De Stijl was a Dutch group of painters, architects and designers who founded an artists' association and a magazine of the same name in Leiden in 1917.
Founding members were the painter and art theorist Theo van Doesburg, the painters Piet Mondrian and Georges Vantongerloo, the architects Robert van 't Hoff, J. J. P. Oud and Jan Wils, the painters Vilmos Huszár and Bart van der Leck, and the poet Antony Kok.
1917-1931
De Stijl Group
By 1922, eight of the initial ten members had left the group, but new ones joined, including the architects Gerrit Rietveld (1918) and Cornelis van Eesteren (1922) and the painter Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart (1924).
The group professed a geometric-abstract, "ascetic" form of representation in art and architecture and a purism limited to functionality, which, similar to the German Bauhaus, to which there is a close relationship in terms of ideas and art history, established principles for an aesthetic applicable to all areas of design. Their ideas were influenced by Cubism and Wassily Kandinsky's art-theoretical publications.