The Ideal as Art: De Stijl 1917-1931 (Carsten-Peter Warncke)

De Stijl from the Dutch for "The Style" is also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. 
 
In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931, founded in the Netherlands. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and color; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. This volume provides a broad representation of the movement. 
 
About the Author
 
Carsten-Peter Warncke studied art history, classical archaeology and literature in Vienna, Heidelberg and Hamburg.
He passed his thesis in 1975 and is now a professor of art history at the University of Göttingen.
He has been working for several years, among other things, on the emblematic and has published, by Taschen, his vast monograph on Picasso.