The New Yorker (Jazz) Punch Bowl

Around 1930, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, commissioned Cowan Pottery for a ceramic bowl to be used at a party. Cleveland-born designer Viktor Schreckengost, recently hired by Cowan, submitted designs inspired by the modernity, music, and bustle of Manhattan. Schreckengost used a sgraffito technique, scratching the stylized motifs of advertising signs, skyscrapers, cocktail glasses, instruments, and figures onto a top layer to reveal a preliminary layer below, and finished it with a cobalt-blue glaze that reminded him of the “funny blue light in New York.” Mrs. Roosevelt subsequently ordered two more bowls, one of which she planned to present to her husband upon winning the presidential election. Cowan and Schreckengost then applied the New York jazz theme to a range of bowls and plates at varying prices, which had a brief moment of popularity in the 1930s. Cowan shut its doors in 1931, hit by the economic depression, but Schreckengost went on to secure more than a hundred patents during his fifty-year teaching and industrial design careers. When the ceramic series was rediscovered in the 1980s, it was nicknamed Jazz, and this oversized punch bowl quickly became an icon of American Art Deco.

The New Yorker (Jazz) Punch Bowl; Manufactured by Cowan Pottery Studio (United States); USA; glazed, molded earthenware with sgraffito design; H x Diam: 29.9 x 42.2 cm (11 3/4 x 16 5/8 in.) Diam (foot): 17.5 cm (6 7/8 in.); Gift of Mrs. Homer Kripke; 1980-21-7

This object was previously on display as a part of the exhibitions The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s and Making Design.