The Theo van Doesburg exhibition has arrived at Tate Modern. It boasts of being "the first major exhibition" devoted to this influential uber-modernist to be mounted in Britain. Van Doesburg died in 1931. So, before we go in there and confront this crucial career, we need to ask ourselves why it has taken so long for it to be examined. Why 80 years?
My suspicion is that there are two reasons. The first is the daunting nature of Van Doesburg's achievements. He was the central figure in a complex arrangement of modernist factions whose revolutionary pronouncements are so strict and joyless that the modern curator - a wimpish breed in the best of circumstances - takes one look at this important art theorising and scarpers. I don't blame them, either. Few sights in aesthetics are quite as challenging as a Van Doesburg manifesto.
The second reason he has been avoided is that nobody actually adores him as an artist. Perhaps a few Dutch compatriots, the dour ones with strict cultural agendas of their own, have persuaded themselves that Van Doesburg could paint as well as he could pronounce. The rest of us, however, have allowed an image of him to take root, of a dull polemicist whose art was chiefly there to illustrate his theories. Compare him with Mondrian, a junior partner in the Van Doesburg alliance, and most of us prefer the junior partner. Mondrian thrills. Van Doesburg does not. Or so I have always assumed.
This is the situation in which this event finds itself, as it ends the long wait and arrives at Tate Modern to weigh up one of the pivotal careers of pioneering modernism. To my eyes, even today, there is still some avoidance going on. Examine this exhibition's full title, Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World. Is there not a weaselly tone to it? Is this not a show that promises, again, to explore Van Doesburg's context, but not, again, Van Doesburg?
He was born in Utrecht in 1883 as Christian Emil Marie Küpper. His first ambition was to become an actor, then a singer, and finally a painter, a task he pursued, initially, in the Van Gogh manner, with turbulent brushstrokes and dark moods. The Tate, however, misses out on all that and begins looking at him when he was already in his thirties, and already tottering on the cusp of abstraction. The earliest work here is a most peculiar painting, from 1914, of a young girl sniffing some flowers. She has red cheeks, peeping black eyes and a pink face that seems to have been pushed against the picture surface, like a schoolkid pressing her nose against a shop window.
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The surrounding images, all painted in 1915 or 1916, are also weird: glowing spheres encircling mysterious orbs; pulsing suns rising in darkened skies; abstracted Christmas trees glowing with cosmic baubles. Even the monogram that Van Doesburg has invented to sign his work - the letter tau, intersecting a triangle - is spooky and occultish. Which is not surprising, because he had by then become a theosophist.
The captions mention it briskly, then rush on, determined to avoid the subject. The fact is, theosophy, founded by the fraudulent Madame Blavatsky in the 1870s, is embarrassing. If there is one thing you do not want your hardcore modernist to be, it is a member of an occult cult that believes in the essential unity of the cosmos, as proposed so battily by Madame Blavatsky. Theosophy takes art into Dan Brown territory. No serious student of art history wants to touch it.
Yet it was theosophy that turned Van Doesburg from a turbulent expressionist working in the Van Gogh style into a painterly seeker after universal truths. He discovered it via Kandinsky, also a theosophist, whose writings on the spiritual in art Van Doesburg read and absorbed in 1913, his year of change. Mondrian, the greatest painter in Van Doesburg's circle, and a gorgeous contributor throughout this show, was a theosophist too. When Mondrian died, one of the few possessions left in his studio was a large portrait of Madame Blavatsky.
I will not bore you here with the details of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine. Only the truly determined will ever read it from cover to cover. The book's key claim, though, is that there exists a cosmic order in the universe that unites everything. This universal order is achieved by balancing a male force - the vertical - with a female force - the horizontal. Mondrian's early Pier and Ocean paintings, in which the vertical pier thrusts into the horizontal ocean, is a textbook illustration of Blavatsky's doctrine.
Van Doesburg swallowed it whole as well, and the first few rooms of this show are characterised by their enthusiastic effort to reduce everything to its underlying verticals and horizontals. I found it fascinating to watch. A cow becomes a set of coloured rectangles. A dancing couple becomes a pattern of squares on a stained-glass window. Most evidently of all, two card players at a table are turned into a multicoloured chessboard of pulsing angular patches.
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The influence of theosophy on Van Doesburg was not, I suggest, confined to this search for universal shapes. Just as telling was his determination to spread the abstract message through the constant formation of avant-garde groups and cults. The first of these, founded in 1916, was an art club called De Sphinx (what else was anyone going to call their first quasi-occult artistic gathering?), while the most influential was De Stijl, set up a year later.
De Stijl - a group of artists determined to impose universal order on all the arts, from typography to architecture - had Mondrian as a member, and the brilliant Georges Vantongerloo, and the exciting Bart van der Leck. This show has beautifully chosen examples from all of them. All worked with essential arrangements of rectangles and squares, painted in the basic colours of red, yellow and blue. Once your eye gets in tune with this lovely austerity, it soon recognises how different they all were. All except Van Doesburg, whose art seems to me to be always shying away from expressing its maker's identity.
This curious sense of Van Doesburg being there on paper, but somehow not in the flesh, continues through the display. There are 80 other artists crammed into the show, and the effort to track all the groupings they formed or managed or inspired results in a busy display that sometimes grows frantic.
Another of Van Doesburg's key ambitions was to spread his occult-inspired modernist message across all the arts, so the show also finds itself hopping crazily from discipline to discipline. Gerrit Rietveld's famous De Stijl chairs, with their unsittable angles, share a plinth with Eileen Grey's complex planar tables. An array of architectural models allows you to imagine some of the era's most ambitious buildings and interiors. Film makers with no colour stock at their disposal are forced to hand-colour their pulsing rectangles and circles. It's all periodically exciting, but also relentless. I, for one, would have preferred two-thirds of the show not to be here, allowing the remaining portion to breathe.
Having founded De Stijl, Van Doesburg flirts, rather surprisingly, with Dada (where he adopts the pseudonym IK Bonset, probably an anagram of ik ben zot, Dutch for "I am foolish"), and as his subsequent groupings pile up - elementarism, Cercle et Carré, art concret, abstraction-création - the typical visitor will, I suspect, find their grasp of abstract nouns being tested beyond a pleasing limit.
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Then, at the very end, some clarity. Van Doesburg died in 1931. The entire centre of his career had been spent bringing others on board. In his own story, however, he seems to have saved his best painting till last. Having lavished most of his attention on verticals and horizontals, some time around 1928, he belatedly discovered the power of the diagonal. A switch is thrown. Van Doesburg's art shifts moods abruptly from placid to dynamic. The squares are now tipped up at vertiginous angles, their corners cropped brusquely, as if captured in a snap shot.
His final painting, with the wholly unpromising title of Arithmetic Composition, is a beautiful thing. This gorgeous arrangement of black squares marching upwards at an angle through parallel bands of a two-tone white seems finally to discover a universal beauty that is truly Van Doesburg's own.
Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde is at Tate Modern, SE1, until May 16