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VAN DOESBURG AND THE INTERNATIONAL AVANT-GARDE Constructing a new world Tate Modern Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens Hotte, editors VAN DOESBURG AND THE INTERNATIONAL AVANT-GARDE Constructing a new world 264pp. Tate Publishing. Paperback, £24.99.

978 1 85437 872 9 Within the loose and sometimes argumentative tribe of avantgardists who called themselves, or who have been called by others, "Constructivists" - that is, artists whose work was more or less abstract in content, restricted in means and jagged or geometrical in effect - are several wide splays of opinion. Chiefly at issue was a question which had exercised the philosophical flank of the artistic community through much of the nineteenth century: should art be useful or beautiful? Or rather, could it be both? The artist, designer and critic Theo van Doesburg believed it could.
A decade younger than the better-known Piet Mondrian, he championed his countryman's painting and publicized his ideas through a Stakhanovite lecturing schedule and an influential journal, De Stijl, as well as strongly echoing it in his own art. Van Doesburg steered a judicious middle way between the manically engagé approach of artists such as Tatlin and Moholy-Nagy and the art-for-art's-sake stance assumed by Mondrian and other artists in De Stijl's orbit. It is the doggedness and suppleness with which he maintained this course, as much as the estimable quality and remarkable diversity of van Doesburg's output, which makes him a wise choice of flagship for what is effectively a group show at Tate Modern. Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde is both a beautiful and a useful exhibition, though maybe only rarely both at once.
Van Doesburg's first artistic creation was himself. Having survived the First World War, he proclaimed himself reborn, and discarded his given name, Christian Emil Marie Küpper, in favour of his stepfather's rather more patrician one. During his editorship of De Stijl (which lasted a decade or so from 1917), he also wrote under the names Aldo Camini and IK Bonset, to conceal his authorship of writings with, respectively, a futurist and a dadaist bent. But as an artist, typographer and what we might today call an interior designer, he was pretty consistent: once he found his path he stuck to it. Less exclusive than Mondrian in his palette and formal language (the duo disagreed strongly about the permissibility of the diagonal, among other things; Mondrian was banished from the pages of De Stijl in 1924), his work is nonetheless broadly similar to the older man's. Grids are infilled with flat rectangles of colour, elegantly but asymmetrically arranged across the picture surface or café wall in question. It is all very resolved, very clearly conceived and fully realized (though on an architectural scale it must all have been a bit strident).

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The term Mondrian devised for this sort of work, "Nieuwe Beelding", cognate with if not quite the same as "New beholding", implies a looking at the world, a sense of some kind of reference to nature in art, whereas its common English translation, "Neoplasticism", stresses the autonomous being of the work of art, its independence of any subject, its disavowal of any documentary or allegorical role. Van Doesburg, ever the diplomat, hedges his bets somewhat on this question.
There is a nice trio of pictures in the exhibition, arising from van Doesburg's contemplation of a cow (a potent emblem of national identity in the Netherlands, let's not forget, and an important motif in Dutch art). The first two, a stylized but recognizably "handmade" pencil drawing and a more rigid painting, are both cow-like to some degree. The third is a matrix of squares and rectangles on a white ground, with a single larger square where the bulk of the animal's torso might be. The process implies that abstraction is a journey away, or a removal of inessential material, from some sort of visual transaction with a definite subject. Yet elsewhere van Doesburg uses arithmetical series, or patterns inferred from pieces of music (like many of his associates he was very keen on Bach, and we've noted Mondrian's love of jazz above) to generate pictures. In his writings, and notably in Klassiek - Barock - Modern (1918), he speaks of a harmony between the universal and the particular, between essence and phenomenon. In his last years he preferred the term "concrete" to "abstract", and his ultimate attempt to found an artistic grouping went under the name "abstraction-création", which suggests two different paths converging on the same destination.
Around Mondrian and van Doesburg's paintings, and other pieces of "fine" art by Bart van der Leck, Georges Vantongerloo and other De Stijl regulars, the curators have assembled a broad church, or a busy and rowdy square-dance, of European art, design and typography from between the world wars: De Stijl's camp followers in Germany and Eastern Europe, a dash of dada, the more cool-headed and technologically inquisitive work of Moholy-Nagy and other artists affiliated with the Bauhaus, outside the gates of which van Doesburg pitched his teepee for a while in the 1920s.
There are also several designs for buildings and interiors, and some furniture by Gerrit Rietveld, Marcel Breuer and Eileen Gray. It is this which may be the most widely recognizable fruit of the De Stijl philosophy. Rietveld's "Red-Blue" chair, which he devised before coming into contact with the De Stijl circle, but which he simplified and painted in Mondrian's triad of red, blue and yellow under its influence, has been canonized as a design classic. It exemplifies the utilitarian as well as the utopian aspirations of high modernism (it was an early example of flat-pack furniture). Yet it isn't what you'd call a model of functionality, and never will be until the day that humanity finally evolves a right-angled backside. A table designed under the same rules is wobbly and weak - and Gerrit Rietveld's sideboard of 1919, as well as being more or less the most hideous thing you will ever see, must have been responsible for many concussed and black-eyed children, and a good few kneecapped adults, in the progressive dining spaces of Europe between the wars. Never entirely useful, and only sometimes beautiful, in other words.
In general, though, the exhibition does its best to improve and delight. Putting fragile works on paper next to paintings and sculptures demands lowish light levels, so the colours in some of the pieces don't quite sing out as they should, but it does stress broad continuities as it exposes small differences. There might have been a bit more Russian work on display, and certainly the influence of Kandinsky on several of these artists is too palpable not to have been acknowledged a bit more emphatically. The broader question of political affiliation is, perhaps, soft-pedalled a little, in the good postmodern style, which is what we nowadays often mean by art for art's sake. At any rate, van Doesburg, while certainly leftish (in a Fourierist or even Bloomsburyish way) was in no hurry to mount the barricades. Many of the proclamations to which he put one or other of his names shows a weariness or a cynicism about politics, a wariness arising from the Soviets' abandonment of avantgarde principles - and, as a corollary, a sense of disappointment in the reluctance of the working classes to be transformed by his, and his friends', new beholding.