LADISLAV SUTNAR
Noel Martin [Designer]
Noel Martin [Designer]: LADISLAV SUTNAR [poster title]. Cincinnati: Contemporary Arts Center, 1961. Original edition. Poster machine folded in quarters for mailing [as issued]. Printed in three colors on recto only. Expected wear to the heavily inked folds, and raking light reveals minor handling creases, but a very good or better example of this rare poster.
18 x 24-inch (45.7 x 61 cm) poster designed by Noel Martin for “A comprehensive exhibition of the International pioneer graphic designer, Ladislav Sutnar, sponsored by The Champion Paper and Fibre Company at the Contemporary Arts Center located in the Cincinnati Art Museum from April 7 through May 7, 1961.” After the Cincinnati debut, this exhibition was travelled to New York City and was held at the Pepsi-Cola Exhibition Gallery, 500 Park Avenue, New York City, from August 2 to 30, 1961 [Janakova et al.: LADISLAV SUTNAR - PRAGUE - NEW YORK - DESIGN IN ACTION. Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts, 2003. p. 378].
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 added: " 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."
Noel Martin (American, 1922 – 2009) was a renown self-taught typographer and designer who studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He later became an instructor there and was the long-time designer for the Cincinnati Art Museum, as well as a prolific free-lance designer. Martin was celebrated for modernizing museum graphics and industrial trade catalogs. In 1953, he was featured in MoMA's landmark design exhibition, Four American Designers, along with Herbert Bayer, Leo Lionni, and Ben Shahn. His spiral-bound self-promotional piece, Identity Programs, presents some of his iconic minimalist logos.
From Steven Heller's New York Times Obituary [February 27, 2009]: " With the ubiquitous branding and expert merchandizing of museums today, it is easy to forget that graphic design was once a low priority for them. In 1947, when Mr. Martin became the Cincinnati Art Museum's first graphic designer, most museum publications were staid and musty.
"Mr. Martin maintained that contemporary typographic design, as practiced by the European Modernists, would enhance these documents and make art, particularly abstract art, more accessible and more appealing to younger museumgoers. He introduced a distinct blend of classical and modern typography to the museum's exhibition catalogs.
"Allon Schoener, a freelance museum curator and friend, said that Mr. Martin, first at the Cincinnati Art Museum and later at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, "created a style which has been emulated by most other American museums during the last 40 years."
Noel Martin was born on April 19, 1922, in Syracuse, Ohio. When he was a child, his family moved to Cincinnati, where he spent the remainder of his life. He studied painting, drawing and print- making at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1939-1941 and 1945-1947, between which he married his wife, Coletta, and served in the military. During World War II he served in a camouflage unit in the Army Air Force, where he made catalogs and brochures. While making educational film strips for the Army in New York he was exposed to modern art for the first time, which later influenced his work. He trained himself in the art of typography and graphic design. He became a designer for the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1947 and in 1949 began offering his services as a free-lance designer and art director to a variety of firms.
In 1951 he began teaching design and commercial art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and worked there until 1957. In 1953 he was one of four designers featured in the Four American Designers exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by which time he'd already become nationally known. He received the Art Director's Medal in Philadelphia in 1957.
In 1958 he redesigned The New Republic from cover to cover. Martin (1959) said, "Good typography for magazines is generally typography which is free of animation and the necessary tricks of advertising, and is functional1." He used typeface Palatino and uncluttered the cover, making sure to leave white space throughout the publication. In 1959, he wrote several articles on the relationship between modern art and graphic design.
He continued designing for the Cincinnati Art Museum throughout his life. He designed numerous booklets, books, calendars, catalogs, corporate logos, flyers, magazines, newsletters, stationary and posters throughout the following decades. Some of the firms and institutions he designed for on a free-lance basis include Champion Paper Company, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Federated Department Stores, General Electric, LeBlond Ltd., Standard Oil Company, The United Fine Arts Fund, University of Cincinnati, and Xomox Corporation. He also designed corporate logos for institutions, such as Advance Mortgage Corporation, the Contemporary Arts Center, and Black Clawson, most of which were minimalist in nature.
He was featured in various editions of Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Graphic Art and Who's Who in Advertising. He was featured in numerous exhibits locally, nationally, and internationally. He wrote several articles and gave numerous lectures throughout his career. He dies of leukemia on February 23, 2009.
Ladislav Sutnar (Czechoslovakian, 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. [sutnar_2023]