Van Doesburg & The International Avant-Garde
Theo Van Doesburg's Small Dada Evening (1923) Picture: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York
The European avant-garde's reaction to the mass carnage and destruction of WWI spawned the diametrically opposed movements of Dadaism and De Stijl (The Style).
The former's chaotic and absurd art mocked bourgeois respect for order, rationality and tradition while the latter sought to create a better world via its calm abstractions. Amazingly, Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) managed to believe in both.
Nevertheless his most lasting legacy is as a founder member and untiring promoter of De Stijl. Much of this through the movement's magazine of the same name - for which he designed the radical typeface - and which he edited and wrote for throughout its existence from 1917 until his own early death in 1931.
De Stijl art and design aimed to combat the pernicious effects of individualism and nationalism by creating a universal form of visual communication which could be understood by all.
Initially rooted in the spiritual ideas of Theosophy, the De Stijl artists believed that the essence of harmonious life could be found in the balance of opposing forces such as sea and land, night and day or male and female.
Applying these ideas to visual art, they stripped it down to its underlying characteristics of basic form, line, mass and colour which they arranged in balanced harmonies purified of distracting allusions to the specific, visible world.
Its best-known co-founder was Piet Mondrian, whose purist paintings create an asymmetrical equilibrium from the intersection of horizontals and verticals to form squares and rectangles while the neutral colours grey, black and white are balanced by the pure primary colours red, yellow and blue.
Van Doesburg's paintings lack the uncompromising rigour of Mondrian's paintings, but his restlessness led him to apply these ideas to a wide field of innovatory design.
Possessing monstrous energy levels and ambition, this untrained stepson of a military man worked as an artist, designer, architect, typographer, poet, art critic, teacher and publisher while also travelling and furiously networking over many European countries. Yet he died aged only 48.
By displaying van Doesburg's works among those by about 80 artists with whom he interacted and collaborated, the Tate's exhibition presents him as a focus of and catalyst for varied strands of the 1920s avant-garde.
We see works by artists as diverse as the De Stijl architect Jacobus Oud, the Dadaists Kurt Schwitters and Tristan Tzara, the Soviet Constructivist El Lissitzky, the Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the film-maker Hans Richter and the Swiss artist and designer Sophie Tauber-Arp.
The vast array of works span all the arts - film, poetry, music, architecture, graphic design, posters, dance, painting and sculpture, from Gerrit Rietveld's furniture and light fittings to Dada and Constructivist magazines.
For van Doesburg, what linked them was innovation and modernity.
All broke with the heavy ornamentation and historicism of Victorian art and architecture which still dominated the visual world and which signified the old world's bourgeois values.
That was how he found a connection between the ordered peace of De Stijl and the subversive chaos of Dada.
Under the pseudonym IK Bonset he published his magazine Mecano (1922-4) in which he juxtaposed unrelated images and sent type dancing across the page in Dadaist freefall.
Yet his images lack the satirical bite and visual sophistication of Raoul Hausemann's and Hannah Hoech's Dada photo montages.
Not surprisingly, van Doesburg sometimes clashed with his more single-minded colleagues. When he had the temerity to introduce dynamic diagonals and impure mixed colours into his De Stijl paintings Mondrian broke off all relations since they contravened the movement's commitment to harmonious repose and purity.
Was van Doesburg an unprincipled, opinionated egoist or an open-minded polymath? Probably a bit of both.
Despite his dizzying hyperactivity he devoted his greatest energies to proselytising for abstraction and his internationalism cross-fertilised ideas across Europe from the Soviet Union to France.
Both Dada and De Stijl appeal to the mind rather than the heart. The cerebral dominates the exhibition and there are so many works, many by relatively obscure artists who shared a similar aesthetic, that you may find the experience exhausting.
The visitor's guide does not explain the socio-historical context of war and revolutions which gave artists such utopian desire to create a better world. This is a serious omission which will particularly affect younger viewers, since history is now taught so cursorily in schools.
However the sheer inventiveness and elan of the 1920s avant-garde shines through.
Most works still look modern today. So all-pervasive was their influence that they did indeed create a universal visual language.
But it was incomprehensible to most of their contemporaries.
What became known as international modernism was not widely used until after WWII.
Runs until May 16. Price £10/concessions £8.50.
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