Overy, Paul : De Stijl

De Stijl (‘The Style’) was the name given to the work of the architects, designers and artists associated with the magazine of the same name edited by Theo van Doesburg and founded in Holland in 1917. De Stijl was international in its outlook: in contact with the Bauhaus and the Russian Constructivists, it helped to create the ideology and formal language of modernism.

Mondrian is De Stijl’s best-known artist, while Oud, Wils, Huszár and Rietveld were its major architects and designers. Their aim was an objective art concerned with universal values, expressed in primary geometric forms and pure colours. In this book, De Stijl is reassessed by Paul Overy in the light of Post-modernist debates and documentary material only recently made available.

Paul Overy, who died in August 2008, was Senior Research Fellow in the history and theory of modernism at Middlesex University, London. His publications also include books on Wassily Kandinsky, Norman Foster, and the architecture and furniture of Gerrit Rietveld.