Books April/May 2001 BOOKS / EXHIBITION CATALOGUES / VIDEO Viktor Schreckengost and 20th-Century Design Success by Design: The Schreckengost Legacy Dante Marioni: Blown Glass Contemporary Textile Art: The Collection of the Pierre Pauli Association Lenore Tawney: Celebrating Five Decades of Work Fired by Ideals: Arequipa Pottery and the Arts & Crafts Movement Traditional Pottery of India African Forms The Ring Materials & Techniques in the Decorative Arts: An Illustrated Dictionary
	TOP Viktor Schreckengost and 20th-Century Design by Henry Adams, 2000, Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, distributed by the University of Washington Press, Seattle, 800-441-4115; 192 pages, illustrated. $40 paperback. Success by Design: The Schreckengost Legacy Video, 2000, 45 minutes, directed by Ted Zbozien, produced by Glazen Creative Group for WVIZ/PBS in partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art; available from the museum store, 800-469-4449. $14.95. Reviewed by Robert Silberman Covetousness is sinful, but I can't help myself. Viktor Schreckengost made me feel it. I want to own his Jazz punchbowl, even if the last one to be auctioned off sold for six figures. A set of his Metropolis dinner plates would also be nice, and so would a ceramic sculpture. And though I'm too old and too big, I'd love to have one of his pedal car airplanes. The terra-cotta animal figures on the buildings at the Cleveland Zoo can stay where they are; sinner that I am, I'm not that greedy. But since he trained the man who designed the Ford Mustang, maybe I could have one of those, too. Schreckengost, now 94, is a major figure in 20th-century industrial design as practitioner and teacher, an important, if too-little-known figure in American modernism. The Jazz Bowl is an Art Deco classic, just as the bicycles he designed for the Murray Ohio Company (the main supplier of Sears) are models of streamlining. In the video Success by Design, Schreckengost says, "I was always bugged by the fact that only wealthy people could have good design." He enjoyed doing "one-offs," but felt they were elitist. Early on he was attracted to mass production and showed the skills necessary to work with manufacturers and marketing people, and please the customers. Products he designed have sold in the millions, bringing modernism to millions of households, though it may not be the modernism of Breuer chairs. This catalog and video accompanied an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art (November 12, 2000-February 4), unfortunately its only venue. As the titles suggest, the emphasis is on Schreckengost the designer, not "artist" or "craftsman." A separate documentary could be done just on his ceramic work, given relatively short shrift in the video except for the Jazz Bowl. (The 1930 commission for "a New Yorkish punchbowl" was at first anonymous, but turned out to be from Eleanor Roosevelt.) With its focus on design and Schreckengost's legacy as a teacher at the Cleveland Institute of Art,1 the documentary is filled with tributes from former students. Given its brevity and his longevity, the video does a pretty good job of presenting the biography and surveying the work. It is a treat to see Schreckengost on camera. Still, if there is a separate level of hell reserved for those filmmakers determined to jazz up their art documentaries and prevent them from becoming a slide show by moving the camera up, down, across, in and out, so that the audience never gets a static, full image of a work, then I am afraid I know where Mr. Zbozien is headed. The catalog offers a more thorough presentation, with excellent reproductions and a fine text by the exhibition curator, Henry Adams. He takes a balanced approach to the protean Schreckengost's endeavors, which included theatrical set design and watercolor painting, and provides a solid discussion of the ceramics, including Schreckengost's year in Vienna studying with Michael Powolny. As the child of a ceramic worker in Sebring, Ohio, a company town, Schreckengost was at first determined to get away from the commercial pottery world, and he later searched for a method "where form, rather than utility was of primary interest." In retrospect, his turn to carved slab vessel forms is of special importance because, as Adams argues, it anticipates Peter Voulkos and the turn to nonfunctional ceramics. As Adams also notes, Schreckengost avoided sentimentality but was not afraid of humor, and that makes another comparison, with Robert Arneson, less than farfetched. The