H. L. C. Jaffé

Dutch art historian (1915–1984); professor at the University of Amsterdam; specialist in De Stijl and modern abstract art.

Hans Ludwig Cohn Jaffé was a Dutch art historian whose scholarship centered on the De Stijl movement and the broader currents of geometric abstraction in twentieth-century art. Born in Germany, he fled to the Netherlands during the Nazi period and became a leading figure in Dutch art history. His doctoral dissertation on De Stijl, published as De Stijl, 1917–1931: The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art (1956), remains a foundational study of the movement and its artists — Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, and their circle.

As professor of modern art at the University of Amsterdam, Jaffé was both a meticulous historian and a theorist of abstraction. He wrote extensively on Mondrian, Klee, and other pioneers of non-representational art, and served as editor of the journal Museumjournaal. His interest in the structural and syntactic properties of visual art — how elements are composed according to rule-governed relationships analogous to linguistic syntax — made him a natural contributor to the Kepes anthology's investigation of structure as a concept bridging art and science.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: co-contributor. Jaffé contributed "Syntactic structure in the visual arts" to Structure in Art and in Science (1965), the Gyorgy Kepes-edited anthology in which R. Buckminster Fuller contributed "Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures." Jaffé's essay analyzed how visual compositions are organized by syntactic principles analogous to those in language, extending the anthology's exploration of structural thinking into the realm of abstract art and visual perception.

See Also

• Gyorgy Kepes — editor of the anthology

Sources

• Structure in Art and in Science (source reference) — Zotero record for the anthology