Gemeentemuseum The Hague Opens De Stijl Centenary with Mondrian and Van Der Leck Show

The Gemeentemuseum The Hague has launched a year-long program, 'Mondrian to Dutch Design. 100 years of De Stijl,' to mark the centenary of the De Stijl movement. The inaugural exhibition, 'Piet Mondrian and Bart Van Der Leck. Inventing a New Art,' explores the collaboration between Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and Bart Van Der Leck (1876–1958) during the formative years of Dutch avant-garde. The show traces their parallel evolution toward abstraction in the 1910s, highlighting their ideological differences. Van Der Leck's method of 'doorbeelding'—a term between decomposition and subtraction—reduced figurative sketches to geometric forms while retaining human warmth, as seen in works like 'La tempesta' (1916) and 'Composizione n. 4' (1916). The latter was inspired by a trip to Algeria for Müller & Co., depicting miners and railway tracks. Mondrian, influenced by Cubism in Paris, pursued a more rigorous abstraction, leading to a rift with Van Der Leck after two years. Van Der Leck later applied his approach to interior designs for patron Helene Kröller-Müller around 1919. The exhibition runs until May 21, 2017, offering a human, organic perspective on Neoplasticism.