De Stijl, 1917-1928

Date
1952

Publisher
[publisher not identified]

Exhibition URL

www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1798

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition

history—from our founding in 1929 to the
present—is available online. It includes
exhibition catalogues, primary documents,
installation views, and an index of
participating artists.

MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art

the museum of modem art bulletin
! [LIBRARY
(THE MUSEUM
OF MODERN ART
I Received: ;

TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

John Hay Whitney, Chairman of the Board; Henry Allen Moe, 1st Vice-Chairman;
Philip L. Goodwin, 2nd Vice-Chairman; Nelson A. Rockefeller, President; Mrs.
David M. Levy, 1st Vice-President; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss,
William A. M. Burden, Stephen C. Clark, Rene d'Harnoncourt, Mrs. Edsel B.
Ford, A. Conger Goodyear, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, Wallace K. Harrison,
James W. Husted, Mrs. Albert D. Lasker, Mrs. Henry R. Luce, Ranald H. Mac-
donald, Mrs. G. Macculloch Miller, William S. Paley, Mrs. E. B. Parkinson, Mrs.
Charles S. Payson, Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, David Rockefeller, Beardsley Ruml,
John L. Senior, Jr., James Thrall Soby, Edward M. M. Warburg, Monroe Wheeler

HONORARY TRUSTEES
Frederic Clay Bartlett, Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Duncan Phillips, Paul J. Sachs,
Mrs. John S. Sheppard

Cover: Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren: Color Construction (project for a
private house). 1922. Gouache on paper, 221/2 x 221/2 ". The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. Fund

The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin: Vol. XX, No. 2, Winter, 1952-1953

Copyright 1952, The Museum of Modern Art, 1 1 West 53 Street, New York 19, N. Y.
hHA
fit i, r* c

d© Sti|I 1917-1928

This publication is issued on the occasion of an exhibition

of de Stijl, held at the Museum of Modern Art, December
i952 — February 1953.
The material for this exhibition was assembled by a
committee of Dutch scholars and former members of the
Stijl group appointed by the Dutch Government, together
with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It was shown
m 1951 at the Stedelijk Museum and in 1952 at the
Biennale in Venice.

The installation was designed by architect Gerrit Rietveld.

The Museum of Modern Art is pleased to extend
its grateful appreciation to the Dutch Government, which
is circulating the exhibition in the United States, and to
Mr. W. J. H. B. Sandberg, Director of the Stedelijk Museum
in Amsterdam, for his invaluable cooperation.
chronology
1912 Mondrian in Paris; influenced by Picasso.
1913 Mondrian begins to "geometrize" analytical cubism.
1914 Mondrian back in Holland; his first "plus-and-minus' compositions. Van Doesburg
paints abstract expressionist pictures.
1915 Mondrian and van Doesburg meet and correspond.
1916 Mondrian and van der Leek meet; influence each other and van Doesburg; first
compositions in rectangular planes of primary colors. Van Doesburg associated
with architects Oud and Wils.
1917 Formation of de Stijl group, Leyden; members: van Doesburg, van der Leek, Mon
drian, Huszar, all painters; Vantongerloo, sculptor; Oud, Wils, van t Hoff, archi
tects; Kok, poet. Magazine, De Stijl, launched in October. Oud and van Doesburg
collaborate in designing building at Noordwijkerhout.
1918 Mondrian's compact compositions in pale tinted rectangles divided by thin black
lines. Van Doesburg continues isolated vertical and horizontal rectangles. Van-
tongerloo's volume constructions. Oud appointed housing architect of Rotterdam.
November, first manifesto of de Stijl signed by original members, excepting van
der Leek, who had resigned. Rietveld, architect, joins de Stijl and designs de Stijl
furniture. Relations of group with other countries begin.
1919 Van Doesburg and Mondrian divide canvases into a grid of regular squares or
rectangles.
1920 Leyden, April: second manifesto of de Stijl signed by van Doesburg, Kok and
Mondrian. Mondrian to Paris; publishes Neo -plasticisme; his compositions of rec
tangles grow simpler and more asymmetrical. Van Doesburg makes grand propa
ganda tour; meets architects Gropius, Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier.
Oud leaves de Stijl.
192 1 Van Doesburg at Berlin and Weimar; continues to publish De Stijl; influences Gropius
and Bauhaus. Mondrian, in Paris, further develops his own style of heavy black lines
defining rectangles of a few colors and various greys. Richter, German maker of
abstract films, joins de Stijl. Van Doesburg and his wife collaborate with dadaists.
1922 Van Doesburg at Weimar and Berlin. De Stijl influences Berlin architects Taut and
Mies van der Rohe.
1923 Van Doesburg in Paris. De Stijl exhibition at Leonce Rosenberg's; apparently influ
ences Le Corbusier. Mondrian arrives at his fully developed style. Architects van
Eesteren and Kiesler join de Stijl.
1924 Rietveld's house at Utrecht. Van Doesburg lectures in Prague, Vienna.
1925 Oud's Cafe de Unie, Rotterdam. Kiesler's The City in Space, Paris Exposition of
Decorative Arts. Mondrian leaves de Stijl.
1926 Societe Anonyme exhibits Mondrian and other de Stijl artists at Brooklyn Museum.
1926-1 928 Van Doesburg collaborates with Jean Arp and Mme Tauber-Arp in designing
cabaret L'Aubette, Strasbourg. Vordemberge-Gildewart (Hanover) and Domela join
group. Van Doesburg's manifesto of elementarism.
1931 Van Doesburg dies at Davos.
1932 Last number of De Stijl, January.
A. H. B., Jr.

