De Stijl and Surrealism
In Holland, De Stijl created an art of straight lines and pure colours, while Belgian Surrealists turned reality into a riddle.
The First World War divided the two countries. Belgium was occupied and became a battlefield, while the Netherlands remained neutral. In isolated Holland, Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian founded the magazine De Stijl in 1917. The group wanted to create a universal art of straight lines, right angles and the three primary colours red, yellow and blue, together with black, white and grey. The ideas applied not only to painting but also to architecture, furniture and typography. The goal was a new and harmonious environment for living.
At the same time, architects in Amsterdam built housing in the expressive Amsterdam School, with undulating brick façades, and in Rotterdam a sober functionalism. In Belgium a Flemish Expressionism emerged, with heavy, earthy images of peasants and landscapes. In Antwerp and Brussels some artists tried out an abstract art close to De Stijl. In the interwar years both countries were important places for the European avant-garde. M.C. Escher meanwhile began making his enigmatic prints of impossible spaces and interlocking patterns.
From the mid-1920s Brussels became a centre of Surrealism. René Magritte painted everyday things in impossible contexts, with a dry and precise technique, and raised questions about images, words and reality. Paul Delvaux painted dreamlike scenes with naked women and trains. The Second World War cut this development short. Both countries were occupied in 1940, and Mondrian, who had fled to New York, died there in 1944, just a few months before the liberation of Belgium. The war brought the era to an end.