Stijl, de, (`The Style') art movement founded by the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg in Leiden in 1917. Founder members of the group included the painter Mondrian, the sculptor Vantongerloo, the architect J.J.P. Oud and the designer and architect Rietveld. In October 1917 van Doesberg started a magazine, which took its name from the group, De Stijl. Mondrian's article, `The New Plastic in Painting', best expresses their ideas for a universal, elemental art divorced from the need to serve representation: `The new plastic art...can only be based on the abstraction of all form and colour, i.e. the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour'(Lemoine, 1987, p.29).

`Neo-Plasticism'(a name by which de Stijl is alternately known) rejected figuration as the goal of art and replaced it with the pared-down vocabulary of elemental shapes and primary colours, thereby allowing art to express its own `plastic' language free of the concerns of representation. The artist in this environment became less author of a subjective artwork than the agent of a universal harmony. The depesonalisation of the artwork was carried through into the execution which was anonymous and impersonal, as in Mondrian's `Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue' (1930); although many De Stijl paintings are abstractions of natural phenomena, such as van Doesburg's `Rhythms of a Russian Dance' (1918).

In the 1920s, while Mondrian's work adhered to the strict principles of Neo-Plasticism, van Doesberg sought to broaden the influence of the movement into architecture. The austere forms of De Stijl were well suited to the geometric structures favoured by the >International Modernist movement, while the primary colours favoured by the painters could be used as decorative elements to articulate an otherwise plain facade, as in Oud's `Caf‚ De Unie' in Rotterdam (1925). Likewise, Rietveld's `Red and Blue Chair' (1917), painted in primary colours and revealing its structure, offers itself for analysis like a Mondrian painting.

The principles of De Stijl art and design had considerabble influence on the >Bauhaus in the 1920s, and after Mondrian's emmigration to New York in 1940, the U.S.A.

P. Overy, De Stijl (1969); K. Frampton, `De Stijl, in T. Richardson, and N. Stangos, (eds.) Concepts of Modern Art (1974); De Stijl: 1917-1931, Visions of Utopia (1982); N. J. Troy, The De Stijl Environment (1983); C. Blotkamp et al. De Stijl: The Formative Years [1982] (1986).