De Stijl is the dutch movement (1917–1931) that pursued absolute purity in art and design through horizontal and vertical lines and primary colours.
De Stijl ('The Style') was founded in the Netherlands in 1917 by the painter and theorist Theo van Doesburg, who edited the journal of the same name from 1917 to 1931. The movement's most famous artist was Piet Mondrian, who from around 1920 reduced his painting to a vocabulary of horizontal and vertical black lines, white grounds, and rectangles of pure red, blue, and yellow. Mondrian called this 'Neo-Plasticism' and considered it not merely a style but a path to spiritual and social harmony — pure relationships unencumbered by any reference to nature, individual expression, or accident. Other De Stijl artists included the painter Bart van der Leck and the designers and architects Gerrit Rietveld (whose 'Red and Blue Chair' of 1917 and Schröder House of 1924 in Utrecht translated De Stijl into furniture and architecture) and J. J. P. Oud. The movement fractured in the late 1920s when Van Doesburg introduced the diagonal — a heresy Mondrian could not accept. De Stijl's influence on the Bauhaus, on International Style architecture, and on later abstract painting was enormous.