Painting as Model

YVE-AWN BOIS

.. -

An OCTOBER Rook

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

@ 1990 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I S 9 0

Figures 1-11 and 8 8 copyright 1990 Succession H. Matisse/ARS N.Y. Figures 12, 14, 17, 19-21, 23-24, and 26 copyright 1990 ARS N.Y./SPADEM. Figures 29-30.34, and 63-64 copyright 1991 Estate of Piet Mondrian, d o Estate of Harry Holtzman, New York, N.Y. Figures 66-81 copyright Annalee Newman. MI rights reserved. No p a n of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic o r mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, o r information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in ITC Garamond by DEKR Corporation and printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bois, Yve Main. Painting as model / Yve-Main Bois. p. cm. An October book. Includes bibliographical references ISBN 0-262-02306-7 1. Painting-Philosophy. I. Title. ND1140.B59 1990 750'.1---dc20

The De Stijl Idea

There are three ways of defining De Stijl, and all three are used simultaneously by Theo van Doesburg in his 1927 retrospective article on the movement:' De Stijl as ajournuf, De Stijl as agroup of artists assembled around this publication, and De Stijl as an idea shared by the members of this group. The first definition is the most convenient, for it is derived from a definite corpus: the first issue of the journal appeared in Leiden in October 1917, the last in 1932, as a posthumous homage to van Doesburg shortly after his death in a Swiss sanatorium. Yet the very eclecticism of the journal, its openness to all aspects of the European avant-garde, could lead one to doubt that De Stijl had any specific identity as a movement. According to this definition, everything that appeared jn ~e ~ t i jis l "De Stijl." But to rank the dadaists Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, and Hans Richter, the Italian futurist Gino Severini, the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky, and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi among the "main collaborators" of De Stijl, as van Doesburg does in his recapitulatory chart of 1927 (not to mention the inclusion of Aldo Camini and I. K. Bonset, that is, van Doesburg himself under a futurist and a dadaist guise), is to miss entirely what made the strength and the unity of the Dutch avant-garde group.Z Indeed, it is the second definition, that of De Stijl as a restricted group, that is the most commonly accepted. It establishes a simple hierarchy, based on historical precedence, between a handful of Dutch founding fathers and a heteroclite detachment of new cosmopolitan recruits who joined at various times to fill the gaps left by defecting members. Generally speaking, the founding fathers are those who signed the Firsf Manifesto of De Stijl, published in November 1918: the painters Piet Mondrian and the Hungarian-born Vilmos Huszar, the architects Jan Wils and Robert van't Hoff, the Belgian sculptor Georges Vantongerloo, the poet Antony Kok (who published little), and of course van Doesburg, the bornme-&ewe, the only real link between the members of the group and mainspring of the movement. To those

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names one must add that of the painter Bart van der Leck (who had already left De Stijl before the publication of this manifesto), and that of the architects Gerrit Rietveld and J. J. P. Oud (the former had not yet joined the group at this point, although he had already produced an unpainted version of the RedandBlue Chair, whichin its painted form-was to become the landmark of the movement; the latter never signed any collective text). The new recruits, with the exception of the architect Cornelis van Eesteren, all pursued careers independently from De Stijl and were only briefly associated with the movement when it was already approaching the end of its course. For example, the American musician George Antheil, who got his degree in avant-gardism with his score for Femand Uger's film Ballet dcanique; the creators of reliefs, Cesar Domela and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart; the architect and sculptor Frederick Kiesler; and the industrial designer Werner G S . But despite its usefulness, this second definition turns out to be only slightly more precise than the first, based as it is on what seems to be a purely circumstantial criterion of inclusion. It cannot explain, for example, van der Leck's defection from the movement during its first year, o r Wils's and van't Hoff's during the second, Oud's during the fourth, Huszar's and Vantongerloo's during the fifih, and finally that of Mondrian in 1925. There remains therefore the third definition, De Stijl as an idea: "it is from the De Stijl idea that the De Stijl movement gradually developed," writes van Doesburg in his retrospective article. Although this definition seems the most vague of the three, it turns out, by its conceptual nature (as opposed to the purely empirical character of the two others), to be the most restrictive. Moreover, it is the only one that can take into account that "De Stijl" means not only "the Style" but even more ambitiously "Thestyle." What follows is an attempt at a brief presentation of this "idea."