art-world model of success has rolled through the craft world; dealers have been known to encourage individuals to reduce production as a means of elevation to artistic status; goodbye potter, hello ceramic sculptor. Schreckengost reminds us that it is possible to combine production ware and "one-offs," and move freely between design, craft and the traditional fine arts.2 It is unfortunate that back problems made him give up ceramics in the early 1970s. The first time I saw the Jazz Bowl, it bowled me over. It still does. To learn of the full range of Schreckengost's activities, from revolutionizing the design of trucks and buses (by putting the cab over the engine, eliminating the "nose") to creating a set of elegant neoclassical heads for the 1939 World's Fair, is to be all the more impressed. Adams describes Schreckengost as "certainly the most versatile, and in many ways the most interesting and significant American artist in clay in the early 20th century." That may sound like curatorial puffery, but it strikes me as a just assessment. And as the video and catalog make clear, Viktor Schreckengost's work in ceramics is but one part of an achievement that can make sinners of us all. 1. Associated with the institute as student and teacher for more than 70 years, Schreckengost was presented in November with the school's first faculty achievement award, named in his honor: the Cleveland Institute of Art Viktor Schreckengost Award, for excellence in teaching. 2. For the artist's reminiscences of his many-faceted career, see "In Conversation: Viktor Schreckengost/William Daley," AMERICAN CRAFT, June/July 1997, pp. 44-49, 70-72. Robert Silberman, who writes regularly for AMERICAN CRAFT, teaches art history and film studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
	TOP Dante Marioni: Blown Glass by Tina Oldknow, 2000, Hudson Hills Press, New York, NY, 212-929-4994; 156 pages, introduction by Joseph Marioni, foreword by Edward R. Quick, photographs by Roger Schreiber and Russell Johnson. $45. Dante Marioni came of age in Seattle in the late 70s as it was becoming a vital center of American studio glass. Attracted to Italian glassblowing, he learned his craft without leaving home from American glass artists like Benjamin Moore and Richard Marquis, as well as from the Muranese master Lino Tagliapietra. This handsome volume presents Marioni's blown vessels, chiefly from the 90s, which combine classical forms with pure color. The essay by Tina Oldknow, curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass, traces Marioni's career and analyzes his work. The book concludes with the step-by-step depiction of the artist and his team making a mosaic vase.
	TOP Contemporary Textile Art: The Collection of the Pierre Pauli Association 2000, Editions Benteli, Berne, and Mary Toms-Pierre Pauli Foundation, Lausanne, Switzerland, available through Friends of Fiber Art International, Western Springs, IL, 708-246-9466; 178 pages, texts by Erika Billeter, AndrČ Gavillet, Pierre Magnenat, Anic Zanzi in English, French and German, illustrated. $42.50 paperback. A companion to an exhibition last summer in Lausanne, Switzerland, this catalog presents works by 48 internationally known fiber artists once exhibited in the International Biennial of Tapestry, held between 1962 and 1995 in Lausanne. The works had been donated by the artists to the now-defunct Pierre Pauli Association, named in memory of one of the Biennial's founders. The essay by Erika Billeter, former director of Lausanne's MusČe Cantonal des Beaux Arts, captures the experimental spirit of textile art in the 60s and 70s as it was reflected in and stimulated by the Biennials. (The Pauli collection has recently been merged with the Mary Toms collection of traditional tapestries under the rubric Mary Toms-Pierre Pauli Foundation, which has announced its intention to establish a new textile museum.)
	TOP Lenore Tawney: Celebrating Five Decades of Work 2000, browngrotta arts, Wilton, CT, 203-834-0623; 64 pages, essay by Sigrid Wortmann Weltge, foreword by Kathleen Nugent Mangan, illustrated. $25 paperback. From the 1950s onward, Lenore Tawney, now 94, has been a pioneer, exploring weaving, assemblage, collage and other art forms. This catalog of a recent retrospective at browngrotta arts pictures 60 works representing every aspect of her oeuvre, from a 1958 weaving to the mixed-media Drawings in Air of 1997, interspersed with evocative entries from Tawney's journals. Sigrid Wortmann Weltge's essay places Tawney as an artist of the avant-garde.
