From Dada to Concrete Art: when Zurich was a modernist battleground

A new book about the pioneers of Concretism fills a gap in the history of the most internationally influential Swiss art movement of the 20th century. Its co-author, Thomas Haemmerli, explains how the book also acknowledges the art form’s contribution to the rise of the world-renowned Swiss school of graphic design. Thomas Haemmerli confesses that he used to hate concrete art. Born in 1964, Haemmerli belongs to the generation of radical young people who stormed the streets of Zurich in the late 1970s and early 1980s – Switzerland’s delayed answer to the youth revolutions that shook much of the rest of the world in the 1960s. Times changed, and today the former activist is known as a humorous documentary film-maker. Together with the art critic Brigitte Ulmer, he is also the author of Circle! Square! Progress! Zurich’s Concrete Avant-Garde, a comprehensive reassessment of Switzerland’s most influential 20th-century movement in arts and design, whose impact still resonates in ...