[...] The Swiss architect, artist, and product designer Max Bill published the first of three different versions of his own definition of terms based on van Doesburg’s in a piece headed “concrete design” published in the catalogue of the exhibition Problems of Contemporary Swiss Painting and Sculpture at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1936. In this essay, he wrote that “concrete design is that design that arises of its own accord, following its own laws without deriving these from external natural phenomena or modeling them on the same.” This was followed in 1938 by Wassily Kandinsky’s essay entitled “L’Art Concret” published in the magazine XXe Siècle.

Bill’s active work as both publicist and curator, which he was able to continue even during the war, did much to establish the concept of “Concrete Art,” even if only in Switzerland at first. His essay “From Abstraction to Concrete Painting in the 20th Century,” in which he traced the recent history of art from Cubism to abstraction and from Constructivism to Concrete Art, positioning his own work at the end of this development, was published in 1943. The Kunsthalle Basel hosted the exhibition Concrete Art organized by Bill in 1944, and a revised version of the aforementioned text was published in the catalogue of the exhibition concrete art from zurich in 1949, which was later shown in Stuttgart and Munich as The Zurich Concretists. “Concrete art is what we call those works of art that arise of their own accord, subject to their own laws, without recourse to external natural phenomena or the transformation, including through abstraction, of the same.” This is the version of the text that Bill used in later publications. [...]

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Art from Switzerland