VISUAL DESIGN IN ACTION
1961 Exhibition Catalog
Ladislav Sutnar
Ladislav Sutnar: VISUAL DESIGN IN ACTION EXHIBITION catalog. Cincinnati: Contemporary Arts Center in association with Champion Papers, n.d. [1961]. First edition. Slim quarto. Thick printed duplex stapled wrappers. 16 pp. Black and white reproductions. Elaborate graphic design on multiple paper stocks. Catalog design and typography by the author. A fine, uncirculated copy.
6 x 12 saddle-stitched exhibition catalog with 16 pages printed on Champion Kromekote cast coated enamel paper. Statements by Sutnar printed in red on matte paper. Photographic illustrations of Sutnar's work and exhibition design printed in black on the glossy stock. A fine addition to tuck inside your Lars Müller reprint—it fits perfectly. Just saying.
From the catalog: “The lack of discipline in our present day urban industrial environment has produced a visual condition, characterised by clutter, confusion and chaos,’ wrote Allon Schoener, the curator of the ‘Ladislav Sutnar; Visual design in Action’ exhibition originated at the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1961. ‘As a result the average man of today must struggle to accomplish such basic objectives as being able to read signs, to identify products, to digest advertisements, or to locate information in newspapers... There is an urgent need for communication based upon precision and clarity. This is the area in which Ladislav Sutnar excels.”
Mildred Constantine wrote: " There is a force and meaningful consistency in Sutnar's entire body of work, which permits him to express himself with a rich diversity in exhibition design and the broad variations of graphic design. Sutnar has the assured stature of th integrated designer."
Steven Heller provides this background history: "Sutnar's client base was eroding by the early 1960s. He lost his job with Sweet's because the systems in place obviated the need for a full-time art director and information research department. At a particularly difficult time, Sutnar's friends banded together to inform the business community about his work. The result was the traveling exhibition Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action, which was curated by Allon Schoener but meticulously designed by Sutnar himself.
"The exhibition was the basis for the book of the same name, which, because he could not find a publisher who would pay the high production costs, Sutnar financed out of his own pocket and sold for the hefty price of $15. Sutnar had previously edited Design for Point of Sale (1952) and Package Design (1953), which showcased exemplary work by others, but Visual Design in Action featured his own work as a model on which to base contemporary design. Sales were not very brisk, although today the book is a rare treasure."
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.
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.
A true high point of American Graphic Design.