Theo van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg ( born August 30, 1883 in Utrecht, † March 7, 1931 in Davos ), actually Christian Emil Marie Küpper, was a Dutch painter, writer, architect, sculptor, typographer and art theorist.

Van Doesburg created paintings geometrically constructed and was therefore one of the founders of abstract painting. He was co-founder in 1917 of the artists' association De Stijl. Later he joined for a short time to Dadaism.

Life and work

Van Doesburg coined the term concrete art and founded together with Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Robert van ' t Hoff, JJP Oud Jan Wils, Bart van der Leck and the other in 1917, the art movement De Stijl.

Van Doesburg originally wanted to be an actor, but studied painting from 1899. In 1908 he exhibited for the first time. How Mondrian paintings he created geometric surface constructed. He met Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut know and practiced from 1921 to 1922 a teacher in private courses on architectural design at the Bauhaus in Weimar from. A permanent position as Master had refused, but Doesburg influenced other teachers of the Bauhaus, Gropius.

In 1922, he led the Dada in the Netherlands and published - under the pseudonym IK Bonset - the Dadaist magazine Mecano. On 10 January 1923, he initiated the " Dada campaign " in the Netherlands with the first Dada evening in The Hague. The last Dada Soirée was held in Friesland Drachten on 13 April. This year, 1923, the actions of Dadaism ended permanently.

For the café and dance hall Aubette on Kléber in Strasbourg he designed in 1927/28 with Hans Arp and his wife Sophie Taeuber- Arp following as a Gesamtkunstwerk of the De Stijl movement remodeling the interior decoration. Since they did not meet the public taste, it was destroyed in the late 1930s and produced from 1989 to 1994 again.

In 1931 he was in Paris with Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo, Auguste Herbin and Georges Vantongerloo founding member of the artist association Abstraction- Création in Paris, which was replaced in 1946 by the Salon des Nouvelles Réalités. In 1947, a retrospective exhibition of his works at Peggy Guggenheim 's Art of This Century held in New York.

1955 his works were represented posthumously at the Documenta in Kassel 1.