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(b Utrecht, 30 Aug. 1883; d Davos, Switzerland, 7 Mar. 1931). Dutch painter, designer, architect, and writer on art. His early work was influenced variously by Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism, but in 1915 he met Mondrian and rapidly underwent a transition to complete abstraction. In 1917 he was one of the founders of De Stijl and he devoted the rest of his life to propagating the association's ideas and the austerely geometrical style it stood for, seeing himself as a crusader fighting to cleanse the world of cultural impurities. He spent much of the 1920s travelling to promote his beliefs, particularly in Germany, and from 1922 to 1924 he taught intermittently at the Bauhaus. By the mid-1920s he had abandoned the rigid horizontal–vertical axes insisted upon by Mondrian and introduced diagonals into his paintings in a series of works entitled Counter-Compositions; he called this new departure Elementarism.

Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)


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