Theo van Doesburg Abstract artist Bio

The artist was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands in 1883, Christian Küpper was formally registered as the son of Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant however, unconvinced of his parentage, he took the title Theo Van Doesburg. Little is known of his early life, but he started painting naturalistic subjects c. 1899. In 1903 he began his army service, and close that time met his first wife, Agnita Feis, a Theosophist and poet. Between 1914 and 1915 the powerful influence of Wassily Kandinsky became apparent from his drawings and abstract functions.

Theo Van Doesburg artwork

While reviewing an exposition, Van Doesburg was introduced to the functions of Piet Mondrian. In these works, he saw his perfect in painting: complete abstraction of reality. Shortly after the exposition, Van Doesburg contacted Piet Mondrian and with associated artists Bart van der Leck, Anthony Kok, Vilmos Huszar, and J.J.P. Oud, in 1917 they founded the magazine De Stijl.

That same year he lectured on contemporary literature in Prague, Vienna, and Hannover, and the Bauhaus released his Grundbegriffe der Neuen gestalten den Kunst (Basics of Neo-Plastic Artwork ). Van Doesburg announced a new phase of De Stijl in his manifesto of"Elementarism," published in 1926. During that year he collaborated with Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp on the decoration of this restaurant-cabaret L'Aubette in Strasbourg. Van Doesburg returned to Paris in 1929 and started working on a home at Meudon-Val-Fleury with van Eesteren. Also in that year, he published the first problem of Artwork concrete, the organ of the Paris-based set of the same name. Van Doesburg was the moving force behind the creation of this group Abstraction-Création in Paris. The artist died in Davos on March 7, 1931, in Switzerland.