Ladislav Sutnar

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Ladislav Sutnar (born November 9, 1897 in Pilsen , Austria-Hungary , † November 13, 1976 in New York City ) was a Czech-American designer.

Memorial plaque in Pilsen
Sutnar's house in Dejvice (Prague)

Life

Ladislav Sutnar studied at the School of Applied Arts , Charles University and the Czech University in Prague . From 1922 to 1936 he was a teacher at the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague. In 1932 he was appointed director of the school and held the post, in absentia, until 1946. He belonged to the Artěl artists' association . The focus of his work was on the design of mass products in glass, porcelain, metal and textiles, as well as educational toys.

The Czechoslovak government was represented by him from 1926 onwards at exhibitions of new art, in whose exhibition buildings, pavilions and design he was often directly involved. He designed books in a new typography for the Prague publishing house Družetevní Práce and was the editor of an architecture magazine. He received a gold medal at the Exposició Internacional de Barcelona in 1929. He moved to the Werkbundsiedlung Baba ( Prague-Dejvice ) built in 1932 . In 1934 Karel Teige designed an exhibition with Sutnar's work.

For the construction of the Czech pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair , he went to the USA as chief designer when Czechoslovakia was broken up by the German Reich in February 1939 . He stayed in the USA as an emigrant, but was unable to bring his family to join him.

In the USA he worked for 20 years from 1941 as a designer for the company FW Dodge, whose FW Dodge's Sweet's Catalog Service produced mail order catalogs for industrial and commercial companies. A major customer was the plumbing supplier American Standard . A catalog principle introduced by Sutnar was indexing to make it easier for the user to use, experimenting with the Dewey decimal classification .

Lettering ADDO-X of Sutnar

Since 1951 he ran his own design studio in New York under the name Sutnar Office , Philip Pearlstein worked there for a time. Among his corporate customers were Vera scarves ( scarves ), Carr's shopping plaza in New Jersey (customer orientation and guidance in the supermarket ), the Swedish office machine manufacturer AB Addo , whose company name he typographically "dynamized".

In the late 1950s, he worked for the telephone monopoly Bell and designed advertising and educational material for the conversion of the telephone system to regional prefixes . This made it easier for customers to understand the system changeover. For a long time not recognized in the history of design and superseded in reception by Saul Bass' superficial change of the company logo in 1968 , Richard Saul Wurman remembered it after the turn of the millennium.

Sutnar developed a set of typographic and iconographic tools that were supposed to enable the user to navigate the sea of ​​information and stimuli. He also activated the existing stock of punctuation marks to visualize messages. Sutnar made it obvious borrowings from Constructivism and El Lissitzky's illustrations for Mayakovsky's poetry book Dlja Golosa . The graphic design and typography were deliberately placed in the European tradition of the 1920s and 1930s.

After he left Sweet's in 1961, friends from the Contemporary Art Center, New York , presented his work in a traveling exhibition in the USA and then entered the collection of the Rochester Institute of Technology . Works by Sutnar were shown in 1944 and 1968 in the context of exhibitions at MoMA , which also has him in its permanent collection. Sutnar's programmatic work Visual Design in Action (1961) on design and designers emphasized the value of theory in his profession: The designer must think first, work later .

In old age Sutnar devoted himself to painting, which he also exhibited.

Writings / exhibition catalogs (selection)

  • with Karl Lönberg-Holm: Catalog design: new patterns in productiv information . Sweet's Catalog Service, New York 1944.
  • with Karl Lönberg-Holm: Designing information . Whitney Publications, New York 1947.
  • with Karl Lönberg-Holm: Catalog Design Progress . Sweet's Catalog Service, New York 1950.
  • Design for point of sale . Pellegrini & Cudahy, New York 1952.
  • Package design . Arts, Inc., New York 1953.
  • Visual design in action . Hastings House, New York 1961.
  • Iva Janáková (Ed.): Prague - New York: design in action . Exhibition Prague 2003
  • Matthew S. Witkovsky; Jared Ash: Avant-garde art in everyday life: early-twentieth-century European modernism . Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Yale University Press, Chicago 2011.

literature

  • Reto Caduff and Stven Heller (eds.): Ladislav Sutnar: visual design in action, Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich 2015, ISBN 978-3-03778-424-2
  • Eckhard Neumann (ed.): Bauhaus and Bauhäusler: Memories and Confessions . 5th edition DuMont, Cologne 1996, pp. 302-307, ISBN 3-7701-1673-9 .
  • Jessica Helfand : Ladislav Sutnar: Mechanical Beauty , Design Observer, August 10, 2004

Web links

Commons : Ladislav Sutnar  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Steven Heller: Sutnar , Eye , no.13 vol. 4 1994
  2. ↑ Leipzig City Museum of Applied Arts: Simple, cheap, beautiful: artistic wooden toys based on the designs of Prof. L. Sutnar , after 1925
  3. ↑ Sweet's Catalog Service, USA ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Catalog collection at MoMA @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.moma.org
  4. ↑ Gernot Grube (ed.): Cultural technique between eye, hand and machine . Fink, Munich 2005.
  5. ↑ Steven Heller : Ladislav Sutnar , at American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), 1997
  6. ↑ Ladislav Sutnar, joy-art . Shuster Gallery, New York 1969.
personal data
SURNAME Sutnar, Ladislav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech-American graphic designer
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Pilsen
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1976
Place of death New York City