De Stijl was a typically modernist movement, whose theory was grounded on

those two ideological pillars of modernism, historicism and essentialism. On historicism, because on the one hand De Stijl conceived of its production as the logical culmination of the art of the past, and on the other because it prophesied in quasiHegelian terms the inwitable dissolution of art into an all-encompassing sphere ("life" o r "the environment"). On essentialism, because the motor of this slow historical process was an ontological quest: each art was to "realize" its own "nature" by purging itself of everything that was not specific to it, by revealing its materials and codes, and in doing so by working toward the institution of a "universal plastic language." None of this was particularly original, although De Stijl's formulation of this modernist theory developed quite early on. The specificity of De Stijl lies else-

The De Stgl Idea

where: in the idea that a single generative principle might apply to all the arts without compromising their integrity, and moreover, that it is only on the basis of such a principle that the autonomy of each art can be secured. Although this principle was never explicitly formulated as such by any of the movement's members, I would say that it involves two operations that I would like to call elementarization and integration. Elementarization, that is, the analysis of each practice into discrete components and the reduction of these components to a few irreducible elements. Integration, that is, the exhaustive articulation of these elements into a syntactically indivisible, nonhierarchical whole. The second operation rests upon a structural principle (like the phonemes of verbal language, the visual elements in question are meaningful only through their differences). This principle is a totalizing one: no element is more important than any other, and none must escape integration. The mode of articulation stemming from this principle is not additive (as in minimalism, for example) but exponential (hence De Stijl's blanket rejection of r e p e t i t i ~ n ) . ~ This general principle rapidly displaced the ontological question-the "What is the essence of painting o r architecturen-by leading artists to consider the question of delimitation, of what distinguishes a work of art from its context. As a result, all of the De Stijl painters were interested in playing with the frame and the polyptych format: see for example Mine Triptych (Composition 1916, no. 4) by van der Leck (1920, Dienst (fig. 27), o r Composition XVIII in three parts, by Theo van ~ o e s b u r g Verspreide Rijkskollecties, The Hague)." The logic of this shift goes something like this: as a constitutive element of every form of artistic practice, the limit (frame, boundary, edge, base) must itself be both elementarized and integrated; but its integration will remain incomplete as long as the inside and the outside (which the limit articulates) lack a common denominator, that is, as long as the outside itself has not also been subject to the same treatment. Thus, De Stijl's environmental utopia, however naive it may seem to us today, was no mere ideological dream, but a corollary of the movement's general principle. However, this utopia, which is an essential motif of Mondrian's writings, did not prevent him from treating his paintings as isolated objects, as independent entities (and the same can be said for Rietveld's furniture). For the general principle had first to be realized within each individual art form, before they could be joined together and then integrated into the larger world. De Stijl was initially a congregation of painters, to which the architects later joined (according to legend, it is this addition that compelled van der Leck to flee), and it was the painters who laid the foundation for De Stijl's "general principle."

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27. Bmf yan der lack, Composition 1916, no. 4 (Mine Triptych) [Mijntriptiekl 1916. Oil on c a q 113 X 222.3 (44V2 X 87'/2 in.). Diensf Vkxpreide RghcoIIekties, on loan to the Genwerttemusacrn, 7be Hague. Photo SedeIgk Musacm.