4
 foreword
For architects and designers today de Stijl has an especial importance.
The International Style, which has dominated architecture the last quarter
century, has had many roots — steel and concrete skeleton construction
methods, machine inspiration and the like — but the basic esthetic organi
zational ideas were first expressed by the Stijl group and particularly by
its leading spirit, Theo van Doesburg. It was he and his associates who
transmogrified and codified the esthetic experimentations of cubism;
and, what was important for architecture, they codified them as a basis
of all the arts, not only of painting (plate 1). Except for Le Corbusier,
himself a capable painter who had been through the discipline of cubism,
the modern architects of the twenties learned their esthetics from de Stijl.
Why the Stijl esthetic was so influential architecturally is simple to
understand. In the first place its theories once more seemed to integrate
architecture into a universal theory of art which, ever since the disinte
gration of the revivalisms of the 19th century, modern minded architects
and designers had been seeking and which earlier "modern movements"
like Art Nouveau or the Arts and Crafts movement had not supplied.
Second, the esthetic system of de Stijl fitted perfectly the architectural
background of the time. Regular rectangular shapes fitted skeleton con
struction methods which were beginning to be admired. The separation of
the volumes fitted the growing feeling for functional articulation of
buildings. But most important the occult asymmetrical balance of the reas
sembled elements offered a new method of architectural composition.
Past styles of architecture depended primarily on plays of axial
symmetry for the ordering of plans and on a hierarchical massing for
emphasis. De Stijl offered instead a separation of plan into similar, or
sometimes identical elements and a reassembling of them into a loose
yet careful asymmetric balance. For example, the Bauhaus building, the
greatest post-Stijl building of the twenties, is just such a composition of
quasi-independent rectangular prisms, separated for functional reasons,
and juxtaposed in careful asymmetry. Accent is achieved by position and
by a unique surface treatment, not by symmetry and hierarchic massing.
In the thirty years since van Doesburg made these schematic drawings
architecture has understandably developed. Nothing as complex in com
position as the Bauhaus is built today. Nothing today as intricate as
Mies van der Rohe's linear country house of 1922 is on the boards. But in
a group of buildings completed in 1951 — Mies' 860 Lake Shore Drive
apartments — the elements are juxtaposed in exactly the same manner
as in van Doesburg's diagram. In Walter Gropius' new dormitory for
Plate 1 Theo van Doesburg:
Harvard University the separate units are just as separate; and accent
a) Basic Composition in Painting is achieved by occult balance, not by symmetry and hierarchy.
b) Basic Composition in Sculpture In the esthetic of balance and composition the influence of de Stijl is
c) Basic Composition in Architecture still clear.
Philip C. Johnson, Director
Department of Architecture and Design

5
 a Mondrian: painting
(detail) 1914

b Mondrian: painting
(detail) 1915
Plate 2

DE STIJL:
THE FUNDAMENTALFORM

Van Doesburg: painting

(detail)
1917

e Vantongerloo: sculpture
Van Doesburg: painting
1918 (detail)
(detail)

f Rietveld: chair
1919
(detail)

