Theo van Doesburg was born Christiaan Emil Marie Küpper in Utrecht on Aug. 30, 1883, to legal parents Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant. Wilhelm Küpper, a German photographer, left the family shortly after Theo's birth and returned to his hometown of Cologne, where he died in 1892. Theo's mother then remarried family friend Theodorus Doesburg, who was probably also Theo's biological father. Theo soon began to name himself after his "stepfather," calling himself Theo van Doesburg as early as elementary school. He would also later work under the pseudonyms I.K. Bonset and Aldo Camini. The first pseudonym Van Doesburg used mainly to sign his Dadaist poems and activities. It is probably a corruption of the words "I am sot. The pseudonym Aldo Camini he used mainly for his activities as a critic. Van Doesburg married three times during his life. The first time he united in marriage with writer and poet Agnita Feis, from whom he divorced in 1917 to marry bookkeeper Lena Milius. In 1921 he left Lena to share his life with pianist Nelly van Moorsel, seventeen years younger, whom he married in 1928 and remained together until his death in 1931. Van Doesburg had no children. After briefly attending drama school, Van Doesburg indicated at age 18 that he preferred to become a painter and writer. This choice was not appreciated by his parents, upon which he left the parental home. Van Doesburg did not enroll in a school, but took a few lessons from painter A.J. Grootens and continued to work as an autodidact. His earliest known paintings are two oil sketches of dogs and an 1899 oil painting of a landscape with haystacks. Although his first paintings seem more inspired by Rembrandt, at some point Van Doesburg became very fascinated by Van Gogh's work. When Van Doesburg was twenty he was called up for military service, from then on he would have to go on regular refresher exercises. The fact that Van Doesburg's passion and complex mind do not leave him unmoved is already apparent in July 1906. He then stays in Zandvoort to recover from a severe depression. In 1908 an exhibition of 42 drawings and sketches by Van Doesburg takes place at the Haagsche Kunstkring. Some two years later his portfolio "The masks off!"comes on the market. This portfolio contains 20 modern caricatures commented on by Van Doesburg. From 1913, under the influence mainly of Kandinsky, he started working in an increasingly abstract-geometric way. From that time Van Doesburg also wrote art critiques in various magazines, often in the theosophical weekly Unity and gave several lectures on new visual art. In addition to painting, he also engaged in architecture, literature, poetry, philosophy, design, typography and architectural history. His work was based on the idea of the fusion of zeitgeist and means of expression; all the plastic arts together should result in a monumental architecture. The environment thus created, according to Van Doesburg, would contribute to harmony in the world. When World War I broke out, Van Doesburg was stationed in Alphen, North Brabant, from where he would be transferred to Utrecht in 1915. From that time in Utrecht are letters and cards from Van Doesburg to his friend Antony Kok, a railroad official and poet. In this correspondence they discussed each other's poetry. Van Doesburg's poems discussed then would be published in 1921 as "The Soldiers' Verses" under the pseudonym I.K. Bonset in the magazine De Stijl. During this Utrecht time, Van Doesburg met the painter Thomas Denier (pseudonym of G. ten Doesschate) Through Denier he met Erich Wichman and through Wichman the painter Janus de Winter. Wichman and De Winter made abstracted and visionary art. With Wichman, Van Doesburg discussed his plans to found a magazine. Through a magazine he could realize his ideal, collectivism in the arts instead of the individualistic artist. At the time, Van Doesburg was in contact with Mondrian, whom he asked for illustration material to accompany his lectures. With Mondrian he would maintain an intensive correspondence until 1922. Probably for the same reason as with Mondrian, contact arose with Bart van der Leck. On March 24, 1916, Van Doesburg, among others, founded in Amsterdam the De Anderen, an association whose purpose was to promote the artistic and social interests of the most modern visual artists. In addition to Van Doesburg, the board of this association consisted of Erich Wichman, Johan Tielens, Louis Saalborn and Phocas Fokkens. With the founding of "De Anderen," an exhibition was organized in The Hague, in which Van Doesburg participated. At the same time he took part in the seventh exhibition of 'De Onafhankelijken' in Amsterdam and a few months later also in the eighth exhibition. In the founding year of De Anderen another artists' association was founded De Sphinx. Van Doesburg was also among the initiators of this association, which was founded in Leiden. The aim of De Sphinx was to obtain more cooperation between architects and artists working in other fields. Architect J.J.P. Oud was chairman of De Sphinx and Van Doesburg was its second secretary. During evenings of this club, Van Doesburg recited poems from his own work. Through Oud, Van Doesburg received his first commissions in the field of architecture. In August 1916, the architect commissioned Van Doesburg to make a design for a stained-glass window for a mayor's residence in Broek in Waterland, "stained glass Komposition I. From 1917, the year he moved to Leiden, Van Doesburg received more frequent commissions for stained glass, again from Oud, but also, for example, from the architect Jan Wils. In addition, Van Doesburg received other commissions in the field of architecture. For example, he designed tile floors, parts