Below are select pages from the 1921 Dada book of poems titled Bezette Stad (Occupied City) by Paul van Ostaijen. It is illustrated with five striking woodcuts by Oskar Jespers. The bold woodcuts plus the experimental type + lettering are pretty fantastic and serve as excellent examples of progressive design.
Pages 127 & 135
Remarkably, the typographic layout in this book was designed by the poet himself and is an expressive part of the poetry. Van Ostaijen (1896-1928) was a Dutch-speaking Belgian writer, active in the Flemish cultural revival of the 1920s. The beseiged city of the book’s title is his native Antwerp, occupied by the Germans in the First World War. It is also an image for a wider sense of disintegration, both cultural and personal. (Via the Victoria & Albert Museum)
Pages 69 & 91
Van Ostaijen was an active supporter of Flemish independence. Because of his involvement with Flemish activism during World War I, he was forced to flee to Berlin after the war. There, in one of the centers of Dadaism and Expressionism, he met many other artists. There he also went through a severe mental crisis.
After Van Ostaijen returned to Belgium, he opened an art gallery in Brussels. In 1928 at the young age of 32 he died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Miavoye-Anthée, in the Wallonian Ardennes.
Pages 113 & 119
>> Make the jump below to see 4 more fantastic pages from Bezette Stad.
Pages 19 & 41
Pages 47 & 61
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View Bezette Stad in its entirety here. Thanks to Patrick Bell’s recent tweet for tipping me off about the International Dada Archive located at the University of Iowa.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I enjoyed seeing this work. Beautiful… type becomes art.
pure beauty :)
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