De Stijl

De Stijl (Dutch for The Style) was a circle of Dutch abstract painters and architects founded in 1917, together with the journal of the same name that spread their ideas. The movement promoted an art of strict geometry built exclusively from horizontals and verticals, right angles and flat planes, and a restricted palette of the three primary colours—red, yellow and blue—together with black, white and grey. Its adherents sought a universal, impersonal harmony purified of individual emotion and natural form, a philosophy that Piet Mondrian named Neoplasticism, also championed by Theo van Doesburg. Its most celebrated painter was Piet Mondrian, known for his balanced grid compositions, while its most famous three-dimensional expressions were Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue Chair and his Schröder House in Utrecht. The ideas of De Stijl had a profound impact on architecture, design, typography and the Bauhaus, becoming one of the cornerstones of the modernist pursuit of formal purity, clarity and rational order in the twentieth century.