The accomplishments of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and his associates in the De Stijl group seem to be endlessly fascinating, if one can make this judgment on the basis of the sheer quantity of ambitious publication over the past decade. Why this is so appears, however, to be somewhat puzzling when seen against the broad-based rejection of “radical” modernism in this same decade—the period of so-called postmodernism. Is it nostalgia (a very postmodern sentiment) that has bred a renewed fascination with postmodernism’s ideologically more surefooted predecessor, or is it a niggling fear that something more aesthetically durable has been lost sight of? Or is it just old-fashioned pedantry gravitating toward Mondrian and De Stijl because there is so much theory, so many documents to edit and analyze? Supporting the last of these three possibilities is the clear fact that Mondrian and De Stijl are almost unique among major twentieth-century aesthetic phenomena in that they can be studied (if one chooses to do so) almost exclusively from the written record of autograph texts. The paintings, architectural projects, etc. which constitute the visual legacy of the artists involved lend themselves almost perfectly to functioning as examples of what is being brought forward in print—usually, but not always, in the pages of the periodical called De Stijl, conceived in 1917 and edited by its founder, Theo van Doesburg, until his death in 1931.

The personal archives of major members of the De Stijl circle—of van Doesburg in particular—have made