Dutch for ‘The Style’. A Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917 (also known as neoplasticism). Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colours along with black and white. De Stijl was also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), propagating the group’s theories. Leading members of the movement were the painters Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Vilmos Huszár (1884-1960), and Bart van der Leck (1876-1958), and the architects Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), Robert van ‘t Hoff (1887-1979), and J J P Oud (1890-1963). In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is also used to refer to a Netherlandish body of work covering the period 1917-31.