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This Just In: Piet Zwart Ephemera
We now hold over 150 pieces from the pioneer of 20th-century experimental typography and photomontage.
Dutch designer Piet Zwart (1885-1977) was trained as an architect, but is best known as a pioneer of twentieth-century experimental typography and photomontage. He preferred to call himself a “form engineer” because he was such a strong believer in functionality, standardization and machine production. The master set from Zwart’s own archive is at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.
Letterform Archive’s collection of Piet Zwart began thirty years ago, but it was substantially enhanced by newly acquired material. Starting in 2013 there was a series of five auctions in the Netherlands featuring duplicates from Zwart’s personal archive. We were an active bidder in all five sales.
Our Piet Zwart collection now contains over 120 pieces of rare ephemera. Many are proof copies (printed on one side only) with dates or other notations in his own hand, and almost all have Zwart’s name and address rubber stamped in green on the back.
The items featured in the linked PDF arrived recently from the last of the five auction sales.
Download a hi-res sampler of images from the collection
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