97861 INTERIOR TEXTOS 001-318 ING_168X230 21/10/15 16:32 Página 33
It is perhaps not surprising that a Calvinist country like the Netherlands, with some forty Protestant denominations, produced two such principled and forthright men of ideas on modern art: Pieter Cornelis (Piet) Mondrian (1872– 1944)—the most important theoretician of the De Stijl movement (1917–1930)—and Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, known simply as Constant (1920–2005). Their utopian ideas about a future society and the plastic manifestation of that society had great international influence on both art and architecture. In essence, their ideas were diametrically opposed, but they do come close in some respects. Almost literally, in fact, as Constant was inspired by Mondrian on more than one occasion.1 And also in a more figurative sense, because their utopias, which were to be imposed on humanity as a kind of totalitarian model, had similar aims.2
Origins of Their Ideals The ideas of these two artists can be seen as the extremes of two sets of ideas in twentieth-century art that broadly fanned out in two directions. These ideas can be categorized as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” The seeds of both had been sown in the late nineteenth century, perhaps even earlier. These ideas were first proposed by two English thinkers who were active in the art world in the second half of the nineteenth century: theoretician and critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) and designer and activist William Morris (1834– 1896). Their abhorrence of the soulless products of the industry that was emerging at the time led them to campaign for a return to craftsmanship. They took as their ideal the guild system of the medieval period. Their quest and Morris’s practical efforts led, around 1880, to the arts and crafts movement, whose influence would extend throughout the Western world and even beyond. Driven by socialist ideas and inspired by Karl Marx (1818–1883), Morris called upon people to return to working as simple craftsmen. His ideal was a community from which a kind of folk art would once more emerge. A divergence of opinion arose when, in the early twentieth century, this school of thought embraced industry—first via the Deutscher Werkbund (Munich, 1907) and then via the Bauhaus (Weimar, 1919). This was prompted by the notion that mechanical production based on good design could provide the people with aesthetically sound products on a much larger scale than manual production ever could, handmade products being reserved for the better-off members of society. The primitivist ideal of “self-activity” also continued to follow its own path, appearing several times during the first half of twentiethcentury: in the German expressionist movement Die Brücke (1905–1913) 33