Like ‘Hamlet’ Without Prince, Tate Mounts Show Lacking Star

Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Blockbuster exhibitions, like blockbuster movies, tend to operate on the star system.

That’s why it’s brave of Tate Modern in London to mount a big show “Van Doesburg & the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World” (through May 16) without a big name in the title.

Obviously, it does have a lead player, but Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) isn’t a well-known figure. And much of the exhibition is devoted not to his work but to that of the other members of the teeming European avant-garde in the years following World War I.

The result is “Hamlet” without a prince, plus an awful lot of extras. This is, nonetheless, an enjoyable if over- large exhibition. And, strangely enough, Van Doesburg and his friends really did have an effect on the world, not entirely in a good way, many would say. The short walk from Tate Modern to Southwark tube station takes you past building after cornflake-box building visibly affected by the idea of these enthusiastic visionaries of 90 years ago.

Van Doesburg was the organizer and spark plug of the group of Dutch modernists known to posterity as “De Stijl” (or “The Style”). This took its name from a magazine founded by Van Doesburg in 1917. It preached that art, buildings, fixtures and fittings should be reconfigured in an abstract, geometric idiom. A simpler, cleaner environment -- so the argument went -- would make mankind more peaceful and less individualistic.

Mondrian’s Lines

Among the artists and others who rallied to this publication there was one art historical giant in the abstract painter, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Some fine examples of his work are on show, and also many much less successful attempts by other artists to do the same thing.

Mondrian’s pictures are a demonstration of the truth of that adage, “It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it.” All the De Stijl painters used more or less the same repertoire of straight lines, rectangles and simple colors (Mondrian himself ended up just employing primaries). For reasons that are hard to analyze, Mondrian was infinitely better at it. Somehow he could make poetry out of three black lines and a yellow oblong; the others mainly couldn’t.

Van Doesburg had his moments as a painter. More memorable, though, are his contributions to what used to be called the “decorative arts.” There are splendid geometric stained-glass panels by Van Doesburg, intended for futuristic building projects of the 1920s that are more impressive than his paintings. In fact, Mondrian apart, De Stijl was more interesting for what it did in utilitarian areas.

Rectangular Rears

I love the De Stijl furniture designed by Gerrit Rietveld. Granted his “Red-Blue Chair” of 1923 is just about the most uncomfortable item to sit upon devised by anyone outside the Spanish Inquisition. Still, it’s beautiful: a Mondrian in 3-D, although suitable seating only for those with perfectly rectangular buttocks.

Also beguiling are the experiments in animated abstract film made by Van Doesburg’s associates in the 1920s, a time when he had moved beyond the small pond of Dutch modernism and formed alliances with fellow spirits throughout Europe, including the anarchic Dadaists.

Those were heady days. The messianic hopes of early modernism were as ill founded as those of the Russian Revolution of the same year De Stijl was founded: 1917. No one now believes, as Van Doesburg and his friends did, that abstract art and design will make human beings more virtuous.

(Martin Gayford is chief art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Martin Gayford in London at martin.gayford@googlemail.com.