Piet Mondrian & Theo van Doesburg

De Stijl

De Stijl was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 by artists and architects based in Leiden, Voorburg, and Laren. It propagated its theories through a journal edited by Theo van Doesburg. Its founding principle—neoplasticism—used only straight horizontal and vertical lines, rectangles, and primary colours plus black, white, and grey to access a spiritual reality beyond appearance. Around 1924, it abandoned those constraints for Elementarism: diagonals, energetic colour, and rejection of harmony. It avoided symmetry, achieving balance through opposition—embodying 'stijl' as structural support, like a crossing joint. It ended in 1931 with van Doesburg’s death.