Although only Mondrian managed to fully translate this principle into practice, with the elaboration of his neoplastic oeuvre from 1920 on, both van der Leck and Huszar contributed to its formulation. It is known that van der Leck wasthe first to elementarize color (Mondrian credited his own use ofthe primary colors to him)? but he was never able to achieve the integration of all the elements of his canvases. As "abstract" as some of his paintings may seem (and through the direct influence of Mondrian on his work he almost reached total abstraction in 1916-18), he never relinquished an illusionistic conception of space. The white ground of his paintings behaves like a neutral zone, an empty container that exists prior to the inscription of forms. Thus it is not surprising that van der Leck left the movement in 1918 to "return" to figuration (the ostensible reason he gave for his desertion, that is, the invasion of the journal by architects, was only a pretext): once the other painters had solved the problem of the ground, van der Leck found that he no longer spoke the same language. As for Huszar, a handfi~l of compositions-among them, the 1917 cover design for De Stw and a 1919 canvas entitled Hammer a n d Saw (the only painting ever to his one pictorial contribution to the be reproduced in color in De Stijl)-reveal movement, namely the elementarization of the ground, or rather of the figure/ ground relationship, which he reduced to a binary opposition. In one of his most

7;beDe Stiji Idea

successful works, a black and white linocut published in De St# (fig. 28), it is impossible to discern the figure from the ground. Unfortunately Huszar stopped there and even regressed, for, like van der Leck, he was incapable of integrating other pictorial elements into his work. Having begun with the latter's illusionistic conception of space (see Huszar's 1917 painting CompositionII, Skaters, in the Gemeentemuseum o f The Hague), he returned to it in his mediocre figurative works of the 1920s.These are too often antedated by dealers, though having nothing whatsoever to d o with the principle of De Stijl. Having perfectly assimilated the lessons of cubism while he was in Paris in 1912-14, Mondrian was much faster than the other members of De Stijl to resolve the question of abstraction; thus he was able to devote all his attention to the issue of integration. His first concern, after the choice ofprimary colors, was to unite figure and ground into an inseparable entity, but without restricting himself to a binary solution, as Huszar had done, for this would jeopardize the possibility of a full play of color. The evolution that led him from his cubist work to his three first breakthrough canvases of 1917 (the "triptych" mentioned in note 4: Composition in Color A, Conzposition in Color B, and Composition with Black Lines), and from there to neoplasticism is too complex to be analyzed here in detaiL6 Let us simply note that Mondrian managed to rid his pictorial vocabulary of the "neutral ground" a h van der Leck only after he had used a modular grid in nine of his canvases (1918-19; see fig. 29). The problem Mondrian faced was the elementarization of the division of his

28. VifmasHcmar, Composition 6, 1918. Linocur, printed in De Stijl I , no. 6 (April 1918), 11.4 X 14.4 cm (4'/2 X 5% in.).

I1 Abstraction I

29. Pier ~tlondrian, Lozenge with Gray Lines [Imsangique diizgonaf met grijze lijnenl 1918.Oil on canLpas, 121 o n (47% in.). Gerneenfernuseum,Tbe Hague. Pbofo o f r k museum.

paintings, that is, finding an irreducible system for the repartition of his colored planes, a system grounded on one single element (hence the use of the modular grid, the module being o f the same proportions as the surface of the very painting it is dividing).' Mondrian very quickly abandoned this device, which he found regressive because it is based on repetition and privileges only one type of relationship between the various parts of the painting (univocal engendering). But in passing the modular grid allowed him to solve an essential opposition, not considered by the other members of De Stijl, that of color/noncolor. Back in Paris by mid-1919,he spent the next year and a half ridding the canvas of the regular grid: the first truly neoplastic painting is Composition in Red, Yellow, andBlue (fig.30), which dates from the end o f 1920. Van Doesburg, on the contrary, needed the grid throughout his life; for him it constituted a guarantee against the arbitrariness of the sign. Despite appearances and despite his formulations that sometimes bear "mathematical" pretensions, van Doesburg remained paralyzed by the question of abstraction: if a composition must be "abstract," it had to be "justified by "mathematical" computations, its geometrical

7 2 De ~ Stijl Idea

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30. Pief Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue [Composition met rood, gee1 and blauwl 1920. Oil on canLwi, 51.5 X 61 cm (20vr X 235/8 in.).Sfedefijk Museum, Amslerdarn. Pbofoof the museum.

