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Artist or Maker: A HAND PAINTED AND GLAZED SGRAFFITO EARTHENWARE 'JAZZ' PUNCH BOWL, 1931
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Notes: cf. H. Adams, Viktor Schreckenengost and 20th Century Design, Cleveland, 2001, pp. 90 and 95 for illustrations of punch powls of this design.
The design of the Jazz Bowl was inspired by a visit with an art school friend that Viktor Schreckengost made to New York on Christmas Eve, and in capsule form the bowl provides a narrative of this excursion. As we work our way around the bowl, we are told a humorous story about a night in New York. It starts with the word "dance", which floats above eight stylized faces with hats. One has a mustache, another a monocle, and another has X's for eyes - and old cartoon symbol for someone who has had too much to drink. Then we pass three gas street lamps and a clock that reads "3:30" (it is a safe guess that it is after midnight). We then encounter the neon signs of Times Square. In an amusing bit of wordplay, signs reading "follies" and "café" stand beside streetlights that read "stop" and "go." Then comes a group of skyscrapers, in exaggerated cartoon perspective, with a luxury ocean liner steaming on the Hudson River behind them. Next is the Cotton Club and a performance by Cab Calloway that Viktor remembered, indicated by a drumhead carrying the word "jazz" surrounded by stars and bubbles. A group of musical instruments follow, perhaps saxophones and we also visit the Ziegfield Follies in Radio City Music Hall, with its magnificent Wurlitzer organ. The story ends with cocktail glasses, complete with rising bubbles, and two liquor bottles. Inside is a sprinkling of stars and bubbles, which presumably join with the intoxicating ingredients in the bowl.
When the design was nearly complete, a large circle of decoration needed to be filled in. "I had that circle there, but I didn't know exactly what to put on it so I just put the word Jazz." It was an afterthought, the last thing Schreckengost added to the design, but it ended up providing the popular name for his creation: The Jazz Bowl.
No other design of this period in any medium so precisely sums up the feeling of the jazz age in New York, and, in fact, while seemingly simple, the bowl has some interesting complexities. New York has been rendered in cubist fashion before and while Schreckengost's use of bold contrasting color, sharp angles, and modern imagery is similar, nothing quite like it had ever appeared on ceramics before. Moreover, the artist's design has an engaging sense of humor and irony, very different from the moralistic and humorless tone of American crafts of the previous arts and crafts movement.
The jazz that Schreckengost's bowl celebrates was largely an African-American creation, celebrating a distinctly American kind of blending of class lines and moral distinctions that was at once exciting and risky. Furthermore, the design humorously evokes the downside of this experience as well as the positive one. The traffic light reading "stop" and "go" can be interpreted as moral admonitions, simultaneously encouraging us to indulge and to watch out. The bottles, liquor glasses, skyscrapers, and idly evoke not simply the excitement of New York but the dangers of a handover. Even the color of the bowl carries a double meaning. Though glowing and exciting, it also suggests "the blues," perhaps from the sadness of being alone in a crowd, or from being hung over after indulging too much. Part of the greatness of the Jazz Bowl is its realism, its lack of sentimentality, and the way it touches on the tawdriness and sadness of America as well as its excitement. In short, while seemingly simple, bold, and brash, it achieves a complexity of meaning even beyond that of most paintings while at the same time providing a wonderful visual punch.
Cowan Pottery produced three different versions of the 'Jazz' punch bowl and the present lot belongs to the second in this series. The first series, with its simple parabolic curve and no lip proved to be difficult to produce and would often come out of the kiln disfigured. In order to resolve this issue, for the second, a flared rim was added to the design. Both versions were created using the labor intensive sgraffito technique thus, for the third variant a significantly cheaper method was developed. Dubbed 'The Poor Man's Bowl,' this last version employed a plaster positive of the punch bowl's shape which incorporate the 'Jazz' design in relief thereby eliminating the need for sgraffito.