of facades, interiors and a monument for Leeuwarden. In October 1917, the founding of the magazine "De Stijl" took place. Van Doesburg played a major role in this founding and was chief editor. Collaborators from the early days of De Stijl were Alexander Archipenko, H.P. Berlage, Dop Bles, Frits van Hengelaar, Vilmos Huszar, Anthony Kok, Bart van der Leck, Piet Mondrian, J.J.P. Oud, Pablo Picasso, Jan Toorop, Erich Wichman, Van 't Hoff, Vantongerloo and Jan Wils. For them, the magazine was a means of discussing new modern art and spreading their ideas and opinions about it. They were concerned with a universal art, in which all the arts had to merge. Principles here (which were not at all clear at the beginning) were absolute abstraction, the vertical and horizontal line, the three primary colors red, yellow and blue and the non-colors white, black and gray. It was mainly Van Doesburg and Mondrian who then took up these principles. The magazine eventually gained international fame. In addition to De Stijl, the Dadaist pamphlet, Mécano, also appeared four times. Beginning around 1924, Van Doesburg introduced the "fourth dimension" into his architectural designs, a new style he called "elementarism. Through the application of color, Van Doesburg sought to express the concepts of time and dynamics ('the fourth dimension'). From this came the diagonal as a visual device. He called the resulting works contra compositions. This innovation produced many conflicts within The Style Group, especially with Mondrian. In the early 1920s, Van Doesburg traveled through Europe to spread the ideas of De Stijl abroad. The magazine had already given him many international contacts, which he wanted to visit in person. His visit to Weimar in December 1920 made a great impression on him and he wanted to return there to work. In 1921 he acted on this feeling and arrived in Weimar after a six-week trip with his new wife Nelly van Moorsel. In 1922, he taught De Stijl courses there in his studio. He gave those courses mainly to people from the Bauhaus, an institute where he would have liked to become a teacher, but did not succeed. Through his courses, he was still able to influence the Bauhaus. In addition to De Stijl courses, Van Doesburg organized the illustrious Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists in Weimar. It was the premiere of a small Dada tour of Germany. The following year, together with Kurt Schwitters, Vilmos Huszar and Nelly van Moorsel, Van Doesburg continued his Dada tour in the Netherlands. Nelly played the piano during those meetings, under the stage name Pétro Van Doesburg. Led by Van Doesburg, an exhibition of De Stijl architects took place in Paris in 1923 at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L'Effort Moderne. For Van Doesburg, this was a very important moment and he invested heavily in the exhibition, both in terms of time and financially. To his mind, he finally got the chance to elaborate and show some integration ideas and views on visual art and architecture. He worked with Cornelis van Eesteren on the Maison Rosenberg, the Maison Particulière and the Maison d'Artiste. Their designs were asymmetrical and eccentric. The spaces were in open connection with each other and there was no distinction between front, side, and back facades. Also, instead of being added after the fact, color was involved in the design process from the beginning. Other participants in the exhibition included Gerrit Rietveld, Mies van der Rohe, Huszar, W. van Leusden, J.J.P. Oud and Jan Wils. A year later the entire exhibition was exhibited again in Paris at the L'École Spéciale d'Architecture, and in 1926 it would be exhibited again, this time as part of the Deuxième Exposition Annuelle of the Nancy-Paris Committee at the Galeries Poirel in Nancy. In the winter of 1923/24, Van Doesburg was given his own retrospective at the Landesmuseum in Weimar. It featured 86 of his works. That same year he gave lectures on modern literature in Prague, Vienna and Hanover, and the Bauhaus published his article "Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst. In March 1925 another exhibition was devoted to Van Doesburg's work, this time at Der Quader in Hanover. In 1926, Van Doesburg was involved by Hans Arp and his wife Sophie Tauber in the decoration and remodeling of the eighteenth-century Aubette entertainment complex in Strasbourg. Van Doesburg envisioned an integration of space, color and movement. To achieve this, he used the same lines, color planes and materials for the ceiling as for the walls. It would become one of his most famous projects, on which he would work until 1928. Both financially and artistically, he had to make quite a few concessions materially, however, the Aubette became a disappointment for Van Doesburg. Shortly after this project, Van Doesburg began work on a house with studio at Meudon-Val-Fleury, near Paris. He built the block-shaped structure on stilts for himself and his wife; he lived there for only a few weeks. Van Doesburg had wanted to make it a meeting place for artists. By 1929, Van Doesburg was exhibiting regularly. His work was shown in Berlin at the exhibition Neue Typographie and at the Expositions sélectes d'Art contemporain in Amsterdam and The Hague. A year later, the latter exhibition was also shown in Spain. Another year later, he founded the group Art Concret with four others. Art Concret was a reaction to the founding of Cercle et Carré and strove for lawful constructed compositions. Van Doesburg's "A-rhythmic compositions" and "designs for a universal form" date from that time. In February 1931, Van Doesburg left for Davos to recover and recover from asthma. On March 7, 1931, he died there of cardiac arrest during an asthma attack.