Politics

The First World War started with the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914. In the months immediately following, refugees who came from Belgium, Germany and France, flooded The Netherlands.

The Netherlands was neutral in the First World War, Dutch artists were not able to leave the country after 1914 and were effectively isolated from the international art world. During that period, Dutch artists and intellectuals began to look inward and re-examine their own culture and re-define the role of their small country in the future of modern Europe. Doesburg astutely took advantage of this situation; he started to up a journal for like-minded artist and creative people, and was able to organise and promote De Stijl as the Dutch contribution to modernism. This was an attempt to construct a new modernizing national style in a country isolated by its own neutrality caught between two warring nations.

Mondrian caught in Holland by the war between 1914 and 1919, teamed up with van Doesburg and van der Leck. Mondrian was hesitant at first, because he expected that the conflict would quickly end and he would return to Paris, but eventually he embraced De Stijl and constructed strict rules that he adhered to when painting. In general, he proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms. Furthermore, their formal vocabulary was limited to the primary colours red, yellow and blue and the three primary values black, white and grey. The works avoided symmetry and attained aesthetic balance by the use of opposition.

De Stijl was a utopian vision that had been born into a Europe devastated by war. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour.

These minimalistic philosophies and a hope for a new utopia mirror the same hopes of the revolutionaries in Russia in the same period. In 1919 painter Chris Beekman received a letter from Jan Wills discussing the idea of contacting the communist party: "I am firstly convinced that communism is also bound to enter our country very soon. I should immediately add that I am a communist through and through... fervently and eternally... we should contact communist leaders within this country and abroad without delay." (Wils. 3, 1919)

Although there are many parallels between communism and De Stijl, it was never a communist movement, mainly because it was not really an art movement, more of a loose collaboration of artists and archetects held together by van Doesburg. However, there were a few advocates of communism, van Doesburg revels his communist ideals in a letter to Chris Beekman in 1919: "Although we differ individually, we all live for the same cause. We should concentrate solely on that." (van Doesburg. T, 1919)