Presentation of Vision '67

Abstract

Introduction by Victor Margolin Willem Sandberg was a man of many talents. Born in Amersfoort, Holland, in 1897, he studied art in Amsterdam as a young man; became a follower of Mazdaznan, the spiritual movement that also attracted Johannes Itten; and then traveled extensively in Europe. In 1927, he visited Vienna. There he studied the Isotype system of pictorial statistics developed by Otto Neurath. Sandberg then visited the Dessau Bauhaus and spent several months in Berlin where he met and became a close friend of Naum Gabo among others. After returning to Amsterdam, Sandberg gradually became active as a graphic designer. He had no formal training in design, but his early art training and his familiarity with Neurath's pictorial statistics, as well as a brief apprenticeship with a printer in Herrliberg, Switzerland, during his Mazdaznan days, prepared him for his first commission: a calendar for the publishing house Ploegsma. His initial contact with the Stedelijk Museum came in 1928 when he was asked to design pictorial statistics for the museum's exhibition Work for the Disabled. In 1932, Sandberg was invited to become a member of VANK, the Dutch Society for Arts and Crafts, leading him to join a Stedelijk Museum committee that recommended alternating exhibitions of applied art with those of painting and sculpture. After several consulting projects with the Stedelijk, Sandberg became the museum's curator of modern art from 1937 to 1941. After the war, he was named director of the museum and served in that capacity until his retirement in 1962. While at the Stedelijk, Sandberg expanded the collections of painting and sculpture and developed many new exhibition techniques that were widely adopted internationally. In addition to his curatorial responsibilities, he designed more than 300 catalogs and many posters for the museum's exhibitions. These were not only landmarks in museum publication design, but also were some of the most thoughtful and tasteful graphic designs done in the postwar years. Following his retirement from the Stedelijk, Sandberg was active in many projects at home and abroad, including the international advisory committee for the Beaubourg in Paris and the executive committee for the new Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The following talk, presented on October 19, 1967, is taken as is from the original mimeographed copy as circulated at the Vision '67 conference sponsored by the International Center for the Communication Arts and Sciences in New York City. It is printed with the kind permission of the International Center for the Typographic Arts.