1921 g Van Doesburg: magazine

cover

h Van Doesburg and van Eesteren:

1922 project for a house (detail)

i Rietveld and Schroder:

1923-24
house (detail)
 de stijl
De Stijl, one of the longest lived and most influential groups of modern
artists, was formed in Holland during the first world war. From the very
beginning it was marked by extraordinary collaboration on the part of
painters and sculptors on the one hand and architects and practical de
signers on the other. It included among its leaders two of the finest artists
of the period, the painter Piet Mondrian and the architect J. J. P. Oud;
bul its wide influence was exerted principally through the theory and
tireless propaganda of its founder, Theo van Doesburg, painter, sculptor,
architect, typographer, poet, novelist, critic and lecturer — a man as
versatile as any figure of the renaissance.

DE STIJL PAINTING, MONDRIAN AND VAN DOESBURG, 1912-1920

Three elements or principles formed the fundamental basis of the work
of de Stijl, whether in painting, architecture or sculpture, furniture or
typography: in form the rectangle; in color the "primary" hues, red,
blue and yellow; in composition the asymmetric balance. These severely
simplified elements were not, however, developed in a moment but as
the result of years of trial and error on the part of the painters Mondrian,
van Doesburg, and van der Leek.
Mondrian first studied with his uncle, a follower of Willem Maris. Then,
after three years at the Amsterdam Academy, he passed through a
period of naturalistic landscapes to a mannered, mystical style resem
bling the work of Thorn-Prikker and Toorop. By the beginning of 1912
he was in Paris and there very soon fell under the influence of Picasso.
Some of his paintings of 1912, based upon tree forms, were as abstract
as any Braque or Picasso of that time.
Back in Holland in 1914, influenced perhaps by synthetic cubism,
Mondrian painted several canvases, plate 3, in which colored rectangles
are composed in counterpoint to broken black horizontal and vertical
lines. In a tentative way these anticipate by several years the collective
formal discoveries of the Stijl group. But Mondrian himself almost
abandoned color during 1915-16. Indeed he seems almost to have
stopped painting at this time though his "plus-and-minus" seascape series
in black lines, plate 4, begun in 1914, led him to completely abstract
composition in 1917.
By 1917, perhaps a little earlier, all the painters of the Stijl group
were experimenting by combining van der Leek's dead-flat planes in
primary colors with Mondrian's vertical-horizontal bars and rectangles.
Van Doesburg's Composition (The Cow), plate 6, of 1916-17 is a classic
example of a Stijl abstract painting derived from a natural form. In
Plate 3 Piet Mondrain: Color Squares in Oval.
1914-15. Oil on canvas, 31 x 42%". The Museum
Composition No. 3 of 191 7, plate 5, also probably based on some natural
of Modern Art, New York, Purchase Fund image, van der Leek applies bright color to Mondrian's heavy black
tMt Wirl i in-rt'liT

I ' I— I I
I , 1 I I
Plate 4 Piet Mondrian: Composition. 1915. Oil on canvas, 34 x 42%". Plate 5 Bart van der Leek: Composition No. 3. 1917. Oil on
Rijksmuseum Kroller-Miiller, Otterlo, Holland canvas, 37'/2 x 39%". Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo,
Hollond

plus-and-minus style of the same year. Van Doesburg's Rhythm of a

Russian Dance of 1918, plate 8, is perhaps the best demonstration in
painting of the Stijl composition of vertical and horizontal lines so ar
ranged that they never touch or overlap each other but instead seem
about to slide by each other without collision.
The sculptor Vantongerloo, meanwhile, was applying the Stijl love
of rectangles to sculpture. His Volume-Construction of 1918, plate 9,
was the most significant three-dimensional work by a Stijl artist up to
that time.
By 1919 both Mondrian and van Doesburg had abandoned nature
even as a starting point for their paintings. It was apparently the latter
that now led the way in a brief experiment with simple mathematical
devices. He subdivided a perfectly square canvas into smaller squares
which he then used as modules for composition. (He had followed a
similar system in designing the floor of square tiles at Noordwijkerhout
in 1917, plate 10.) Mondrian, too, worked for a time on color variations
within a grid. However, by 1920, the year of his Neo-Plasticist mani- *
festo, Mondrian turned from this exact geometrical method to a freer
style, in which dark lines divide the canvas into asymmetric rectangles of f
various greys and flat colors, plate 1 1, a style which he was to refine and
simplify during the subsequent decade.

