Piet Mondrian’s name may be the first to come to mind at the sight of the clean, bold lines and blocks of color celebrated and replicated the world over, but it was his Dutch compatriot Theo van Doesburg that championed the De Stijl movement to wide acclaim.The cultural center Bozar in Brussels brings Van Doesburg to the forefront of De Stijl in the exhibition “A New Expression of Life, Art and Technology,” on until May 29, and shows the movement’s far-reaching influence and disregard for constraints to traditional mediums.Van Doesburg’s ballet through the geometric bliss of De Stijl and Dadaism is shown through stained-glass windows in variations on the color-block motif. Those same lines become three-dimensional in a 1918 chair by Gerrit Rietveld. A floor tile design draft resembling a precursor to QR codes pushes further the anti-futurist’s boundaries avant-garde stakes.A rolling, rhythmic phonetic poem plays over cascading texts in stylized typeface from Van Doesburg’s dip into the Dadaist movement through poetry under the pseudonym I.K. Bonset.Not even film and architecture were safe from reimagining. Light and squares flicker in hypnotic films by Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling. A step-in model of a Strasbourg cinema redesign and plans for his own house testify to Van Doesburg’s commitment to De Stijl.As history shows, Van Doesburg was not afraid to destroy the status quo to find something new in the reassembly. His elementarism diagonals remind of the artist’s split from Mondrian, who rejected the slight modification of perspective by rotating the clean lines 45 degrees.Van Doesburg’s work conveys a sincere longing to find meaning in the shape of things, even at the task of destroying them. Recalling post-World War I optimism and the conviction to break past art for art’s sake, the exhibition speaks to creating living, lasting art that serves society beyond hanging on a wall, but perhaps even by being that wall.“A New Expression of Life, Art and Technology” is on show at Bozar until May 29.
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