Van Doesburg at the Tate

Surrounded by windows. Everywhere you look, white rectangles and squares, with thin black frames between them. Then around the corner the stain glass windows, flooded with colour. Mostly, though, the glass is clear, with only patches of blue, red or yellow.

Is there nothing outside the window?

Surrounded by windows. Everywhere you look, white rectangles and squares, with thin black frames between them. Then around the corner the stain glass windows, flooded with colour. Mostly, though, the glass is clear, with only patches of blue, red or yellow.

Is there nothing outside the window?

For Mondrian or Van Doesburg the answer is probably no, at least no material world: they were looking for transcendent spirit. Pure white light, with patches of impurity, that is what we look at we see these pictures. I assume they should be all white, like the big windows in Van Doesburg’s Weimar studio; with their squares and rectangles were they the model for this movement? But then the painter lives in this world, and can only strive towards the ideal. Red, blue and yellow, those distinctive colours of De Stijl, are they nothing but emblems of failure?

Theo leaves Holland. You watch him go, to enter a new building.

It’s like a Pantomime behind closed doors. Draw back the curtains! Actors half-dressed, lines half-learned, collage into ramshackle scenery: sloganeer the buildings with Merz! The actors turn and stick out their tongues, for friends to measure them; searching for the median. Kurt Schwitters draws the curtain…

Like a fragments of a building left over after its destruction, or as if Bacon’s studio was inside Kensington Palace, we find De Stijl broken in the Tate. Then the Russian revolution arrives next door.

Dada and De Stijl. Two extremes of the Modernist aesthetic. Two sides of the same personality? Yet Van Doesburg wears De Stijl in that famous Dada photograph, taken in Weimar. Nothing separate here, they are fused into the same collage.

Too often the many aspects of Dada are forgotten: to be seen only as an icon of anarchic nihilism. However, it was a mosaic of all its personalities, and included the mystical, the aesthetic, the political and the organisational (Tzara wanted to lead a conventional art movement).

Worship the moment, the fragment, the rubbish in the studio. Then give them to Schwitters, he’ll make them beautiful.

Does it all fit, is it meant to? Theo leaves Holland and finds…. The Spirit takes many forms, and the impurities can be pure too. All pieces can be put into a frame, but there has to be space; to see to the other side.

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