(b. 1883, Utrecht, The Netherlands; d. 1931, Davos, Switzerland )
Christian
Emil Marie Küpper, who adopted the pseudonym Theo van Doesburg, was
born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on August 30, 1883. His first exhibition
of paintings was held in 1908 in the Hague. In the early 1910s he wrote
poetry and established himself as an art critic. From 1914 to 1916 van Doesburg
served in the Dutch army, after which time he settled in Leiden and began
his collaboration with the architects J. J. P. Oud and Jan Wils. In 1917
they founded the group De Stijl [more] and the periodical of the same name;
other original members were Vilmos Huszár,
Piet Mondrian, Bart van
der Leck, and Georges Vantongerloo. Van Doesburg executed decorations for
Oud’s De Vonk project in Noordwijkerhout in 1917.
In 1920 he resumed his writing,
using the pen name I. K. Bonset and later Aldo Camini. Van Doesburg visited
Berlin and Weimar in 1921 and the following year taught at the Weimar
Bauhaus [more], where he associated with Raoul Hausmann,
Le Corbusier,
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Hans Richter. He was interested in Dada
[more] at this time and worked with Kurt Schwitters as well as Jean Arp,
Tristan Tzara, and others on the review Mécano in 1922. Exhibitions
of the architectural designs of Gerrit Rietveld, van Doesburg, and Cor
van Eesteren were held in Paris in 1923 at Léonce Rosenberg’s
Galerie l’Effort Moderne and in 1924 at the Ecole Spéciale
d’Architecture.
The Landesmuseum of Weimar
presented a solo show of van Doesburg’s work in 1924. That same
year he lectured on modern literature in Prague, Vienna, and Hannover,
and the Bauhaus published his Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst
(Principles of Neo-Plastic Art). A new phase of De Stijl was declared
by van Doesburg in his manifesto of “Elementarism,” published
in 1926. During that year he collaborated with Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp
on the decoration of the restaurant-cabaret L’Aubette in Strasbourg.
Van Doesburg returned to Paris in 1929 and began working on a house at
Meudon-Val-Fleury with van Eesteren. Also in that year he published the
first issue of Art concret, the organ of the Paris-based group of the
same name. Van Doesburg was the moving force behind the formation of the
group Abstraction-Création in Paris. The artist died on March 7,
1931, in Davos, Switzerland.