Theo van Doesburg

He was a Dutch painter, architect, designer and writer. Son of Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant. Little is known of his early life, but he began painting naturalistic subjects c. 1899. In 1903 he began his military service, and around the same time he met his first wife, Agnita Feis, a Theosophist and poet. Between about 1908 and 1910, much influenced by the work of Honoré Daumier, he produced caricatures, some of which were later published in his first book De maskers af! (1916).

His early work was strongly influenced variously by Impressionism, Fauvism and Expressionism, but there was a big change in his style in 1917 because this was the year that Doesburg  met Mondrian and he underwent a big transition to a complete abstraction. Theo Van Doesburg was one of the De Stijl founders and he developed the rest of his life to propagating the association's ideas and the austerely geometric style it stood for, seeing himself as a crusader fighting to cleanse the world cultural impurities. He made a new order uniting art and life. In his perfect quest for an ideal language of abstraction not without the moral and the spiritual.

In the 1920s he went to Germany to preach and promote his beliefs and he also taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1924.  By the mid-1920s he had abandoned the rigid horizontal and vertical axes diagonals into his paintings in a series of works entitled Counter- Compositions, he called this new departure Elementalism.

Doesburg moved to Paris in 1929 and there he designed a house and studio for himself. In 1930 he published a manifesto of Concrete art and eleven months later he  had a heart attack and he died. In 1931 shortly before his death a meeting was held in his studio and this led to the formation of the Abstraction- Creation association.
Doesburg inspired other atists, he also inspred graphic designers. One of the Graphic Designers that was insprired from his style and by reading his manisfesto was Max Bill. The style was the same, he used geometric and abstractive shapes, but the difference that made Max Bill's style considered as graphic design was the fact that even tough he made abstract use he gave his abstract compostion a meaning and this what makes it a graphic design and not a fine art. With his style Bill inspired the international typographic style, in fact he was one of the pioneers.
This lead us to a conclusion that Theo van Doesburg invented a style which is abstractive, he wanted to express purity and good moral. He inspired a lot of people of his time and even those who came after him.

Bibliography
Chilvers.I, 2009,Dictionary of art and artists,4th edition, New York:Oxford university Press.
Meggs, P. B,. and Purvis, A.W., 2012. Megg's History of Graphic Design. 5th ed. New Jersey: John Willey and Sons, Inc.