e, to help form the direction his early career. One force was his exposure to revolutionary artistic and social ideas, from communism to Dadaism, filtered through the adoption of such ideas by important members of the Dutch Arts and Crafts Movement. As Monguzzi explains, Zwart had older contemporary famous role models in the fine artist Mondrian and the architect Berlage. Both were interested in the then-new social ideas of Marx, as well as in the idealistic philosophies of Hegel and Kant (Monguzzi, p. 5). This was to have importance for Zwart's later career. However, according to Purris, Zwart read Hegel and Marx on his own, which helped to crystallize his socialist philosophy on the responsibilities of the artist toward society. Later, he and many of his contemporaries believed that a new world order would arise out of the devastation of the Russian Revolution and World War I. They wanted to put the past behind them and to help create a new and better world (Purris, p. 62).
The fact of Zwart's independent philosophical studies can be compared to his
...