ARCHITECTURE AND DE STIJL

The typical architecture of de Stijl grew first of all out of cubism by way
of Mondrian, plates 3 and 4. To Mondrian's plus-and-minus method of
linear composition were added van der Leek's bright flat color planes.
Then van Doesburg contributed his synthesis of the two, plates 6 and 8,
and Vantongerloo provided the architects with early examples of Stijl

8
 design in three dimensions, plate 9. His "volume-constructions" however
gave an effect of dense cubistic masses rather than the weightless rec
tangular volumes the architects and van Doesburg were working toward.
(The open planning and free asymmetries of Frank Lloyd Wright, known
in Holland since 1911, also contributed much to de Stijl architecture.
There is more Wright than Vantongerloo in Oud's design of 1919 for
a factory.)
As early as 1917 van Doesburg began to apply his own and his
fellow painters' researches to architectural decoration. The floor in the
home for convalescents at Noordwijkerhout is his design, plate 10. The
clean rectangular lines of Oud's architecture and the supression of inci
dental ornament were essential if negative characteristics of de Stijl
esthetics. The moldings around the doors which give an effect of weight
and thickness were soon to be abandoned, too. Oud was the greatest
but at the same time the most conservative of the Stijl architects.
Others carried Stijl principles of design much further. The design for a
house, see cover, by van Doesburg and van Eesteren, 1922, is clearly a
three-dimensional projection of Stijl painting. Flat rectangular vertical
and horizontal planes define a complex of asymmetric volumes. The
fact that the planes are white or painted in bright blue, yellow and red
emphasizes the weightless freedom of the composition. Within a few
years, painting the walls of the same room different colors was to become
a practice all over the world. It began with de Stijl.
This project was never built but a year or so later Rietveld's house in
Utrecht was completed, plate 1 3. Here in an actual building the partition
of space into volumes by means of freely abutting and interpenetrating
planes is emphasized as never before in Western architecture. Moving
partitions further demonstrate the radical and consistent principles of
the design.
Rietveld's furniture such as the chair, plate 12, may also be compared
with the paintings of van Doesburg and Mondrian, plates 6, 8, 11.

Plate 7 below. Study for van Doesburg

/s
5 The Cow. Pencil, 4 x 6Va ". The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, Purchase Fund

Plate 6 Theo van Doesburg: Composition ( The Cow.) 1916-17. Oil on canvas, 14% x 25".
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase Fund

*
 Technically and imaginatively the boldest creation in the Stijl tradition
was The City in Space, plate 14, designed by Kiesler, an Austrian member
of the group, for his country's section at the Paris Exposition of Decora
tive Arts in 1925. It was a suspended framework constructed on a tension
system without foundations or walls and without a static axis. In its radical
technique it suggests the experimental designs of the Russian Construc-
tivist architects but in its consistent use of rectangles asymmetrically
arranged it is a development of such Stijl designs as Rietveld's house of
the year before.
Oud's Cafe de Unie fagade of 1925, plate 15, done between more
serious designs for Rotterdam civic housing blocks, is a frank and amusing
adaptation of such paintings as Mondrian's Composition of 1920, plate
1 1. The lettering on this facade follows de Stijl principles of typographi
cal layout which are classically represented by the cover of the maga t
zine, De Stijl, plate 2g. This asymmetrical arrangement of letters blocked t
into rectangles was designed by van Doesburg early in 1921.

