Theo van Doesburg Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

He who is above cannot be below / Not to show one's colours is to be like flotsam / not to be consistent (to be oneself) is not being / inconsistent / but never being true / here all flag-heroism but incite to / being oneself / suffering the consequences of being:/ to be hard to be cold to be cruel / To kill to hurt / to disturb tranquility / to distort harmony / from truly being / that is heroic thing / to be oneself is / being neither under bond nor borrowed nor sold nor hired / to be / means / to be spiritually free

Theo van Doesburg
For – to say a few words on technique – whereas the curved line was used predominantly for reasons of beauty, (Phidias, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens) it has been used more and more economically for reasons of truth (Millet, Monet, Paul Cézanne) until it will end as the straight line for reasons of Love. This will enable the art of the future to create an international form; a form understandable to all and vital enough to the expression of a general feeling of love in a monumental way. Such is the future.

Theo van Doesburg
Since all preceding schools of painting have proved that the spirit of beauty does not lie in nature but in the 'I', now that painting in all its various expressions from Giotto to Cézanne has demonstrated that all beauty is in the 'I', that the 'I' is all emotion and that beyond the 'I' nothing can exist because all being exists only in relationship with the 'I', now the time has come to develop from this 'I' a new style. As soon as this 'I' becomes the general, universal 'I' instead of the individualistic or the rationalistic one, the new style will be a general style.

Theo van Doesburg
In all these products, whether iron bridges, locomotives, automobiles, telescopes, cottages, airport-hangars, funicular railways, skyscrapers, or children's toys, the will towards a new style expresses itself. The similarity of these examples to the new creations in art consists in the same striving for clear, pure form which expresses truth in the objects.

Theo van Doesburg
A demand which will never be fulfilled as long as artists use individualistic means. 'Unity can only result from disciplining the means, for it is this discipline which produces more generalized means'. The objectification of the means will lead towards elementary, monumental plastic expression. It would be ridiculous to maintain that none of this relates to creative activity. If that were true, art would not be subject to logical discipline.

Theo van Doesburg
The new architecture considers not only space, but also time to be an architectural value. The unity of space and time will give architecture a new form of appearance, which is more complete. This is what is meant by 'active space'.... the dissimilar space-cells develop eccentrically from the center to the borders of the cube, thereby granting a new plastic quality to the dimensions of height, width, depth, and time.

Theo van Doesburg
Dada is able to mobilize the optical and dimensional static viewpoint which keeps us imprisoned in our [three-dimensional] illusions. Thus it became possible tp perceive the entire prism of the world instead of just one facet at a time. In this connection Dada is one of the strongest manifestations of the fourth dimension, transposed onto the subject.... Dada is 'yes-no, a bird on four legs, a ladder without steps, a square without angels. Dada possesses as many positives as negatives. To think that Dada simply means destruction is to misunderstand life, of which Dada is the expression.

Theo van Doesburg
The artist's studio will be like a glass-bell or a hollow crystal. The painter himself must be white, which is to say, without tragedy or sorrow. The pallet must be of glass; the brush must be square and hard, dust-free and as immaculate as a surgical instrument. Doubtless there is much to learn from a medical laboratory… …The studio of the modern painter must reflect the ambience of mountains which are nine thousand feet high and topped with a eternal cap of snow. There the cold kills the microbes.

Theo van Doesburg
Our time has produced a need for contrast. This has been achieved not only in the external appearance of plastic expressions of coulor and matter, but also, and chiefly, in the tempo of life and in the techniques related to the daily, mechanical functions of life; namely standing, walking, driving, to lying and sitting – in short, every action which determines the content of architecture.

Theo van Doesburg
European art [however] has developed from mimeticism and only today is arriving at an elementary plastic art [meant is here: art without representation any longer].

Theo van Doesburg
Piet Mondrian realizes the importance of line. The line has almost become a work of art in itself; one can not play with it when the representation of objects perceived was all-important. The white canvas is almost solemn. Each superfluous line, each wrongly placed line, any color placed without veneration or care, can spoil everything – that is, the spiritual.

Theo van Doesburg
.. art and life are no longer separate domains.... The word 'art' no longer has anything to say to us. In place of that, we [De Stijl] insist upon the construction of our surroundings according to creative laws, deriving from a fixed principle.

Theo van Doesburg
To be white, red, yellow, or black is to be a painter. To-day it is not sufficient for the painter to think of colour; he should be colour, feed on colour and transform himself into painting. That is the essential thing. To feel like colour means to carry within oneself the entire range of colours, not as a treasure, but as a trust.

