Where did the symbolism for these elements of De Stijl come from? The answer varies from artist to artist, since the different uses of these elements are different from artist to artist. A notable influence of this symbolism can be seen between Jan Toorop and Piet Mondrian. Toorop was a Dutch artist who created a variety of different styled works. He is known as the leader of Dutch symbolism. The influence started when Mondrian moved to Domburg in Zeeland. He admired the Impressionists, a genre of artists which Toorop had influenced. Toorop’s art “was a conscious reaction against naturalism: Its means of expression were a clear predominance of line… a tendency to represent every object in its maximal extension, by an arrangement parallel to the plane of projection” (Jaffe 40).
Toorop’s influence on Mondrian’s art is shown directly in his triptych Evolution. In this work Mondrian paints three women rich with symbolic representation, a common theme found in Toorop’s work. Mondrian explores the idea of uplifting in his paintings, a motif which is found even in his later works. He does this by literal symbolic representations of shapes which point upward or downward around and on the women.
Through Toorop, Mondrian became more conscious of the need for simplification, the gravitation towards the center of the canvas and the use of line in his compositions. Toorop also changes his views about color, due to Toorop’s style of pointillism in which his dots took the shape of blocks. In his essays he writes, “The first thing to change in my painting was the colour. I forsook natural colour for pure colour. I had come to feel that the colours of nature cannot be reproduced on canvas. Instinctively I felt that painting had to find a new way to express the beauty of nature” (Mondrian 10). This lead to the start of Mondrian using muted primary colors, then eventually transitions to pure primaries. Through Toorop, Mondrian realized the need to simplify his subjects leading to the destruction of subjects abstraction which is shown in De Stijl.
De Stijl Symbolism 