INFLUENCE OF DE STIJL ABROAD

As is indicated in the chronology, the years 1920-25 saw an astonishing
expansion of the influence of de Stijl, first in Belgium, then in Germany,
France, Eastern Europe and even in Russia where it met the earlier but
less practicable abstract traditions of Suprematism and Constructivism.
The work of the Stijl group had been known in Paris through its publica
tions well before the exhibition at Leonce Rosenberg's gallery in 1923.
Its influence upon French architects is not so obvious as upon German
but it may be remarked that in France no building, not even by Le
Corbusier, was as advanced in design as Rietveld's model, plate 13;
and Le Corbusier's famous device of painting the walls of the same room
in different colors had been anticipated by the Stijl designers by sev
eral years.
As early as 1919, through the painter Feininger, de Stijl was already
beginning to be known at the Bauhaus- at Weimar. Two years later
van Doesburg himself began to divide his time between Weimar and
Berlin. Though the degree of his influence is still controversial, van
Doesburg's presence at Weimar seems to have stimulated important
changes at the Bauhaus; from a somewhat expressionist mysticism and
transcendentalism, the Bauhaus more and more turned toward clarity,
discipline and the desire for a uniform and consciously developed style
in architecture and the allied arts such as the Dutch movement had
already initiated. Doubtless some of this change of direction was self-
generated; furthermore, there was surely some French and, after 1922,
some Russian influence at the Bauhaus; yet it remains significant that in
1922, for instance, Gropius, who had been engaged in designing a
picturesque wooden blockhouse with cubistic decorations and a sym
metrical fagade, sent to the Chicago Tribune competition an austere,
asymmetrical skyscraper project, its fagade enlivened by a Stijl-like ar
rangement of balconies and other accents.
The influence of de Stijl upon German architecture may further be
Plate 8 Theo van Doesburg: Rhythm of a Russian
seen in Mies van der Rohe's plan for a country house done in 1922, the Dance. 1918. Oil on canvas, 53 Vi x 24 'A The Mu
year after van Doesburg's arrival in Berlin. The resemblance between this seum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

10
 plan and the broken orthogonal asymmetrical design of such Stijl
paintings as van Doesburg's Russian Dance, plate 8, is obvious. As late
as 1925 the fagade of Gropius' own house at Dessau remarkably re
sembles van Doesburg's Composition (The Cow), plate 6.
De Stijl influence at the Bauhaus was by no means limited to archi
tecture. Its typography seems directly derived from de Stijl precedents
as may be seen by comparing the cover of De Stijl of 1921, plate 2g,
with the cover of the Bauhaus prospectus of 1923. (Such asymmetrical
layout, soon spread throughout Germany and Europe and by 1930 was
extensively used in America.) Most of the famous Bauhausbucher were
designed by Moholy-Nagy under de Stijl influence, excepting van
Doesburg's which was designed by himself. Bauhaus furniture, lighting
fixtures, etc., were also affected by de Stijl.
However, it should be emphatically stated that the Bauhaus under
Gropius' leadership eventually went far beyond de Stijl by using a
primarily functional, rather than an abstract "geometrical," system of
design. De Stijl in its use of materials was curiously limited and its in
sistence on flat, primary colors was thoroughly doctrinaire. Furthermore
it was often too much dominated by abstract painting to permit a piece
Plate 9 Georges Vantongerloo: Volume-Construction. of furniture or a building to take a natural form based upon function, or
1918. Plaster? to be finished with emphasis upon natural surfaces or textures.

DISINTEGRATION OF DE STIJL: THE CAREERS OF ITS EX-MEMBERS

In Holland itself the importance of de Stijl tradition dwindled, partly
through the removal of the leading artists to Germany or Paris and
partly because of the generally conservative attitude of the Dutch
public toward its artistic prophets.
Oud continued to work for some time as a city architect in Rotterdam,
designing in 1924 one of the masterpieces of modern architecture, the
row houses at the Hook of Holland, which however were free from the
mannerisms and complex asymmetry of the orthodox de Stijl manner.
Indeed Oud's use of curved lines at the Hook caused van Doesburg to
call his work "van de Velde architecture," after the great Belgian
master of Art Nouveau. Rietveld continued to practice architecture and
van Eesteren became a city architect of Amsterdam.
Mondrian, who had left Holland for Paris in 1920, resigned from de
Stijl in 1925. During the 1920s, he moved in his paintings toward an
ever simpler and purer form, sometimes reducing his composition to
three or four black bars and a single primary color, or no color at all.
Later, during the 1930s, and even more in New York in the early 1940s,
he returned to a more complex style, especially in the boogie-woogie
compositions which were his final works before his death in 1944. Well
before then he had been recognized as the greatest of all the masters
of "geometrical" abstract painting. Katherine S. Dreier, President of the
New York Societe Anonyme, may have been right as well as courageous
when in 1927 she remarked that "Holland has produced three great
painters . . . The first was Rembrandt, the second was van Gogh, and
the third is Mondrian . . ." — right, at least, in terms of international
influence.

