Theo van Doesburg was born Christiaan Emil Marie Küpper in Utrecht. Later he took the surname of his stepfather. Actually he wanted to become an actor but he began to study painting at the age of 19. At the same time he earned his living with art criticism for a magazine.
During his military service in Tilburg in 1915 he came across a criticism of an exhibition of Piet Mondrian. Together, the two artists founded the magazine "De Stijl" in Leiden in 1917, from which the entire artistic movement of the same name for a "total abstraction" was born. Architecture and art were to be brought together, simplified geometric elements becoming their new language. Van Doesburg explained: "What the cross represents for the early Christians, the square represents for us. "The square will conquer the cross." However, van Doesburg and Mondrian's collaboration on "De Stijl" later broke up over the question of whether the use of diagonals in abstract paintings was permissible. While van Doesburg was in favor of this, Mondrian was against it.
Van Doesburg was fascinated by Dadaism. In 1922 he founded the Dada magazine Mécano and moved to Weimar, where he temporarily taught as a private lecturer under Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus. He went on a Dada tour through the Netherlands with Kurt Schwitters. The poster for the "Small Dada Soirée" is a visual cacophony of slogans in different languages, overwritten by one another, which contradict one another in a way typical of Dada: "Dada is against the future, Dada is dead, Dada is idiotic, long live Dada!
At the beginning of 1931 van Doesburg fell ill and moved to Davos in Switzerland, where he died of a heart attack a few weeks later.
Theo van Doesburg was born Christiaan Emil Marie Küpper in Utrecht. Later he took the surname of his stepfather. Actually he wanted to become an actor but he began to study painting at the age of 19. At the same time he earned his living with art criticism for a magazine.
During his military service in Tilburg in 1915 he came across a criticism of an exhibition of Piet Mondrian. Together, the two artists founded the magazine "De Stijl" in Leiden in 1917, from which the entire artistic movement of the same name for a "total abstraction" was born. Architecture and art were to be brought together, simplified geometric elements becoming their new language. Van Doesburg explained: "What the cross represents for the early Christians, the square represents for us. "The square will conquer the cross." However, van Doesburg and Mondrian's collaboration on "De Stijl" later broke up over the question of whether the use of diagonals in abstract paintings was permissible. While van Doesburg was in favor of this, Mondrian was against it.
Van Doesburg was fascinated by Dadaism. In 1922 he founded the Dada magazine Mécano and moved to Weimar, where he temporarily taught as a private lecturer under Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus. He went on a Dada tour through the Netherlands with Kurt Schwitters. The poster for the "Small Dada Soirée" is a visual cacophony of slogans in different languages, overwritten by one another, which contradict one another in a way typical of Dada: "Dada is against the future, Dada is dead, Dada is idiotic, long live Dada!
At the beginning of 1931 van Doesburg fell ill and moved to Davos in Switzerland, where he died of a heart attack a few weeks later.
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