Poster for a talk on the work of Willem Sandberg, 1962

This invitation is to a talk on the work of Willem Sandberg, designer, museum curator and director, and fighter in the Dutch Resistance during the Second World War. But the ‘matter’ at hand is the importance of influence and inspiration in typography; as the poster says, “Sandberg’s continuing contribution is the restoration of wit and scholarship into what had become the mechanical art of typography.”

In the avant-garde period of the 1920s, Sandberg began designing publications for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, steeped in the free, experimental style of his peers Piet Zwart and H. N. Werkman. After 1945, he returned to the Stedelijk as an influential museum director, simplifying exhibitions and explanatory material to make them more accessible and democratic. During the war years, however, he played a truly remarkable role in hiding and thus preserving hundreds of collections of modern art and design, saving them from destruction or theft under the Nazi occupation. He also employed his design and printing knowledge to forge documents that allowed Jewish families to flee the Netherlands and escape internment.

The large, torn paper capital ‘S’ is Davies’s direct swipe of a key Sandbergian idiom, which is itself based on the de Stijl tradition and preoccupation with geometry and minimalism. The style demonstrates the modernist spirit, stretching the limits of Roman letterforms in a free interpretation of the humanist tradition, while bringing a handmade, craft feel to what was very much a machine-dominated strain of the 1920s avant-garde. It also demonstrates the inherently abstract nature of type, employing the disjointed shapes in the role of illustration. Like Sandberg, Zwart, van Doesburg, and Mondrian before him, together with all of the other important Dutch names listed on the poster, Davies literally escapes typographic tradition while simultaneously demonstrating respect for it.

Of course, for Davies such stylistic play was very much in the nature of historical tribute, just as the talk would have been. Any impulse to tear up the past, the restlessness and rejection that drove Sandberg and much of modernist typography forty years earlier, is replaced with a well-researched historical quotation. The obvious if quite sophisticated application of a recognizable style is not meant as a manifesto of the new wave intent on overcoming the old, but a polite acknowledgement of a debt to the past, a very moderate and Canadian modernism. Without its historical, political, and cultural leverage, such signs (or signifiers) become uprooted, and begin to float freely. Having outgrown its role as a wrecking bar to pry away the past, we can feel modernism settling into its ironic and very quotable new position, as an endless source of visual influence and copyright-free inspiration in our postmodern present. – Brian Donnelly

Reference:
https://designobserver.com/feature/willem-sandberg/39319

Artifact Text

8 15 Oct 12 w j h b sandberg talks on matters sandbergian
k c p p king cole room park plaza hotel
t member society of typographic designers of canada
g member’s guest one each only
b bar
o member left out he did not rsvp art steven em 3 3711 s w j h b Sandberg diretor Stedelijk museum amsterdam
diretor international center for typographic arts
creator experimenta typografica
‘sandberg inherits dutch traditional inventiveness and insight into printing. In this century the de stijl school changed our concept of spatial division. designers like van krimpen and de roos developed and refined our type faces. sandberg’s continuing contribution is the restoration of wit and scholarship into what had become the mechanical art of typography…’