11
 Plate 1 0 J. J. P. Oud and Theo van Doesburg: Hall of house at Noord- Plate 1 1 Piet Mondrian: Composition. 1 920. Oil on canvas, 1 9Vs x
/s".
5 wijkerhout, Holland. 1917. Floor by van Doesburg 23 Van de Muysenberg Collection, Amsterdam, Holland

Vantongerloo also moved to Paris where he remained faithful to de

Stijl vertical-horizontal rectilinear design in wood or metal constructions
which he described — and sometimes titled — with mathematical formulae.
Kiesler came to America in 1926 and there practiced theatre design,
architecture and, more recently, sculpture with brilliant originality. Among
the younger de Stijl artists, Domela with his relief constructions produced
in Paris, Vordemberge-Gildewart with his abstract compositions painted
in Germany, continued to win international recognition.
In 1924, van Doesburg also settled in Paris after his years of prose
lytizing in central Europe. In his "elementarist" paintings he used heavy
diagonal lines or bars achieving an effect far more dynamic but less
perfect than Mondrian's. In this style he designed the interior of the
Aubette Cafe in Strasbourg, collaborating there with Jean Arp and his
wife. In 1927 he got out a tenth-anniversary number of De Stijl contain
ing much valuable retrospective material. The last issue of De Stijl,
No. 90, was published in January 1932 as a memorial to Theo van Does
burg, its founder, who had died in March of the previous year.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Director of Museum Collections

(Adapted from Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936 )

Plate 12 G. Rietveld: Child's chair. 1919

12
Plate 13 G. Rietveld and T. Schroder: Schroder House at Utrecht. 1924

Plate^M Frederick Kiesler: The City in Space, model in Austrian Plate 15 J. J. P. Oud: Cafe de Unie, Rotterdam. 1925
section, International Exposition, Paris, 1925
 museum notes
MUSEUM'S ART LENDING SERVICE EXTENDED TO EIGHT STATES
Non-resident members of the Museum living in 8 states in the East may now rent
original paintings and sculpture by well-known American artists through the Art
Lending Service. The states to which the Art Lending Service is extended are:
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and the Dis
trict of Columbia, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Rental fees are based on the insurance value of the works of art and range
from $2 to $35 for a two-month period. This fee is deducted from the purchase
price if the member decides to buy the painting or sculpture.
The Art Lending Service was established by the Museum under the sponsorship
of the Junior Council last season to encourage the wider purchase of original
contemporary art. Approximately 225 paintings, 26 sculptures and 50 prints
and drawings by more than 100 artists are available for rent or sale. Purchase
prices of available works range from $25 to $750.
Colleges, schools, hospitals, clubs and business corporations may also rent
works of art from the Service if one member of the institution's board is also a
member of the Museum.

PUBLICATIONS

BUILT IN U.S.A.: POSTWAR ARCHITECTURE

Edited by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Arthur Drexler
This book is the Museum of Modern Art's report on the best of American archi
tecture today. Private houses, skyscrapers, schools, a hospital, a retail store, a
chapel and a stadium are among the 43 buildings amply illustrated by plans
and photographs.
With the mid-century modern architecture has come of age, and American
architecture in particular has come to occupy a position of special prominence
in the world. The qualities that have brought our building to this pre-eminent posi
tion are reviewed in his introductory essay by Professor Henry-Russell Hitchcock,
America's leading historian of modern architecture. Arthur Drexler, Curator of
the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Architecture and Design, has pro
vided a critical text appraising individual buildings for their stature as works of
art and for their significance in the development of American architecture. 1 28
pages; 1 90 plate; $4.50. 25% discount to members.

LES FAUVES, with an introduction to the Fauve movement by John Rewald. This
movement heralded the art of the 20th century. It emerged from the efforts of
various painters, most of them still alive, who worked in more or less close com
munion. Perhaps their most startling innovation was their arbitrary brilliant un
realistic color — pinks, vermilions, emerald greens, canary yellows — applied in
flat areas often bounded by arabesques of heavy lines, a procedure which
shocked their radical predecessors as much as it did the public. Derain compared
their recklessly exuberant color to sticks of dynamite.
This book covers in part the first comprehensive exhibition in this country of
work by painters of the fauve period (1 898-1 908). After the New York showing
the exhibition will travel to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (January 21-
February 22, 1953); San Francisco Museum of Art (March 1 3-April 12, 1953);
and The Art Gallery of Toronto (May 1-May 31, 1953). 48 pages; 45 plates
(8 in color); paper bound $1.50. 25% discount to members.
*