configuration had to be motivated. Before he arrived at the grid formula (through his work in decorative an, especially stained-glass windows), this obsession made him hesitate for a long time berween the pictorial system of Huszar (see van Doesburg's Composition IX-Car&fa~emof 1917, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague) and that of van der Leck (CompositionXI, 1918, Guggenheim Museum). Then it led him to a concern with the stylization of natural motifs (a cow, a portrait, a still life, or a dancer as, for example, in W t h m of a Rwian Dance [1918], for which all the sketches remain in the Museum of Modern Art in New York). He even tried for a shon period to apply this type of "explanation" to his modular works (as in the absurd presentation he made, in 1919, of his Co?nposition in DLssonarzces as an abstraction jkm "a young woman in the artist's studio" [fig. 31]).8 But this was a false trail, for if van Doesburg was seduced by the system of the grid, it was for its repetitive and further for itsprojectitle nature (since it is decided beforehand and applied onto the picture plane whose material characteristics are of no importance). That is, for the very reason that led Mondrian to consider this system foreign to the De Stijl idea, thus to abandon it.Wence the famous quarrel about "Elementarism" (the extremely inap-

31. Tbeo van Doesburg, Studies, 1919. 7?9issequencewasfirstpub[irhedby can Doesburg in De Hollandsche revue 24, no. 8 (1913) as illustrationfor one of his artkles, entitled "Van 'mfuur'tot 'bmpositie"' [FromNature to Composition]. It was again djmen by him as an illustrationfor thefitst qmputhtic and lengtky st& amdaoted to De Sf$ (Friedricb Markus Huebner, "DieHolliindAcbe SQl-Gmppe,'" Das Feuer 2, no. 5 (Oct.-Na? z atelier" 13-31),pp. 267-278; each of the ei@t images bears the caption ' ~ f l i d d 'irn [YozcngWoman in the Studio]).n3e last image of the sequence & Composition in Dissonances [Compositie in dissonanrenl 1918. Oil on canLao, 63.5 X 58.5 cm (25 X 23 in.). ~ and u ~ a b o uoftbe l ~ SLYstudies are OeflentIilicFM KmlSammlurzg, LkwBasel. 7 2 dlinensio?zs ul2knouw. bawd blany uork by Van Doeshzrrg dated from 1917 to I920 ure acknozc)ledged(y on studiesj-om mature, graa'zra[b "abstracted"But am7 afier he bad abandoned tl~3p1-0C N under tlx injluezce of Afondrian,be retained in the publications of his earlier uorks tlx '~dagogical" de~vce of tlx linear sequence stat?ingh.fi.om a plwtograph and ending uith a geomehicalpaitzting.He used it as late as in his Bauhaus book (Grundbegriffe der Neuen Gesteltenden Kunst Olunicb:Albert h n g m , 1925;English h. Janet Seligtnan, Principles of Neo-Plastic Art [London: Lund Humpln-ies, 19G8]), where he "explainedin such a manner the elaboration of Composition Vlll (The Cow), 1917 (hIu.oeum of modern An, New York).

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32. 7 2 % Lnn ~ Doesbttrg, Counter-composition XVI in Dissonance, 1925.Oil on cantus, 1 1 0 0 X 180 cm (3% X 70% in.). Gemeentmusatm, n?Je Hague.Phoro o f tbe museum.

propriate word chosen by van Doesburg to label his introduction of the oblique into the formal vocabulary of neoplasticism in 1925, as for example in his Counter-composition XVI kn Dksonance of the same year [fig.321). As is well known, it is this quarrel that led Mondrian to leave De Stijl in 1925. But if Mondrian violently rejected van Doesburg's "improvement," as the latter referred to it, it is not so much because it disregarded the formal rule of orthogonality (which he himself had broken in his own "lozangique" canvases, as he called them) as because in a single stroke it destroyed all the movement's efforts to achieve a total integration of all the elements of the painting. For as they glide over the surface of the canvas, van Doesburg's diagonals reestablish a distance between the imaginary moving surface they inhabit and the picture plane, and we find ourselves once again before van der Leck's illusionist space. For an evolutionist like Mondrian, it was as if the clock had been turned back eight years. In short, although van Doesburg's achievement in painting is very interesting, it does not partake of the general principle of elementarization and integration that characterizes De Stijl. However, there are cwo areas in which he did work much more efficiently toward the elaboration of this principle, that of the interior as art, and that of architecture.

