by Jon Lackman | 9 February 2010 | Modern, Museums
The exhibition “Van Doesburg & The International Avant-Garde” opens Thursday at Tate Modern. The Telegraph writes
… a small group of Dutch artists and architects came together, united by an ambition to redesign the world on purer, better lines – and those lines would always be straight ones … After his death, Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, wrote that [van Doesburg] was a “painter, sculptor, architect, typographer, poet, novelist, critic, lecturer and theorist – a man as versatile as any figure of the Renaissance”. He didn’t, however, do everything equally well. His voluminous writings, like those of Mondrian, suffer from severe problems of incomprehensibility. Art historian Carel Blotkamp confessed: “Even we Dutch authors sometimes have not the slightest idea, after half a century, of the meanings of certain statements made by these elated men.”
