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Willem Sandberg The Man Who Tore Up the Rulebook: Willem Sandberg and the Reinvention of the Museum For the many Sandberg items www.ftn-books.com has available, click here   Walk into Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum today, and you’re standing inside an idea that one man spent thirty years fighting for: that a museum should be alive, welcoming, and unafraid of new art. That man was Willem Sandberg — a self-taught typographer, wartime forger, and the director who turned a sleepy Dutch municipal museum into one of Europe’s most influential homes for modern art. Sandberg’s story is unusual because it refuses to sit in one lane....

Anthon Beeke With Anthon Beeke i complete the large blog stories on the great dutch graphic designers from the last 80 years. For many Beeke related books and posters please search with “beeke” at www.ftn-books.com or click here The Shameless Eye: Anthon Beeke and the Art of Making Amsterdam Blush There’s a particular kind of designer who doesn’t just make images — he picks fights with them. Anthon Beeke was that designer. For fifty years he stalked Dutch public space with posters of naked bodies, bandaged museum directors, and typography built entirely out of women lying on a gymnasium floor, and he did...

STEDELIJK MUSEUM Amsterdam   ww.ftn-books.com has probably the largest collection of Stedelijk Museum related material in the world. Nearly a 1000 items available. Search for “stedelijk museum ” at www.ftn-books.com or click here The White Cube Revolution: Why the Stedelijk Museum Is Europe’s Most Important Contemporary Art Museum Walk into most 19th-century European museums and you’ll find dark, ornate rooms stuffed with gilt frames, velvet ropes, and an unspoken rule: art is sacred, and you are a guest who should whisper. Then walk into the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam — and understand why it broke that mold entirely, and why the ripples are still...

Jan van Toorn   For a large number of van Toorn related items please visit www.ftn-books.com or click here and search for “Toorn” Jan van Toorn is one of those designers whose work makes you rethink what a poster or a book cover is actually for. He’s often bracketed with Wim Crouwel and Willem Sandberg as one of the great postwar Dutch design figures, but he spent much of his career deliberately picking a fight with what they stood for — and that fight is the juiciest part of the story. The rebel against the grid Crouwel, nicknamed “Mr. Gridnik,” believed in cool, systematic,...

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