The De Stgl Idea

The importance given to the interior by the De Stijl artists stems both from their questioning of the limits of painting and from their distrust of any kind of applied art. The common view of De Stijl as a movement that applied a formal solution to what is now referred to as "design" is erroneous: decorative art in general did not interest the De Stijl artists, with the temporary exception, in the case of van Doesburg and Huszar, of stained glass (which Rierveld judged moreover as "ignominio~s").'~ If the arts were to remain faithful to the principle of De Stijl, then they could not simply be applied to each other, but would eventually have to join together to create an indivisible hold. The stakes were quite considerable, and almost all the movement's internal quarrels resulted from a power struggle between painters and architects over precisely this issue. The invention of the interior as a hybrid art form was not easy; it developed in two moments, in two theoretical movements. The first movement: only when an art has defined the limits of its own field, only when it has achieved the greatest possible degree of autonomy and discovered the artistic means specific to itself, that is, only through a process of self-definition and of differentiation from the other a m , will it discover what it has in common with another art. This common denominator is what allows for the combination of the a m , for their integration. Thus the members of De Stijl thought that architecture and painting could go hand-in-hand today because they share one basic element, that of planarity (of the wall and of the picture plane). As van der Leck wrote in March 1918 (and one could cite many similar declarations from the same period by van Doesburg and Mondrian, as well as the text Oud published in the first number ofDeSt@l): Modern painting has now arrived at the point at which it may enter into a collaboration with architecture. It has arrived at this point because its means of expression have been purified. The description of time and space by means of perspective has been abandoned: now it is the flat surface itself that transmits spatial continuity. . . . Painting today is architectural because in itself and by its own means it serves the same concept as architecture-space and the plane-and thus expresses "the same thing" but in a different way." From this first movement stems the totality of van der Leck's mostly unrealized interior coloristic projects, the first interiors of Huszar and van Doesburg (see fig. 33), Mondrian's Paris studio and his Projet ak Salon pour Madame B . . . , ~2 Dresak of 1926 (fig. 34). These works share a conception of architecture as static: each room is treated in isolation, as a sum of walls, a six-sided box, which is explicable by the fact that in each case the artist was working within the confines ofan already existing architecture.

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---

33. T h o ~ a Doesburg n Example of Coloristic Composition in an Interior [Proeve van kleurcompositie in interieurl 1919. PubIiFhed (in black and uyhite) in De Stijl3, no.
12 ( N o ~ w b e 1920). r The colors of th&interior composition (realiredfor the anarchrSI philosopher Ball de Li't, u&hfurniture by Rienleld) ulere orange, green, and blue. H o u ~ wuhen , Lnn Doaburgpthlished thb photograph it2 color (in L'Architecture vivante 3, no. 9 [I9251*cia[ hue on De Stij) he comected the color scheme so as to much the red, blue, andyellou~ neophtic orrhodap'.

34. Pier Mondrian, Salon de Madame B . . . , Dresden, 1926. Ink andgotlache on paper, 37.5 X 57 cm (14/16 X 22X6 in.). Slaatliche Kum~rnrnlungmz, Draden.

35.J.J.P.Oud, De Vonk Noordu~zjk&out, 1927-18. Illustrated in Klei, no.-12 (1920). T h color scberne of the u~indou~fiarnes, doors, and shutters and the tile mptycb abo~le the entrance are by ran Doesburg.