	TOP Fired by Ideals: Arequipa Pottery and the Arts & Crafts Movement by Suzanne Baizerman, Lynn Downey and John Toki, 2000, Oakland Museum of California and Pomegranate Communications, Inc., San Francisco, CA, 800-227-1428; 135 pages, illustrated. $30 paperback. This handsome catalog, illustrated with vintage photographs, technical drawings and color photographs, tells the story of the Arequipa Sanatorium in Marin County, California, and the pottery made there between 1911 and 1918 by young working women afflicted with tuberculosis during the epidemic following the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco. Influenced by the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement, Arequipa's founder-director, Dr. Philip King Brown, believed that, in addition to medical care and rest, handcraft would be therapeutic and possibly remunerative. During its seven-year span, the pottery was headed by a succession of well-known British ceramists: Frederick Hurten Rhead, Albert Solon and Fred Wilde. More than 100 examples of Arequipa ware are on exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California through April 29.
	TOP Traditional Pottery of India by Jane Perryman, 2000, A & C Black, London, England, 01480-212-666; 192 pages, foreword by Susan Peterson, illustrated. $64.95. In this movingly written book for which she spent more than five years doing the research and the photography, the English potter Jane Perryman provides in-depth studies of traditional Indian potters and their families. Noteworthy from a technical standpoint are the vessels from Himachal Pradesh that are first thrown on the wheel, then beaten with a paddle and stone to achieve their bulbous shape. Among the more remarkable sculptural works illustrated are the 13-foot-high terra-cotta horses and other animals populating the shrines in the state of Tamil Nadu.
	TOP African Forms by Marc Ginzberg, 2000, Skira Editore S.p.A., Milan, Italy, distributed by Abbeville Publishing Group, New York, NY, 800-343-4499; 297 pages, foreword by Jack Lenor Larsen, photographs by Lynton Gardiner. $75 (paperback $48 from the Museum for African Art, New York City, 212-966-1313). Rich artistic traditions, craftsmanship and inventiveness are on display in this dramatically illustrated book devoted to African objects other than figural sculpture and masks. In these useful objects, writes Marc Ginzberg, "we have a resource of designs and patterns that can be applied in our own cultures." The more than 400 works, from all areas of Africa and from more than 150 ethnic groups, are organized by function; most are from the author's collection and are on view at the Museum for African Art through August 8.
	TOP The Ring by Sylvie Lambert, 1998, RotoVision SA, distributed by Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, NY, 800-278-8477; 272 pages, illustrated. $75. Subtitled Design: Past and Present, this study by a French scholar surveys the ring from antiquity to the present, placing this most widely worn form of human adornment in a historical and social context. More than half the book concerns the 20th century, with the major focus on modern and contemporary rings by European artist jewelers from the 1960s onward. Works by some 75 of these artists were included in a recent exhibition related to the book at Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	TOP Materials & Techniques in the Decorative Arts: An Illustrated Dictionary edited by Lucy Trench, 2000, University of Chicago Press, IL, 800-621-2736; 581 pages, 10 contributors, illustrated. $60. Starting with abalone ("a shell material . . . used in much japanned ware") and ending with Zwischengoldglas ("sometimes called sandwich gold glass"), this valuable reference contains 1,000 entries that explain in clear language and often considerable detail, materials and techniques, both common and rare, to be found in the decorative arts. Compiled by authorities in the categories of metalwork, glass and enamel, stone and plaster, paint, wood, lacquer, ivory and shell, plastics, ceramics, paper, textiles and leather, the entries are supplemented by drawings and photographs—including 30 color plates—and a bibliography.
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