''The Card Players'' is a painting by the Dutch artist

Theo van Doesburg Theo van Doesburg (; born Christian Emil Marie Küpper; 30 August 1883 – 7 March 1931) was a Dutch painter, writer, poet and architect. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. He married three times. Personal life Theo van Do ...

, from 1916-1917.

Background

While portraying a common topic in art history - card players while smoking - the treatment was, in the 1910s, very new. Drawing on the new abstract style pioneered by Picasso, Kanindsky and Mondrian, van Doesburg's painting was executed while he and Mondrian were in the early days of the still developing

De Stijl De Stijl (, ; 'The Style') was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 by a group of artists and architects based in Leiden (Theo van Doesburg, Jacobus Oud, J.J.P. Oud), Voorburg (Vilmos Huszár, Jan Wils) and Laren, North Holland, Laren (Piet Mo ...

philosophy - a reaction to the natural looking paintings that were still common in exhibitions at the time. This particular painting however did not meet the pure abstraction of Cubism: in the words of one commentator, the painting "transformed into arrangements of geometrical shapes but remain intact, rather than dissolving into separate blocks of colour dispersed over the background." The painting hangs in the Kunstmuseum,

The Hague The Hague ( ) is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the c ...

, Netherlands, on long-term loan from the Dutch government collection.

References

1917 paintings Paintings by Theo van Doesburg Collection of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag {{20C-painting-stub