The D e Stijl Idea

113

The second movement is the consequence of a collaborative enterprise turned sour, the first genuine collaboration between a painter and an architect of the De Stijl group, that is, van Doesburg and Oud's teamwork for the De Vonk vacation house of 1917 (at Noordwijkerhout), and later for the Spungen housing complex at Rotterdam (1918-21). If this collaboration resulted in divorce (Oud refusing the last coloristic projects of van Doesburg for Spangen), it is because, despite van Doesburg's heroic attempt to integrate color into architecture (throughout each building, both inside and out, doors and windows are conceived according to a contrapuntal color sequence), the mediocrity of the architecture itself (fig. 35) led the painter to plan his color scheme independently from the constructive structure of the building. This color scheme was conceived in relation to the entire building, the wall no longer being the basic unit, and in opposition therefore to individual architectural elements.12 There is a paradox here: it was precisely because Oud's symmetrical, repetitive architecture was absolutely antithetical to the principle of De Stijl that van Doesburg was drawn to invent a type of negafite integration based on the visual abolition of architecture by painting. (With the exception of his Projectfor the Purmer&Factoq~ of 1919 [fig. 361, strongly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, Oud's early work is characterized by repetition and symmetry; his contribution to De Stijl is thus limited to a few theoretical pieces in the journal).13 "Architecture joins together, binds-painting loosens, unbinds," van Doesburg wrote in 1918.14Thus, the "elementarist" oblique, which appears for'the first time in a 1923 van Doesburg color study for a project for a "university hall" by van Eesteren

3G.JJ.P. Oud,Project of a Factory in Purmerend, 1919. Pencil and u-afercolor onpaper, 37.I x 64.2 crn ('14% X 2 5 ' / 4 in.). NederfandsDocumenfafiecenhurn LW de Bouwkumf, Amsferdanz.Photo of the musatm.

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37. Comefis van Eesteren, with color by uan Doeshug Interior Perspective of a University Hall, 1921-23. Ink,tempera,and collage on fracingpaper, 63.4 X 146 cm (25 X 57V4 in.). Van Eesteren-Flu& G tlan bbuizer~nichting Amsterdam.

(fig. 37), a year later in van Doesburg's design for a "flower room" in the villa MalletStwens built in Hyeres, and finally, on a grand scale, in the 1928 Caf6Aubette in Strasbourg, is each time launched as an attack against a preexisting architectural situation. While the oblique contradicted De Stijl's integration principle within the realm of painting, it fulfilled that principle in the new domain of the abstract interior. There, it is not "applied"; rather, it is an element with a function (ironically, an antifunctionalist one), that of the camouflage of the building's horizontal-vertical skeleton (its "natural," anatomical aspect). Such camouflage was, for van Doesburg, absolutely necessary if the interior was to work as an abstract, nonhierarchical whole. But the oblique was not the only solution to his new integrative task, as Huszar and Rietveld demonstrated in their extraordinary Berlin Pavilion (1923; fig. 38): the articulation of architectural surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling) could itself be elementarized by using the corner as a visual agent of spatial continuity. In this interior, colored planes painted on the walls d o not stop where the wall surfaces meet, but overlap, continue around the corner, creating a kind of spatial displacement and obliging the spectator to spin his body or gaze around. Stretching to the utmost its own possibilities, painting solves a purely architectural problem--circulation in space. Conversely, as the architectural space was not preexisting, this project of a pavilion marked the birth of an architectural problematic that would become proper to De Stijl (it is hardly coincidental that this is a piece of exhibition architecture,

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38. GeAt Rietz9eldand Vilmos Hzrszar, Spatial Color Composition for an Exhibition [Kuimte en Kleuren-conipositievoor e m tentoonstellingl Berlin, 1923. Three ~ i e u of s tlx nzodel for the abslract interior u a q Rwhn Pa~liliorz (it is not certain tlwt t l ~ k aw realized). Pl~oto Stedelijk .tlzfieunz,An~qterdam.

