Czech modernist designer Ladislav Sutnar (1897–1976) arrived in the US in 1939 on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. He got here to work on the Czech pavilion of the New York’s World’s Honest in Flushing Meadows, Queens, which—owing to the struggle—by no means opened. Deciding to not return residence, Sutnar was a person and not using a nation—however a designer with a particular new strategy who would discover a definitive place within the American inventive panorama.
He earned commissions proper out of the gate and established a design studio the place he employed artists who later turned recognized painters, akin to Audrey Flack and Philip Pearlstein, and amongst his principal purchasers, the F.W. Dodge’s Sweets Catalog Service supplied him unimaginable data design challenges. Sutnar’s Constructivist/Bauhaus background, honed whereas designing and instructing in Europe, was his singular asset. In New York he utilized easy organizing rules to the redesign of routinely chaotic {hardware}, equipment and mechanical components catalogs used each day by these within the architectural, constructing, plumbing and industrial trades. Quite than a potpourri of complicated, however important, descriptions and costs, he established navigational programs for finding and retrieving basic information. He was a grasp of readability with out sacrificing id.
Sutnar and his shut collaborator Knud Lonberg Holm, a photographer, author and architect, produced Sweets’ Catalog Design Progress, an in depth guidebook explaining the virtues of contemporary templates for all types of commercial catalogs.
Sutnar’s penchant for precision was a perform of his design, but additionally a attribute of his portray and the premise for the current exhibition Shapes: Venus / discourse, pictures, drawings unearthed curated by Jan Van Woensel of the Ladislav Sutnar School on the College of West Bohemia, Pilsen. The present’s catalog is a reveal of Sutnar’s private expression, referred to as Venus work. These works had been impressed by his New York residence (populated by prostitutes and strip golf equipment) and have become his most important focus throughout the late Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, when rising younger designers had been monopolizing a lot of the company shopper work that had as soon as been his for the taking.
On the identical time, the artwork world was transferring at breakneck velocity away from pure Postwar abstraction towards Pop and Op. “Venus,” “Strip Avenue” and “Pleasure Artwork”—referred to as “posters with out phrases”—had been influenced, like Pop, by newspaper and journal ads and males’s magazines. Van Woensel compiled the sketches and photographic supply materials that vividly showcase Sutnar’s dedication to his artwork, whereas highlighting his curiosity, or “male gaze.”
The Sutnar work echo, however don’t mimic, Tom Wesselman’s “Nice American Nude” and different stylized works related to Pop. Nevertheless, there’s a Sutnar sensibility right here—rooted in his sense of stability, proportion and readability—that departs from Pop aesthetics.
All photographs revealed by Sutnarbooks, Pilsen, are copyrighted by The Radoslav and Elaine Sutnar Basis, with due to the Sutnar Archive and Mr. Josef Mistera.
