Margit Staber

Swiss art critic, historian, and theorist (1925–2014); specialist in concrete and constructive art.

Margit Staber was a Swiss art critic and historian who became one of the foremost authorities on concrete art and its international development in the second half of the twentieth century. Based in Zurich, she was deeply embedded in the milieu of Swiss concrete art — the movement that sought to create visual compositions based entirely on geometric, mathematical, and structural principles, rejecting any reference to external reality. She wrote extensively on Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Karl Gerstner, and other practitioners of systematic and programmatic art.

Staber was also an early and perceptive commentator on computer-generated art and the intersection of art and technology. She contributed criticism and essays to international journals and exhibition catalogs, and her writing combined rigorous formal analysis with attention to the philosophical and scientific foundations of abstract art. Her work on concrete painting as a form of structural thinking positioned her at the intersection of art criticism, design theory, and the philosophy of perception — the same intellectual territory that the Kepes anthology sought to map.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: co-contributor. Staber contributed "Concrete painting as structural painting" to Structure in Art and in Science (1965), the Gyorgy Kepes-edited anthology in which R. Buckminster Fuller contributed "Conceptuality of Fundamental Structures." Staber's essay argued that concrete painting — art composed from purely geometric and mathematical elements — is fundamentally structural in nature, connecting the visual arts to the same principles of order and organization explored throughout the anthology.

See Also

• Gyorgy Kepes — editor of the anthology

Sources

• Structure in Art and in Science (source reference) — Zotero record for the anthology