Card Players (Kunstmuseum, The Hague)

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 philosophy - a reaction to the natural looking paintings that were still common in exhibitions at the time.^[1][2] 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."^[3]

The painting hangs in the Kunstmuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, on long-term loan from the Dutch government collection.^[4]