This richly illustrated reference work on the life and struggles of the abstract artist Jozef Peeters (1895–1960) offers a fascinating glimpse of the Belgian and European avant-garde of the Roaring Twenties, with Antwerp as its point of departure. It was there, shortly after the First World War, that Peeters emerged as orchestrator of the most progressive art movements. He founded the Moderne Kunst group and organized three high-profile modern art congresses, accompanied by shocking exhibitions. Alongside Michel Seuphor, he ran the prominent magazine Het Overzicht between 1922 and 1925 and later the art newspaper De Driehoek. These cult publications featured articles by renowned authors and reproductions of the highest quality, helping to make Antwerp a respected cog in the European urban avant-garde machine of the time.
 
The extensive research performed by the author Peter J.H. Pauwels highlights the pioneering role that Peeters played as an exploratory artist and a promoter of international Constructivism through his contacts with numerous passionate activists at home and abroad. Besides Belgian figures like Victor Servranckx, Felix De Boeck, Paul van Ostaijen and Marthe Donas, we thus also meet Piet Mondrian, Theo and Nelly van Doesburg, Herwarth and Nell Walden, Robert and Sonja Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Lajos Kassak, László Moholy-Nagy, J.J.P. Oud, Marcel Iancu and F.T. Marinetti. For a while, at least, and with much trial and error, these figures shared a belief in a universally comprehensible geometric abstract art capable of transcending national borders and bringing about a new and better world after the disaster of the war.