A NEW YEARS WISH
Ladislav Sutnar
Ladislav Sutnar: A NEW YEARS WISH. [New York: Ladislav Sutnar, c. 1958]. Original edition. Accordion folded 9.5 x 24.25 [24 cm x 61.59 cm] card folded down to 5.75 x 9.5 [as issued] letterpressed in two colors. DATED and SIGNED in red ink 1959 / Ladislav Sutnar. First example we have encountered, thus an unrecorded document. Faint offsetting from brown ink, otherwise a fine example.
Exceptional Holiday Greeting card letterpressed in two colors designed and printed by Ladislav Sutnar. Freed from the constraints of information and product specification design for this personal project, Sutnar’s Czech Avant Garde background is fully displayed on a large canvas where the shapes, glyphs and lines have plenty of time to “go on a walk, freely and without a goal [Klee].”
Sutnar’s Eastern European Utopianism echos through the Card text:
A new year’s wish / The new year holds a challenge / for better living. / With good will, / we can make use / of our expanding knowledge / to create / new, wondrous environments and / leisure for human growth. / And thus, / you and I can achieve / the world of our dreams. / Sutnar
Ladislav Sutnar (1897 – 1976) arrived in the United States on April 14th, 1939 as the exhibition designer in charge of the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Sutnar was the Director of the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague and enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading Czech proponents of Functionalist graphic and industrial design.
Unfortunately for Sutnar’s American assignment, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist the previous month. Germany invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and divided the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the puppet Slovak State. The dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the outbreak of World War II stranded Sutnar in New York City where he remained and worked for the rest of his life.
By 1939 many former Bauhaus faculty members—Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, and others—had won teaching positions at various American Universities. These educators were instrumental in bringing European modernism to American architecture and design. America offered the Europeans not only a safe haven, but also great opportunities to make their modernist visions reality. The dynamically developing US building industry and the open mass-production market permitted the exiled Avant-Garde to continue pursuing their ideas in a democratically minded society.
It was in this exile community that Paul Rand introduced Sutnar to Knud Lönberg-Holm, the director of Information Research for Sweet’s Catalog Service, the mediator for trade, construction and hardware catalogs that were collected in huge binders and distributed to businesses and architects throughout the United States.
In 1941 Lönberg-Holm appointed Sutnar as chief designer of the Information Research Division. Together the two men used modern functional principles to solve the contemporary problem of information organization and —most importantly—retrieval. During the next 20 years at Sweet’s Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm defined and pioneered the field now called information design.
A previously unrecorded and unknown high point of American Graphic Design.
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