ABSTRACT
De Stijl, one of the longest lived and most influential groups of modern artists, was formed in Holland during the War. Indeed J. J. P. Oud’s use of curved lines at the Hook caused Theo van Doesburg to call his work “van de Velde architecture,” after the great Belgian master of art nouveau. As indicated in the chronology the art of the Stijl group dominated the Abstraction-Creation group which in Paris in the early thirties proclaimed a renaissance of abstract art. The clean rectangular lines of the interior and the suppression of incidental ornament was an essential if negative characteristic of de Stijl esthetic. The resulting piling up of cubical volumes was developed by other members of the Stijl into a system of architectural composition illustrated by the project for the house by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, van Eesteren and Doesburg. Doesburg continued to collaborate with architects and in 1929 designed his own house near Paris.