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engaged explicitly in demonstrating its own modernity). N o better proof could have been provided of the proposition that the union of the arts can be achieved only when each has arrived at the greatest degree of autonomy. De Stijl's contribution to architecture is quantitatively far less important than is generally believed: the two little houses Robertvan't Hoff built in 1916 (before the foundation of the movement) are amiable and talented pastiches of Wright;Jan Wils's constructions flirt somewhat with art deco (it is not by chance that he leaves the movement almost immediately); as for Oud, his most interesting architectural work, executed after he had broken with van Doesburg, partakes much more of the Neue Sachlichkeit so-called International than of De Stijl (one could even say that its functionalism annuls whatever superficial features it might have of De Stijl's idiom). De Stijl's architectural contribution consists in fact of the projects exhibited by van Doesburg and van Eesteren in Galerie d e Z'Effort Modem, (see fig. 39) directed by Leonce Rosenberg (Paris, 1923). and in the work of Gerrit Rietveld as a whole.15 As for the Rosenberg projects, a somber argument over attribution initiated by van Eesteren has confused the issue for too long. Attribution here is a wrong question, or a question badly asked: what is essential is that there is a striking formal difference between the first project (an elegant HGfel particulier that anticipates the International Style by several years) and the last two (a Mauonparticuli&e and Maison d'artkfe). For the difference is the direct consequence of the intervention not of the painter (who worked on all three), but of painting: the model of the first project is white, the last two are polychrome. The starting point of those last projects was indeed the possibility of conceiving simultaneously their coloristic and spatial articulation. And van Doesburg's inflated yet enigmatic claim that, in these projects, color becomes "construction material" is not simply rhetorical: it is color indeed that allowed the wall surface as such to be elementarized, culminating in the invention of a new architectural element-the indivisible unit of the s m . The entire architecture of the last two Rosenberg projects, as the groundbreaking axonometric drawings van Doesburg executed for the show demonstrate (fig. 40), stem from the limitation of the constructive vocabulary to this new element, the screen. For the screen combines two contradictory visual functions (in profile it appears like a vanishing line, frontally it is a plane that blocks spatial recession), and this contradiction promotes the visual interpenetration of volumes and the fluidity of their articulation. Thus, the desire to integrate painting and architecture, to establish a perfect coincidence between the basic elements of painting (the color planes) and architecture (the wall), led to a major architectural discovery-walls, floor, ceiling as surfaces

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39. V h 1 of the Exbibition Les architects du Groupe "de Styl,"Park, Galerie cle LEffort Moderne (Leonce Rosenberg director), 1923.Photo Nederhmk D o c u m e n t C U ~ m y van Doesvoor de B o u w h t . In theforeground. one can see thefirst R o s e d m g model b burg and m n Eesteren (Private Villa [Hotel paniculier]), with ilsgroundphns diphyed on tbe d l . Behind it is the third model, House of an Artist [Maison d'aniste]. On the other waN one can recognire Oud's Project of a Factor): and infront of it a modelfor a "lramwq~ shelter with af2orlstWosk" by Willem L m n Leusderz, who u.m wry briejy asassociated with De Stijl. In the second room, there are work by Hurzar and Rietlleld.

I1 Abstraction I

40.A: Comelk L1anEesteren and 73EV L1anDoesbuq, Axonometric Projection of a Private House [Architecture vue d'en haut], 1923.Ink, gouache, and collage (sandpaper),57 X 57 cm (22716X 22-6 in.). Van Eesteren-Fluck G can Lohuizensticbfing,Amsterdam. Photo B: 73EV van Doesburg, CounterNederlands DocumentaIiecenrrum toor de Bouu~h~nst. construction [Analyse d e I'architecture], 1923.Pencil and ink on tracing paper, 50.2X 35.5cm (19% X 14 in.). Nederlanris Documentatiecenrrum t w r de Bouu~kunsr, Amsterdam. Photo of the museum. While thefint illustration sbows how L1anDoesburg applied his color scheme on an y L1anEesteren a ( * fbey had designed the house together), axonomemc drawing made b rhe second ersplains the process of theformation of the many "counter-constructions" rehed to thk project: tan Doesburg "edited tsanEesteren S drawing urnbile tracing it, choosing to keep or delete certain elernen&so as to enhance hk 'anu&sisof rhe architecture."

