Stijl, De

Influential movement in art, architecture, and design founded in 1917 in the Netherlands. The focus of the movement was an attempt to simplify art to pure abstraction; form was reduced to rectangles and other geometric shapes, while colour was limited to the primary colours and black and white. The De Stijl group wanted to bring art and design together in a single coherent, simplified system. Its best-known member was the abstract painter Piet Mondrian. The group's main theorist and publicist was Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), and his death in 1931 effectively marked its end.

The influence of De Stijl was deeply felt in architecture and design during the 1930s. The architects Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, for example, were attracted by its comprehensiveness and radical simplicity, and it stimulated the direction of study at the Bauhaus.

The group published a journal, also called De Stijl (‘Style’), which ran from 1917 to 1931. The movement has also been called ‘neoplasticism’, from a pamphlet of that name published by the artists in Paris in 1920. The leading figures of De Stijl included Mondrian, the painter, designer, and writer Theo van Doesburg, the architect Jacobus Oud (1890–1963), and the architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964).