De Stijl

De Stijl began as a journal in Leiden in 1917 and ended as one of the most austere positions in design: that the straight line, the rectangle and the primary colour were the only honest elements, because everything else was decoration borrowed from nature. Mondrian painted it, Rietveld built it, and Van Doesburg argued for it.

Its output in furniture is tiny — the Red-Blue chair, the Berlin chair, a handful of tables — and almost all of it is reconstructed or remade, which is the first thing to establish when buying. The originals are museum pieces; the later authorised editions are the collectable market.

Read it by the absence of everything: no curve, no secondary colour, no ornament, no joinery hidden behind a moulding. A piece that admits one exception is not De Stijl, and most things that call themselves De Stijl admit several.

The journal years (1917–1923) are the theoretical phase: Mondrian's grids and Rietveld's first chairs.

The Rietveld years (1923–1931) produce almost all the furniture, much of it for a single house.

After 1931 the movement dissolves into the Bauhaus and the wider modern movement, which inherited the argument and softened the edges.