Serialism closely related to certain works from the de Stijl and Bauhaus movements in design and architecture called "serial art" by some writers (; ; ; ), specifically the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Bart van Leck, Georg van Tongerloo, Richard Paul Lohse, and Burgoyne Diller, who had been seeking to “avoid repetition and symmetry on all structural levels and working with a limited number of elements” . Stockhausen described the final synthesis in this manner: So serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever: it's relativity and nothing else. It just says:
Bart van der Leck disagreements with Mondrian his abstract style became based on representational images. His painting Tryptich is an example, in which he transformed sketches of a mine in Spain into seemingly abstract shapes. In 1919-1920 he created the interior design for , in the Hoge Veluwe estate. The hunting lodge was designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage. In 1930, he was commissioned by Jo de Leeuw, owner of the prestigious Dutch department store Metz & Co. to design interiors, window packaging, branding and advertising. For these print materials van der Leck developed a rectilinear, geometrically constructed alphabet. In 1941, he designed a typeface