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Gallery · Room 09 · Netherlands, 1917–1931

De Stijl

Straight lines, right angles and primary colors: art reduced to a system.

A large red square dominates a grid of black lines, with yellow, blue, grey and white rectangles around it.

Piet Mondrian

Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue, 1921

Oil on canvas

Kunstmuseum Den Haag · View record ↗

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Wall text

De Stijl, Dutch for The Style, began in 1917 as a magazine founded by the painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. Around them were the artists Bart van der Leck and Georges Vantongerloo and the architects Gerrit Rietveld and J. J. P. Oud. They wanted a pure, abstract art built from the fewest possible elements.

That meant horizontal and vertical lines, rectangles, the three primary colors, and black, white and grey. Mondrian called it neoplasticism. His colors were never quite pure: he kept mixing them to tune them to each other, as in the large red plane of 1921 shown here. Rietveld carried the same system into furniture and houses.

In the mid-1920s van Doesburg tilted his grid forty-five degrees, as in his counter-compositions, and Mondrian, who rejected the diagonal, left the group. Van Doesburg kept the magazine going until his death in 1931, and with him the movement ended.

Palette · Sampled from the works shown

  • Primary red

    #D8422A

  • Primary yellow

    #EEBD4A

  • Primary blue

    #2C5BC1

  • Line black

    #13160E

  • Off-white

    #EBEBE6

How to recognize it

  • Only horizontal and vertical lines, often black and heavy

  • Primary red, yellow and blue, with black, white and grey

  • Asymmetric balance: large white fields against small blocks of color

  • Only squares and rectangles, with no curves

More works

What to borrow

  1. 01

    Prefer asymmetric balance. A large quiet area against one small strong block makes a layout feel alive.

  2. 02

    A few strict rules applied everywhere make a product recognizable at a glance.

  3. 03

    Tune colors to each other, not to a swatch book. Mondrian kept remixing his until they worked together.

Sources