Concrete Art – 50 Years of Development | Helmhaus Zürich

Although Theo van Doesburg formulated the basic principles of Concrete Art as early as 1930 in the magazine “Art Concret,” it received its most important impulses primarily between about 1950 and 1965 – also through Max Bill (1908-1994), as this original poster designed by Bill attests.
Even before his importance as an artist, however, he was after his year at the Bauhaus in 1927/28 one of the early important representatives of constructive commercial art – together with, among others, Theo Ballmer from Basel. Much of what the Swiss avant-garde movement accomplished in the 1930s in terms of typography, advertising and book design was visualized by “bill – zürich reklame” – characterized by a rational attitude, an emphatically methodical approach and a deliberate limitation of means.