SCHIFFER PRINTS
Stimulus Fabrics
Ladislav Sutnar, Designer
[Ladislav Sutnar, Designer]: SCHIFFER PRINTS [Stimulus Fabrics]. New York: Mil-Art Co. and L. Anton Maix for Sweet’s Catalog Service, [c. 1949]. Original edition: AIA file 13j/1. Slim quarto. Glossy photo illustrated brochure. 4 pp. Machine folded file brochure with 15 printed Fabric examples. A fine uncirculated copy. Not in Janakova.
8.375 x 11-inch single fold brochure printed in two colors announcing the release of the Stimulus Fabrics line from Schiffer Prints available exclusively through L. Anton Maix. Features the textile designs of Bernard Rudofsky, Edward J. Wormley, George Nelson, Abel Sorensen, Salvador Dali, and Ray Eames. Curatorial information includes pattern and repeat numbers, and color combinations.
Designer Sutnar utilized his mastery of information graphics by assigning each of the six Stimulus designers a shape to reinforce their identities: Bernard Rudofsky was represented by a triangle, George Nelson with a square, Dali with a circle, etc.
According to Steven Heller: ". . . Ladislav Sutnar was a progenitor of the current practice of information graphics, the lighter of a torch that is carried today by Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman, among others. For a wide range of American businesses, Sutnar developed graphic systems that clarified vast amounts of complex information, transforming business data into digestible units. He was the man responsible for putting the parentheses around American telephone area-code numbers when they were first introduced.
"As impersonal as the area-code design might appear, the parentheses were actually among Sutnar's signature devices, one of many he used to distinguish and highlight information. As the art director, from 1941 to 1960, of F. W. Dodge's Sweet's Catalog Service, America's leading distributor and producer of trade and manufacturing catalogues, Sutnar developed various typographic and iconographic navigational devices that allowed users to efficiently traverse seas of data. His icons are analogous to the friendly computer symbols used today."
Allow me to quote Design Historian Jeffrey Head’s essay “Pattern Languages: The Artistic Legacy of Schiffer Prints” at length on the origins of this wonderful product:
“In 1949 Schiffer prints introduced its groundbreaking Stimulus Line of textiles, and with that came two innovations that continue to influence the industry today. First, Schiffer hired known artists, architects, and designers to create textile patterns and, secondly, they didn’t alter or modify those patterns for marketing or manufacturing reasons. Nor did Schiffer impose a theme or color palette. The results were dramatic—a variety of patterns, subject matter, and colors. “Unquestionably it is the most brilliant single collection of all modern prints introduced since the war,” declared the New York Times on June 22, 1949, when Schiffer Prints introduced the Stimulus designs at the Architectural League of New York.
“Among the textiles on display were patterns designed by Salvador Dalí, Ray Eames, George Nelson, Bernard Rudofsky, Abel Sorenson, and Edward J. Wormley—whose designs were shown on examples of Dunbar Furniture. In addition, there were several George Nelson–designed Herman Miller pieces upholstered with Schiffer textiles that could be special ordered. The exhibition itself was designed by the Nelson office, namely by Irving Harper, who also created seven patterns for Schiffer and designed the company’s logo . . .
“Cousins Milton H. and Lathrope Schiffer started Schiffer Prints in 1948 as a division of the Mil-Art Company (although little else is known about Mil-Art, some have speculated that “Mil” was an abbreviation for Milton). The Schiffers each came to the textile trade with different experiences. Prior to World War II, Milton had had various jobs, including cutting cotton for his father’s dry goods trade. After the war he had a specialty needlepoint and canvas business. Lathrope, whose parents had an upholstery shop, attended the Lowell Textile Institute in Massachusetts. The cousins set up shop near the Flatiron District in New York City with the Stimulus line of fabrics and draperies as their primary business. L. Anton Maix, whose own textile company was still very new at the time but continued for many years after the Schiffers closed about 1962, helped them develop their textile program and coordinated the Schiffers’ trade business through his shop on East Fifty-Ninth Street.
“Schiffer produced more than forty Stimulus patterns in different color combinations between 1949 and about 1962. Certain textiles were offered to architects and designers, with a different set of patterns created for retail customers. Schiffer fabrics were available across the country, from the J.L. Hudson’s Department Store in Detroit to W. and J. Sloane in New York, and for the trade at Clinton F. Peets in the Robertson design corridor in Los Angeles. In the only known television commercial for Stimulus textiles, New Orleans department store D.H. Holmes featured Schiffer Prints in an ad for draperies that aired in 1950. The Stimulus line received further distinction when architect Abel Sorenson specified his Schiffer designs for use in the United Nations Headquarters. According to George Nelson biographer, Stanley Abercombie, several Stimulus textiles were available in wallpaper versions from the Concord Wallpaper Company.