Theo van Doesburg
I would like to offer an illustration. Imagine a house which is well designed from a material or practical point of view.... Apart from these physio-functional demands, there are also psycho-functional demands which correspond with our optical, phonetic and tactile experiences. Until now, mankind has attempted to satisfy these 'supra-material' demands with a painting on the wall or a sculpture in a room.... the architecture of the future will have to destroy this duality. Its task will be to express completely and fulfill all our demands.

Theo van Doesburg
We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real then a line, a colour, a surface. A woman, a tree, a cow; are these concrete elements in a painting? No. A woman, a tree and a cow are concrete only in nature; in painting they are abstract, illusionistic, vague and speculative. However, a plane is a plane, a line is a line and no more or no less than that. "Concrete painting". Spirit has arrived at the age of maturity...

Theo van Doesburg
Had optical perception not evolved into something more than sensory perception, into super-sensory perception, then the present period would never have had the courage to discover the spiritual in matter. There would have been no fundamental difference between a painting by Picasso [from Picasso's so-called 'abstract' period] and one by Paulus Potter [Dutch painter in 17th century, famous for his painting of cows]

Theo van Doesburg
.. modern destruction begins where architectural structure is opened up and set into motion by colour relationships. The colour-planes, however, are always in orthogonal relationship.

Theo van Doesburg
The new architecture has 'opened' the walls so that the separateness of interior and exterior is suppressed. Walls no longer sustain since the system of construction is based upon the use of columns. This results in a new type of ground plan, an open ground plan, which is totally different from classical ones, since interior space and exterior space are interrelated.

Theo van Doesburg
The problem which Mondrian undertook to solve in nr. 116 [a new painting of Mondrian, exhibited in a group-exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in 1915 in Amsterdam] was handled very successfully. This work spiritually dominates all others. It gives the impression of Repose; the repose of the soul. Its pre-determined structure embodies 'becoming' rather than 'being'. This represents a true element in art, for art is not 'being', but 'becoming'. The idea of 'becoming' has been expressed in black and white.... Through years of hard work my own experiences have led me, before I came to know the theories of Uexkuell or Picasso, to prefer the use of the white-black-grey palette in works of a purely spiritual content...

Theo van Doesburg
One must always paint in opposition to nature, and to one's own 'mood'. To let oneself go is a weakness, a sort of hysterics. If you are full of red, choose a green or a blue; if you feel like yellow, choose grey or black. In this continuous opposition lies the entire secret of plastic creation.... To create a great work of art demands self-mortification.

Theo van Doesburg
Only a radical cleaning of social and artistic life as, in the domain of art, is already done by Dada, which is anti-sentimental and healthy to the core, since it is anti-art. Only unscrupulously striking down any systematically bred amateurism in any field, can prepare civilization for the New Vision's happiness which is greatly and purely alive in a dew people.

Theo van Doesburg
However, Man as the appearance of utmost internality, of spirit, does not possess any point in front, at the side or the back, no fixed point at all towards which he could define a dimension. This explains why in expressing the spiritual, in making spirit an artifact, he will be forced to a moto-stereometric form of expression. This moto-stereometric form of expression represents the appearance of a 4-n dimensional world in a world of three dimensions.

Theo van Doesburg
True artistic experience is never passive, for the spectator is obliged to participate, as it were, in the continuous or discontinuous variations of proportions, positions, lines and planes. Moreover, he must see clearly how this play of repeated or non-repeated changes may give rise to a new harmony of relations which will constitute the unity of the work. Every part becomes organized into a whole with the other parts. All the parts contribute to the unity of the composition, none of them assuming a dominant place in the whole.

Theo van Doesburg
The plastic expression of space is inconceivable without light. Light and space complete one another. In architecture light represents an element of plastic expression – in fact, the most important one. An organic relationship between 'space' and 'material' is possible only with the aid of light. The highest achievements in architecture can be accomplished only if light also is treated as plastic form.

Theo van Doesburg
Marinetti's [leading Futurism founder and theorist] Tactilism can be seen as an instinctive effort in this direction [of the new architecture, acoording to Van Doesburg] even if it presents only the sensuous-tactile expression of space through using various materials. Picasso's earlier compositions in various materials also concerns us here. The Russian artists [Tatlin and Lissitzky, both Constructivist artists] also appreciated the exterior quality of the plane, not only optical, but also in a tactile manner.... Intuition already produced a foreknowledge of these new realms, but they can be established fully only by science.

Theo van Doesburg