Ladislav Sutnar’s Unproduced Modernist Building Toy

SUTNAR, Ladislav. Build the Town. New York, ca. 1943. Original three-colour silkscreen promotional sheet, 21.6 × 28.1 cm, print signed “Sutnar” in the image at upper left. One of approximately 100 copies printed. Fine condition.

A remarkably fresh example of Sutnar’s promotional design for Build the Town, an experimental set of painted wooden construction blocks developed shortly after his emigration to the United States.

Conceived as a means of introducing children to the forms and structures of the modern industrial city, Build the Town continued Sutnar’s important interwar work in progressive toy design. Although he sought an American manufacturer, the set was never commercially produced, and only a few prototype sets are known. The promotional sheets are consequently among the only surviving contemporary records of the project. Examples of the promotional kit are held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which dates them to circa 1943 and identifies the printing process as silkscreen; prototype blocks are preserved at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.