Theo van Doesburg

Biography

He was born under another name: Christian Emil Marie Küpper, the seventh and last child of the German photographer Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Margadant. This was on 30 August 1883 in Utrecht. A year after his birth his father’s photographic studio went bankrupt and his father left for Germany, while his mother and the children moved to Amsterdam to live with the watchmaker Theodorus Doesburg, whom she married in 1893. The future artist always regarded his stepfather as his natural father and signed his first works “Theo Doesburg”; he added the “van” around 1902.

He was a difficult schoolboy: he read everything and did nothing else, and he was expelled. He never completed secondary education, studied briefly at a school of speech and drama in Amsterdam, and then took up the brush. His first attempts date from 1899, and in 1902–03 he took a few lessons from the painter Adri Grootens. After that he taught himself.

His early paintings are brownish and thickly worked, in the manner of Amsterdam painting of the day; mostly landscapes. Then he became interested in suffering and labouring people, possibly under the influence of Van Gogh. He made many self-portraits in which he liked to show himself as a “spiritual worker” in a cap and work clothes, and in 1910, in his first literary book, he published a series of caricature lithographs modelled on Daumier. His first exhibition took place in 1908 in The Hague, at the Haagsche Kunstkring. He was then living on drawing lessons.

The turning point came in 1913, when he read Kandinsky’s “Reminiscences”. From the book he took the idea that pure art is born of the spirit and not of the world around us, and that the road leads to abstraction. His first attempt was “Girl with Buttercups” (1914): the subject can still be recognised but, in his own words, serves only as a motif. From 1912 he had been writing reviews and articles for magazines, and in that same year he began to criticise Futurism.

In 1915, while serving in the army, he came across the work of Piet Mondrian. He wrote about it, then began a correspondence with Mondrian, and from 1916 he broke definitively with Expressionism. In 1917, together with Mondrian, Bart van der Leck, Antony Kok, Vilmos Huszár and the architect Jacobus Oud, he founded the magazine De Stijl. The first issue appeared in October, delayed by a shortage of paper and the search for advertisers. The title was meant as a provocation to those whom Van Doesburg did not consider modern. He was no less strict with the members of the group: those who departed from its principles or were not loyal enough were expelled without ceremony, and the group soon fell apart in quarrels. With Oud he collaborated on architecture, supplying colour schemes and stained glass; in 1921 they fell out when Oud had his scheme painted over.

He was, in effect, the movement’s ambassador. He lectured in Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany, and in 1922 he settled in Weimar next to the Bauhaus, hoping for a teaching post there. Walter Gropius did not take him: his manner was too abrasive and dogmatic, and Gropius feared a clash with Johannes Itten. Van Doesburg nevertheless ran a private and a public De Stijl course, attended by Bauhaus students. A Bauhaus publication later acknowledged that the most important impulse towards overcoming the Expressionist Bauhaus came from outside, from this Dutchman. In 1925 his “Principles of Neo-Plastic Art” appeared as a volume in the Bauhausbücher series. In 1922, under the pseudonym Bonset (a heteronym he used for his Dada writing), he published the Dada magazine Mécano and some poems; a second pseudonym, Aldo Camini, he used for anti-philosophical prose.

In 1923 Van Doesburg moved to Paris with Nelly van Moorsel, whom he married in 1928. In 1924 he broke with Mondrian. The cause most often named is the diagonal: Mondrian would not accept it, while Van Doesburg insisted on the dynamism of slanting lines and called his manner “Counter-Composition”, later “Elementarism”. The historian Carel Blotkamp, as I understand it, looks for the reason in their differing ideas of space and time. They were reconciled by chance in a Paris café in 1929.

In 1926–28, together with Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, he worked on the decoration of the Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg. In 1929 he left the magazine Cercle et Carré, and in the same year took part in founding Art Concret; in 1931, the year of his death, he co-founded the group Abstraction-Création.

At the end of February 1931 he moved to Davos. He died there on 7 March 1931. The last issue of De Stijl appeared in January 1932 as a memorial number, published by Nelly van Doesburg.