To mark the centennial of the De Stijl movement, Sotheby’s has organised an exhibition of works by its founding pioneers and contemporary artists who were influenced by the Dutch movement. Called Iconoplastic: 100 Years of De Stijl, the exhibition, on from 19 October at the S2 gallery in New York (until 8 December), comprises more than 60 works by 33 artists, of which around three-quarters will be available for private sale. According to the house and the Dutch consulate, it is the only exhibition dedicated to De Stijl to be organised outside of Europe this year.
The De Stijl (“the style”) manifesto, outlined in 1917 in a visual arts journal produced by a group of avant-garde artists in Leiden, called on “all who believe in the reformation of art and culture to abolish [the] natural form [that] prevents the clear expression of art”, wrote Theo van Doesburg. The artist and theorist Piet Mondrian, who was influenced by Cubism, devised a visual standard that he called Neoplasticism, a style characterised by horizontal and vertical arrangements of straight lines and geometric shapes, colour-blocked with primary hues, which became synonymous with the De Stijl collective. Artists aimed to extend this abstract but diagrammatic style beyond the canvas and into architecture, music, literature, dance and design.
“The aesthetic of De Stijl can be seen across 100 years of artistic output”, says Julian Dawes, the house’s vice president and co-head of Impressionist and Modern art day sales in New York, who organised the exhibition. One highlight of the show is Maquette for a Chair (undated) by Vilmos Huszár, an “exceptional and remarkable artefact of this movement by one of the founding members of the collective, [which] illustrates De Stijl as a universal style whose principles can be applied to all disciplines”.
Dawes adds, “What’s incredible about De Stijl is that its central philosophy remains remarkably intact to this day, even when it’s not referenced by name.” The philosophy is observable in the exhibition in contemporary works by Leon Polk Smith, Vik Muniz and Ilya Bolotowsky. Richard Pettibone—famed for his unauthorised miniature copies of other artists’ works—extends the theory even further with his tiny take on Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1925 (1996), which “challenges the authorial status of Mondrian, how ‘influence’ is commonly understood and the notion of originality itself as a locus of artistic mastery”, the Stanford art history professor Nancy Troy, who contributed to the catalogue essay, told The Art Newspaper.
If the movement’s themes are timeless, the market moment is now. According to Dawes, “Works created using the principles of De Stijl are performing incredibly well on the market. The auction records for almost every artist in the show have been set within the last three to four years.” Earlier this year, in June, Christie’s London set a record for Georges Vantongerloo, one of the founding members of De Stijl, who is included in the exhibition, with Composition dans le carré avec couleurs jaune-vertbleu-indigo-orangé (1930), which sold for around £1m (est. £350,000-£450,000). And a painting called April in Balance (1971) by Kenneth Noland, a proponent of geometric abstraction, achieved around £350,000 (est. £80,000-£120,000) at Sotheby’s London that same month.