Concrete Art

Concrete Art

Concrete Art and Design or Concretism is an abstractionist movement that evolved in the 1930s out of the work of De Stijl, Futurism and Kandinsky around the Swiss painter Max Bill. The term "Concrete Art" was first introduced by Theo van Doesburg in his "Manifesto of Concrete Art" (1930). In his understanding, this form of Abstractionism must be free of any symbolical association with reality, arguing that lines and colors are concrete by themselves.

Max Bill further promoted this idea, organizing the first international exhibition in 1944. The movement came to fruition in Northern Italy and France in the 1940s and 1950s through the work of the groups Movimento d'arte concreta (MAC) and Espace.

In 1960 Max Bill organized a large exhibition of Concrete Art in Zürich illustrating 50 years of its development.