in Utrecht. He was involved in painting and interior decorating and writing on art, but it was only in 1917 after he had met the painter Piet Mondrian that Van Doesburg formulated his ideas clearly. The two painters founded the group de Stijl (the Style) and the avant-garde review of the same name when they and several other artists established a number of common aspirations which formed the basis of the movement.Van Doesburg's temperament made him the public leader of the group. He was an impulsive and vigorous man, with strong likes and dislikes, in contrast to the far more reticent and cautious Mondrian. De Stijl esthetic was based …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…interested in the Bauhaus, which had recently been founded in Germany. In the 1920s his interests progressively widened, and he wrote about these new interests in his articles for the De Stijl review; these articles helped to change the direction of the movement. Finally, he formulated a more dynamic version of de Stijl and published this as a manifesto of what he called elementarism. He continued to experiment with novel ideas, both in writing and painting, and collaborated with the painter Jean Arp. Just before his death on March 7, 1931, in Davos, Switzerland, Van Doesburg helped found the Abstraction-Création group in Paris. Further Reading Most of the writing on Van Doesburg is in Dutch. Two useful discussions of de Stijl and Van Doesburg's role in the movement are in Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960; 2d ed. 1967), and H. L. C. Jaffé, De Stijl (1964). |