es some original correspondence by Zwart that describes his roots as "the cradle of industrialism" among "the only group in the world who as a result of its productive apparatus have been thinking industrially for three and a half centuries" (Monguzzi, p. 11). In other words, the suggestion is that Zwart had every reason to be thinking along "industrial" lines, even when it came to art--and even though, as Monguzzi notes, Zwart's early years were contemporary with the impressionist (and at the time artistically revolutionary) Van Gogh.
Zwart's family seems to have been sufficiently affluent to send Piet to an art school at Amsterdam, based on his good draftsmanship and woodworking as a child. It was 1902 when he entered school at the age of 17. What is significant about that can be seen in the fact that Zwart did not attend a fine-art school in the strict sense of the term but instead focused on decorative, handicraft, and industrial arts. This was true even though the school was located in the famous Rijksmuseum. The unstructured nature of teaching methods at the National School of Decorative Arts is noted by many different sources through Zwart's comment about the school as "remarkable . . . without the slightest idea of any program" (Luidl, 1986, p. 33). Monguzzi (p. 5) goes into more detail by describing the fact that students were allowed to set their own study curriculum by focusing on one decorative art or another, from painting and sculpture to furniture design to architecture. The impression is left that Zwart developed an independent attitude toward study, based on a progressive attitude toward instruction on the part of the school. Even more important, his attitude also had a serious purpose. This purpose was to develop his technique and experience as an artist but also to develop a philosophy of art.
At this point in Zwart's artistic apprenticeship, three forces seem to have intersected at about the same tim...