CONTROLLED VISUAL FLOW
DESIGN AND PAPER no. 13
Ladislav Sutnar
Ladislav Sutnar: CONTROLLED VISUAL FLOW. New York: Marquardt & Company Fine Papers, n. d. [1943], Design and Paper no. 13. 120 x 200 mm Printed stitched wrappers. 16 pages. Vellum endsheets. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Wrappers lightly toned at spine, otherwise a fine copy of Sutnar’s first English-language publication.
4.75 x 7.75 softcover booklet with 16 pages of editorial and design content, all specifically to promote the various lines of Marquandt papers. The design and printing of each issue meet the highest production standards of the day.
“Good design implies control of visual flow. Such control may be accomplished by simplification and coordination of design factors for the most efficient and continuous transmission of information.”
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 Functional 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 Protectorates. 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—were teaching at various American Universities where they were instrumental in bringing European Modernism to America.
The United States offered these immigrants not only a safe haven, but also great opportunities to realize their modernist visions. The dynamically developing U.S. building industry and the open mass-production market permitted the exiled Avant-Garde to continue pursuing their ideas in a democratically minded society.
This exile community was where Paul Rand introduced Sutnar to Knud Lönberg-Holm (Danish, 1895 – 1972), the Danish-born Director of Information Research for Sweet’s Catalog Service, the mediator for construction and hard- ware catalogs collected in huge binders for distribution throughout the United States.
In 1941 Lönberg-Holm appointed Sutnar 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. Over the next 20 years at Sweet’s Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm defined and pioneered the field now called information design.
And Design and Paper Number 13 is where it all began.
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