Impersonal Best: On to Utopia

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Minneapolis, a major show of De Stijl

A vintage cartoon by Saul Steinberg shows a baroque room, all gold and curlicues; in it, a maestro is delicately prodding at a canvas filled with a grid of straight lines -- a Mondrian, pure and polemical, red-yellow-blue-gray-white-black, utterly incongruous against the florid decor of the 19th century. How could Europe produce the painting within 70 years or so of finishing the room? That in effect is the question posed by "De Stijl, 1917-1931: Visions of Utopia," an exhibition that opened last month at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and will go to Washington's Hirshhorn Museum later in the spring. Organized with exemplary intelligence by the Walker's design curator, Mildred Friedman, it brings together nearly 300 paintings, studies, items of furniture, sculpture, stained-glass panels and architectural reconstructions. The catalogue, published as a book by Abbeville Press, contains essays by a dozen specialists and be comes, at once, the best English text on its subject.

Everyone knows something about Piet Mondrian; barely a detail of his life has escaped the attention of aspiring Ph.D.s, from the fantastic fox-trot routines that earned him the nickname the "dancing madonna," to the exact spot where an artificial tulip stood in his Paris studio (painted white, leaves and all, so as not to offend his eye with the detestable color green). Like Kandinsky, the other fa ther figure of abstract painting, he was a Theosophist: a man given to dreams of the millennium, when material reality would wither away and leave an ideal domain of the pure spirit. Art would help in this great, vague process. Though words were hard to sunder from the sublunary mire of things, art could become intrinsically abstract, as pure an example of internal harmony as music.

Mondrian was not the only Dutch artist to pursue the dream of social renewal through ideal abstraction--though he was the most gifted one. What of his less renowned colleagues, painters like Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leek and Georges Vantongerloo, architect-designers like J.J.P. Oud or Gerrit Rietveld? Though they all used much the same language of geometrical shapes, primary colors and rectilinear layout, their variety as artists is faithfully rendered in the show.

There is all the difference in the world, for instance, between a work like Mondrian's Composition with Line (Pier and Ocean), 1917, and Van Doesburg's Countercomposition V, 1924. One is a reduction of atmosphere and light, the twinkling and palpitation of reflections on the flat sheet of the northern sea that Mondrian used to gaze at, hour after hour, during his walks at Scheveningen; it is transparent and delicate, reaching stability through addition. By contrast, the Van Doesburg throws an almost physical blast of color from its surface; the tilted red square is both monumental and unstable, fierce in its intensity.

But the artists of De Stijl wanted to submerge their personalities in the collective. "Although we differ individually," wrote Van Doesburg in 1919, "we all live for the same cause. We should concentrate solely on that. Then attention is automatically diverted from our own personality." The cultural aim of these reductions and renunciations? In four words: to change the world. To a very small extent, the Stijl group succeeded in this, since its theory of design helped banish ornament from all objects of everyday use, egg-cups to architecture.

The fact that we have no authentic decorative style, only a menu of designers' revivals, is partly due to these Dutch missionaries, who, in the '20s, marched brandishing their red-yellow-blue crucifixes through the dark Congo of impure form.

De Stijl was not far from a religious movement--Dutch Calvinist piety in the realm of art. Its name, first used as the title of the group's magazine when Van Doesburg started it in 1917, and later transferred to the artists themselves, meant The Style--the last one, the one and only, suggesting some final mutation of art and thus the end of art history itself.

Around 1920 the quest for an ultimate style that would correspond to social revolution and human self-improvement was one of the great issues of avant-garde art, the hope of the constructivist Internationale. And it became so for two main reasons: the growth of Utopian collectivist thought (mainly, but not only, Marxist) and the recoil from the horrors of World War I. "The period of destruction is totally finished," announced a De Stijl maniesto in 1923. "A new period begins: that of construction." It is a younger version of he sentiment hauntingly expressed in Dryden's Secular Masque:

All, all of a piece throughout:

Thy chase had a beast in view;

Thy wars brought nothing

about;

Thy lovers were all untrue.

'Tis well an old age is out,

And time to begin a new.

"All of a piece throughout"--that, certainly, was true of De Stijl design. Its aesthetic was seamless, from painting to furniture to architecture, where it made few concessions to the flabby and imperfect human body. Gerrit Rietveld's penitential chairs, rigidly geometric and painted in their bright, winking primaries, go far beyond the ordinary level of Bauhaus discomfort as practiced in the '20s. Yet one cannot imagine Rietveld's masterpiece, the tiny Schroder house in Utrecht, being furnished with anything else. Such interiors were not open to redecoration: the pattern is absolute, the space a sermon. One would need to be the truest of believers to live in such a house, as Mrs. Truus Schroeder-Schraeder, who commissioned it from Rietveld in 1923, and still lives there in her 90s, apparently is.

Rietveld came out of a craft tradition and wanted to take design back into it, achieving a synthesis of "high" art and "low" craft. This never went beyond its prototypes. The Dutch did not want to live in such houses or sit in such chairs. Manufacturers did not want to make them. Finally, the belief in progress and human enlightenment, on which De Stijl depended, encountered the brutal history that came in the '30s and '40s. And so, at this far remove, De Stijl retains its fascination as one of the subtlest tissues of Utopian ideas in the history of Western culture. But it is a vision that is proper to museums, and to art; we know that it cannot come true.

-- By Robert Hughes

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