Thinking about De Stijl: Three Generations of Committed Historians in the Netherlands.

This essay focusses on the changing critical identity of the Dutch modern art-and architectural historian in the decades after the Second World War ranging from the 1950s to the early 1990s. By adopting the historisation of De Stijl as a case-study I will state that its post war historiography was not only defined by new insights concerning this avant-garde movement, but equally by a change in the subject position of the historian as a critical actor. In this article the changed relationship between the subject (the historian) and the object (the past) is analysed as the exchange of an engaged... Mehr ...