Pottery, paintings, banana seat bikes

Designer recognized in Ohio retrospective


Influential industrial designer and artist Viktor Schreckengost poses at an exhibit featuring his designs at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio

In this story:

Eclectic collection

The 'Jazz Bowl'

Transforming an industry

Designing for fun

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CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP) -- There would have been a 20th century, even without Viktor Schreckengost. It just wouldn't have been as much fun to look at.

Remember tearing down the street on a banana seat bike? Or pedaling around the driveway in that pint-size fire engine, the one with a real bell? Or how about the look on Dad's face when he saw that riding mower for the first time?

Schreckengost designed all those cool things -- and many others. He also is an artist of rare quality, known for creating one of America's finest pieces of Art Deco ceramics.

But it's just now, at age 94, that Schreckengost is finally getting his due. The Cleveland Museum of Art, just a few miles from Schreckengost's home, is honoring him with a retrospective show through February 4 that combines both his fine art and commercial work as an industrial designer.

Eclectic collection

It's hard to imagine a more diverse one-man show. The exhibition includes paintings, ceramic sculptures, dinnerware, a huge silver trophy for an air race, bikes and toys, a lawn chair, an electric fan, costume and set designs and photographs of larger machines Schreckengost designed -- such as the first cab-over-engine truck.

"No one has put together that they were all designed by one person," says Henry Adams, the museum's curator of American painting. But when pieces from Schreckengost's long career are brought together, similarities emerge.


Schreckengost's most famous creation, a 1931 punch bowl known as the "Jazz Bowl," commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt, is recognized as an Art Deco masterpiece

"One is the extraordinary clarity with which he gets to the essence of a problem -- whether it's designing a new product or representing an animal," Adams says. For example, "with an anteater, he makes it look like a vacuum cleaner, which is what an anteater is. There's also a wonderful sense of humor and a positive feeling about life that runs through everything in the show."

The son of a potter, Schreckengost grew up in Sebring, about 50 miles southeast of Cleveland, a town built around several china factories.

He worked at the potteries from a young age and soon showed an artistic flair. The oldest work in his exhibit is a remarkably well-drawn cartoon of German officers in World War I, which was raging in Europe when 9-year-old Viktor made it.

Schreckengost went to the Cleveland School of Art -- now called the Cleveland Institute of Art -- where he was president of his class, taught for decades and still critiques student work. After some postgraduate study in Vienna, he returned to Ohio.

The 'Jazz Bowl'

In 1930, while working for a Cleveland pottery company, Schreckengost took an order from a woman who wanted a punch bowl with a New York theme. Schreckengost responded with one his most celebrated creations, the "Jazz Bowl."


This 1941 child's pedal car, "Pursuit Plane," has a propeller that turns as it moves forward

A simple, deep curve, the bowl is decorated with a design in black and vibrant blue that uses bold shapes to give the impression of a night on the town in New York. The bowl shows streetlights, signs for a cafe and follies, skyscrapers in the distance, a jazz band's instruments and a tray of cocktails. It's a scene that is at once exhilarating and a bit seedy.

"For me, that was New York," Schreckengost says as he tours his show for the first time. "New York was this funny blue light at night."

Schreckengost later discovered that the woman who ordered the bowl was Eleanor Roosevelt. She loved it and ordered two more -- "one for Hyde Park and one for the White House -- she was sure Franklin (Roosevelt) was going to make it there," he says.

Several slightly altered versions of the "Jazz Bowl" were eventually made. They're now considered classics of Art Deco and have sold for more than $100,000 at auction.

Schreckengost loves jazz -- he once played saxophone and clarinet -- and found inspiration in the music and the black American culture from which it sprang.

A large segment of Schreckengost's paintings and ceramic pieces from the 1930s depict black subjects -- including big bands, dancers and a sculpture of Mother Earth as a radiant, nude black woman with tiny babies of all ethnic backgrounds climbing on her.

The pieces were daring for a white artist of the time, although some of the subjects' pronounced features might strike modern viewers as stereotyped.


"Pachyderm," a glazed earthenware sculpture. Critics say his ceramic sculpture is among the finest in 20th-century America

"I hope they don't depict any belittling of any kind," Schreckengost says. The works were done out of admiration, he says.

Transforming an industry

In the field of industrial design, Schreckengost seemed willing to take on any project. The sheer catalogue of objects he created is almost numbing. He tells a story about keeping track one day on his way to work of how many objects he saw that he had designed: the tally was 32.

His modern dinnerware of the 1930s transformed the way the American pottery industry -- which had previously copied stodgy European designs -- decorated plates and cups.

At a time when truck sizes were limited by law to 42 feet (12.6 meters), Schreckengost designed a truck that pushed the cab up over the engine, giving it an extra 5 feet (1.5 meters) of hauling space in back.

For the Murray Ohio Co., Schreckengost created bicycles for more than 30 years, from streamlined dreams that look like they were fired from a bullet to funky 1960s banana seat bikes, perfect for popping wheelies. Both styles are represented at his show.

Always, he was guided by simple questions that helped him create useful designs. What is the object for? Who will use it? How can they operate it comfortably? Can the object be mass produced at low cost?

Designing for fun

Then, injecting his sense of playfulness into the process, Schreckengost made his designs fun.

"I didn't understand why wealthy people were the only ones who could have good design," Schreckengost says. "I thought if we could make millions of something, everybody could afford it. It didn't cost any more to make it right than to make junk."

Adams says Schreckengost could have become better known if he had been more interested in self-promotion. But his real love has always been creating.

The artist didn't seek out his current show. Adams first contacted Schreckengost a few years ago to ask him about the "Jazz Bowls," but the more the pair spoke and Adams learned about Schreckengost's career, the more fascinated he became. He would up proposing the show to the museum's executives.

Still, Schreckengost seems happy to be recognized.

A bit frail but still charming and witty, Schreckengost clearly is enjoying his first look at the exhibition, making wisecracks and telling stories as he looks at some his favorite pieces. Someone remarks about breadth of his work.

"I tried everything," he says. "But I was always getting back to the abstract first. The structure of things -- first. Then I'd see whether it fit the subject."