Back in Stijl

Nothing could sound more universal than the Style, or de Stijl as its Dutch founders dubbed it in 1917. That was precisely what they wanted: a pure, pristine art that pierced beyond the world of appearances and individuals. In achieving it, de Stijl changed and unified the appearance of the world.

The staggered buildings of city planning, the glass boxes of much modern architecture, advertising layouts, type faces, furniture, all stem from the taste of de Stijl and other geometrically influenced art isms of the 20th century. Fundamentally, de Stijl's hallmarks were 1) the right angle, 2) the primary colors (red, blue and yellow), 3) asymmetrical composition. Since these rarely occur in nature, they are the closest to abstract art.

But the Dutch art movement, whose standard-bearer was Piet Mondrian, made more than rules for good design. It was a heavily Platonic philosophy of art, carried out in mighty Pythagorean paintings, that saw pure beauty as the universal means of reaching Utopia. Wrote Mondrian: "Abstract art is opposed to the raw primitive animal nature of man, but it is one with true human nature."

Oddly, Mondrian's art paralleled the rather raw expressionism of his countryman, Van Gogh, until he was 37. Then, influenced by cubism, he began simplifying what he saw to horizontal and vertical lines. Flowering apple trees, building fronts, jetties into the sea soon dissolved into what he called "plus-and-minus" rhythms. He wrote that he was searching for a higher "reality detached from the transitory reality of forms."

In 1916 Mondrian met Bart Van der Leek, whose work (see opposite page), though sometimes representational, dealt with pure colors in flat planes. They tried to remove the traditional moat between the picture and the viewer. Mondrian's late paintings can be seen as the visible imprint of an invisible pattern surrounding the viewer. Even the walls of his stark studio were hung with movable panels that he rearranged to suit his desire, in effect making the studio a spatial work of art. Van der Leek used white in his work not as background but as space that separated his flecks of color, like atoms locked together in the Tinker Toy of their own energy.

Artists all over the Western world took constructive geometry as their guide through the 1920s and '30s. Even the names told the story: a Polish group called Blok, an international survey on the subject called Circle, the famed architecture school called Bauhaus.

Though Mondrian has been dead for two decades, the grip of de Stijl's geometry has never lessened, as is demonstrated in the 80-odd paintings on show at Manhattan's Marlborough-Gerson Gallery. Among the younger Dutch painters, Joost Baljeu, 39, makes mechanical totems of an order beyond emotion. U.S. Artist Charles Biederman, 58, saw that his mentor Mondrian had reached "the very limit permitted by the old hand medium of paint." He lays down the brush for what he calls "the new art tools of man"--machines --and makes his metal reliefs look un touched by human hands.

The haphazard crackling of aging oils is time's contemptuous comment on Mondrian's ice-pure ideals. He himself wrote in the mid-'20s that he preferred "a more or less mechanical execution" using "materials produced by industry," because de Stijl sought a rapport with the new technology that Van Gogh and other 19th century artists generally detested. In essence, the Stijlists felt that since the machine cannot make nature, it must if properly used make art.

*Including suprematism in Russia, purism in France, vorticism in England, futurism in Italy, and constructivism in Russia.

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