SHAPE, LINE AND COLOR
Design and Paper no. 19
Ladislav Sutnar
Ladislav Sutnar: SHAPE, LINE AND COLOR. New York: Marquardt & Company Fine Papers, n. d. [1945], Design and Paper no. 19. Original edition. 120 x 200 mm Printed French folded wrappers. 24 pp. Vellum endsheets. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Exceptionally well-preserved: a fine copy of this early Sutnar English-language publication.
4.75 x 7.75 softcover booklet with 24 pages of text and graphics concerning Ladislav Sutnar. Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm’s format contributions were “just as dramatic a change from previous product information presentation as was the introduction of the International Style in architecture.” — Joseph V. Bower, Sweet’s National Marketing Manager, 1984
“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 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.
And Design and Paper is where it all began.
The first six of Marquardt’s DESIGN AND PAPER series of promotional booklets were portfolios showcasing a variety of artists. From Number Seven on, each issue was devoted to an individual artist. The DESIGN AND PAPER series published original booklets designed by Ladislav Sutnar, Saul Steinberg, Raymond Loewy, E. McKnight Kauffer, Erik Nitsche, George Krikorian, Georges Wilmet, Ugo Mochi, Walter Westerveldt, Clarence John Laughlin, and others. Since the booklets promoted Marquardt papers, the design and printing of each issue met the highest production standards of the day.
From “The House Organ: Design and Paper” by P. K. Thomajan from Print Vol. 5, No. 3, 1947: “The idea for this typographic gem started with Edward Alonzo Miller, then associated with The Marchbanks Press. He suggested to Oswald F. Marquardt exactly 10 years ago, the project of issuing an attractive quarterly presenting fine artwork on fine papers, thereby inspiring the increased usage of the latter. Mr. Marquardt promptly O.K.’d the idea and ever since has been O.K.’ing more and more ambitious issues.”
“The early issues were devoted to impressive assemblages of trademarks, title pages, woodcuts, specimens of hand lettering and distinctive typefaces by prominent designers. These were printed on varying shades of antique papers, wire-stitched and thread-tied for that extra touch.”
“Distribution is directed principally to printers , art directors, trade press, and important executives. In addition, many copies go to non-customers, such as instructors of journalism and the graphic arts, who use copies as noteworthy specimens for classroom discussion.”
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