Theo van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg was born Christian Emil Marie Küpper in Utrecht in 1883 and adopted his stepfather's surname as a professional name before he turned twenty. In 1915, working as a painter and critic, he wrote a review of an exhibition by Piet Mondrian, an artist paring his paintings down to grids of black lines and blocks of primary color. The review turned into a partnership, and in 1917, with Mondrian and four other artists, van Doesburg founded a magazine called De Stijl, 'The Style,' to argue for an art built from straight lines, right angles, and red, yellow, blue, black and white, nothing else.

Van Doesburg ran the magazine as editor for the next 14 years, writing much of it himself under invented names, and pushed the De Stijl idea past painting into typography, furniture and building facades. The break with Mondrian came over a single detail: van Doesburg began tilting his rectangles onto the diagonal, a move he called Elementarism. Mondrian, who saw the diagonal as a betrayal of the horizontal-vertical grid the whole movement was built on, quit the magazine over it in 1924.

The two men reconciled by accident in a Paris cafe in 1929, two years before van Doesburg died of a heart attack in Davos at 47. His wife Nelly published one last issue of De Stijl in 1932 as a memorial to him and the magazine both.