The De St# Idea

without thickness that can be duplicated, or unfolded like screens and made to slide past one another in space (see fig. 41). Once invented, the screen had no further need of its chromatic origins: thus, the only genuinely De Stijl element in the white studio-house van Doesburg built for himself at Meudon just before his death is a rectangle that completely masks the stairway leading to the first-floor entrance, and that becomes a second skin for the facade it almost entirely repeats. Van Doesburg was not mistaken when he claimed that Rietveld's Schroder House (1924; fig. 42) was the only building to have realized the principles theoretically laid down in the last two Rosenberg projects,16 with the provision that the screen is used there in a much more extensive way, for Rietveld managed to elementarize what had remained a bete noire for van Doesburg, that is, the building's frame itself. The Rosenberg projects treat the frame from a constructive perspective (for which van Eesteren claims responsibility). That is, the frame is still treated as "natural," anatomical, motivated, and above all functional. While the elementarization of the wall surface had led van Doesburg and van Eesteren to make intensive use of overhanging horizontal planes (the cantilever is one of the most distinctive formal features of the Rosenberg projects), Rietveld's invention was to displace the cantilever to the level of the frame itself. In doing so, he ironically subverted, most of the time by a minimal transformation, the opposition supportinglsupported upon which every constructive frame is based. The Schroder House is full of those inversions that continually pervert the functionalist ethic of modernist architecture--the dictum that would have one meaning per sign (the most famous is the corner window that, once opened, violently disrupts the structural axis constituted by the intersection of two walls [fig. 431). Rietveld's furniture is based on the same model: in the famous Red a?& Blue Chair of 1918 (fig. 44), for example, one of the vertical elements is both supporting (it bears the armrest) and supported (it hangs off the ground).'' Whether architecture o r furniture, Rietveld understands his works as pieces of sculpture (and these are ofren very similar to the best sculptures of Vantongerloo), that is, as independent objects in charge of "separating, limiting and bringing into a human scale a part of unlimited space," as he wrote in an autobiographical tern of 1957.IH This is in direct opposition to Mondrian, for whom the threedimensional nature of architecture was its inherent flaw, but also to the entire body oftexts on the interior in the early numbers ofDeSrijl, which focused on architecture as closure.

I1 Abstraction I

120

41.7hw r l a n Does@ and CorneIf r l a n Eweren, Model, House of an Artist, 1923. This pbotonwnmge, L y ttum Doesburg, umsfirslpubIidwd in De Stijl 6, no. 6 1 7 (1924). Photo Dienst V e q n m d e R@kscoliecties,7Zw Hague.

TIE De St$ Idea

121

42. Genit Rietrekf,Scbroder House, 1924, Ubeci3t.

If Rierveld is the only De Stijl architect properly speaking, it is because he was able to substitute for the functionalist ethic another one, which Baudelaire in his time had called the "Ethic of Toys."19 Everything is deployed in such a m y as to flatter our intellectual desire to dismantle his pieces of furniture or architecture into their component parts (and there is in fact a photograph showing all the elements that are necbut like Baudelaire's infant, who takes the essary to build the Redandglue toy apart in order to locate its "soul," we would learn nothing from this operation (probably not even how to reassemble the parts), for the "soul" in question resides e l s e w h e r e i n the articulation of these elements, in their integration.

11 Abstraction 1

43. Gerri'r RietrleM, Schrijder House, 1.924. Detail of the comer zuindou! Once open, the u~indoul desh-OJ'S the ax* joitzing IUO fiqauks. This break is doubled by the roof r ~ ~it e in r a decentered manner. that h o ~ r o 44. Gerri'r Rieneld, Red and Blue Chair, 1.918. Pair7ted wood, 86 X 63.8 X 67.9 crn (33% X 25% X 26v.1in.). Sttdelijk Afzlseun~, Amsterdam. 7?xJint model of this chair, designed prior to Riet~eld's aquaine lance ulith De Stijf,wm rtncolored. n color u 8 m applied a & 1.920. Photo of the museum.