“The company quickly expanded the Stimulus line and continued to select artists and designers with no previous textile experience. Furniture designer Paul McCobb was added to the roster in 1950 and his Chain pattern was shown at the Good Design Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City the following year. Afterward, McCobb would go on to design textiles for other manufacturers, such as Maix and F. Schumacher and Company.
“Schiffer produced more than forty Stimulus patterns in differ- ent color combinations between 1949 and about 1962. Certain textiles were offered to architects and designers, with a different set of patterns created for retail customers. Schiffer fabrics were available across the country, from the J.L. Hudson’s Department Store in Detroit to W. and J. Sloane in New York, and for the trade at Clinton F. Peets in the Robertson design corridor in Los Angeles. In the only known television commercial for Stimulus textiles, New Orleans department store D.H. Holmes featured Schiffer Prints in an ad for draperies that aired in 1950. The Stimulus line received further distinction when architect Abel Sorenson specified his Schiffer designs for use in the United Nations Headquarters. According to George Nelson biographer, Stanley Abercombie, several Stimulus textiles were available in wallpaper versions from the Concord Wallpaper Company.
“The fashion industry also appreciated Stimulus patterns. Popular designer Dorothy Cox, working with J.R. McMullen and Company, made blouses and skirts with Wormley’s patterns. Ciro designer Jean Mersel created a line of sportswear with Stimulus fabrics by Dalí, Nelson, Rudofsky, and Sorenson. Today, textile maker Maharam (now owned by Herman Miller), offers three reissues from the Stimulus line: Irving Harper’s China Shop and Pavement patterns for George Nelson and the Sea Things pattern by Ray Eames, which Schiffer described in a 1950 brochure as “tiny undersea creatures pleasingly scattered . . .scaled and designed for a child’s room.”
“Perhaps the most lasting, inventive use of Schiffer fabrics was in the serving trays produced by Bolta—part of the General Tire and Rubber Company—in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Manufacturers of plastic bowls, boxes, buckets, and trays for the food and hospitality industry (in addition to vinyl flooring, wall coverings, and upholstery), Bolta introduced its line of Tempo-Trays made with Stimulus textiles (the fabric was actually integrated into the lamination process) in 1956. The firm, also known as Boltabest, turned about a dozen patterns into trays, which were available in different colorways and in different shapes—oblong, oval, and round— and in sizes ranging from eight by ten inches to sixteen by twenty- two, with fourteen by eighteen inches being the most popular. In its advertisements Bolta touted the restaurant and cafeteria trays as the “first fashion-decorated trays. Created by the world’s most celebrated designers!” They were available through 1962 and can occasionally be found on the market today.”
Ladislav Sutnar (Czech American, 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.
Sweet’s Catalog Service (established in 1906) was an information clearing house, evaluating hundreds of catalogs of individual manufacturers with the aim of making the resulting information searachable in an optimal way. Information organization was the central issue, and optimizing it through visual means was an important element in the enterprise, hence the need for a competent art director.
U. S. industrial catalog production in the early 1940s was not in tune with the faster rhythms of the modern tempo. According to an undated internal Sweet’s memorandum “ . . . an industrial catalog is far from an inspiring project, we picture it as cumbersome, colorless, indifferently-printed item of necessity nothing [other] than dreary inventory . . .”
Major flaws included a proliferation of long descriptive texts and mediocre layout, as the manufacturers usually commissioned their catalog production to local printers who simply followed their every whim. The need for informative, relevant and quick-to-read advertising, common in Europe for more than a decade, appeared in the U. S. only with the heightened tempo of production due to the war effort.
During their tenure at Sweet’s from 1944 and 1950 Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm wrote and designed three publications on information design, delivering the most definitive explanation of their mission and in turn they succeeded in revolutionizing the field of information design.
Catalog Design [1944] introduced the basic concepts in catalog design. Designing Information [1947] applied the basic concepts of information design to a broader range, and Catalog Design Progress [1950] further developed ideas in visual communication. All three books demonstrate the very thesis they had worked to develop at Sweet’s — information that is easier to read is easier to comprehend.