Plaque with still life

Schreckengost was a prolific and influential industrial designer, who enjoyed a long career during the 20th century. He was literally born into the ceramics industry, in Sebring, Ohio, where his father worked at a ceramics factory. Schreckengost studied at the highly influential Cleveland School (now the Cleveland Institute of Art), graduating in 1929, and launching into a successful career, both designing and teaching. By the mid-1930s Schreckengost had already established his fame as a ceramic sculptor. He also worked as a designer in the tableware industry, and by that time had begun designing it in a modernist mode.

Industrial design characterizes much of Schreckengost’s work of the 1930s, hand-painted work by him is relatively rare. This plaque not only reveals the breadth of the artist’s skill, but also demonstrates his facility and interest in the art movements of his era. As executed in this table top still life of a wine bottle and fruit on a checkered table cloth, he demonstrates his fluency with the style, in its abstracted, and fragmented forms. Executed some three decades after the style was first invented in France by Picasso and Braque, it also shows the pervasiveness of the style in America. As such, the work is more closely aligned with the American Abstract Artists, founded in New York in 1936, a group that was promoting abstract art at a time when it was receiving a negative critical response in the United States