Piet Zwart: NKF and the New Typography
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This is a recording of an online lecture held at St Bride Foundation on 1 April 2025. Piet Zwart: NKF and the New Typography with Paul Stirton.
In 1923, Piet Zwart was introduced to the Nederlandsche Kabelfabriek (Netherlands Cable Works or "NKF"), thus starting a new phase in his career as a graphic designer. Inspired by the ideals of De Stijl, as well as the graphics of El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, Zwart began to experiment with the basic materials of the type case producing some 275 different designs for adverts, packaging and booklets for NKF.
This culminated in the famous NKF catalogue of 1927–28, combining a radical approach to typography, layout, photomontage and colour overlays, all in the service of a technical catalogue of electrical cables. This booklet made Zwart's name among progressive European designers and the catalogue remains a landmark in the New Typography.
Zwart has been voted the greatest Dutch designer of the twentieth century, but he could also be difficult. He fell out with the NKF management and in 1933 was sacked from his teaching position in Rotterdam. In this talk, Paul Stirton will trace the development of Zwart's designs for NKF and touch on his other work in poster, book, furniture and information design.
Paul Stirton is emeritus professor of the history of European design at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, and editor of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published by University of Chicago Press. He is the author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography (Yale, 2018), on which he spoke to the St Bride Foundation community last year, and NKF: Piet Zwart's Avant-Garde Catalog for Standard Cables, 1927–1928 (Letterform Archive, 2024).
To buy a copy of Paul‘s book, please visit: https://letterformarchive.org/shop/nk...