Columbus Museum of Art to Host Viktor Schreckengost show

We are excited to announce that a retrospective exhibition of Viktor Schreckengost’s work will open in 2007 at the Columbus Museum of Art. According to the initial proposal for the show, “This exhibition aims to reveal the importance and formidable breadth of Schreckengost’s artistic production. His career is often divided between those who recognize his contributions to design, and those who recognize his influence in the history of American craft. To make Schreckengost’s broad and diverse influence understood, the exhibition will be divided into sections, each centered around a work that is immediately recognizable to the museum audience or will most surprisingly introduce them to yet another ‘niche’ in which he pioneered.” Sections will explore such areas as production ceramics (dinnerware), pedal cars, bicycles, sculptures, and watercolors, and will include contemporary advertisements for Schreckengost creations to put them into a more familiar consumer context.

Thousands of Vik’s admirers attended a previous Schreckengost exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2000-2001. We caught up with Henry Adams, Professor of American Art at Case Western Reserve University, who curated the Cleveland show and will be the guest curator for the Columbus exhibition. He described both his memories of the Cleveland show and plans for Columbus.

Dr. Adams well recalls the initial response to Vik’s work among his own colleagues at the museum: “The staff was initially skeptical and even hostile. As strange objects arrived at the museum loading dock—bicycles, teacups, ceramic sculpture, and so forth—people became concerned that the show would somehow not be up to Cleveland Museum of Art standards. Probably the turning point was when I had Viktor come speak to the staff about his work. He was wonderfully articulate about his work and suddenly people became excited by the creative possibilities of the project. There was a sudden shift of mood in the month or two before the show opened.”

“In the end the show was a smashing success. It brought in more than double the estimated attendance—and attendance grew dramatically as the show progressed. The total attendance was 70,000, with 10,000 in the last weekend. The catalogue sold about 5,000 copies and went through two printings. This was unheard of at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where many exhibition catalogues only sell 50 or 100 copies. It would have surely sold more but was not available for at least half the run of the show. The store did over $250,000 in business, including selling large numbers of Viktor’s pedal cars. The show also received extensive local and national publicity, including an article in The New York Times.”

Many visitors to the Cleveland exhibition wrote comments in the guest book. Dr. Adams remembers, “Most visitors were amazed that Viktor could work in so many media. They compared him to Leonardo Da Vinci. Older people enjoyed seeing the toys and objects that had grown up with. Younger people thought that the “Retro Look” of Viktor’s work was wonderful.”

So why do another show? Several reasons, among them: new material, a different focus, a new audience, a new catalogue, and a new approach to the exhibition. A great deal of artistic material has surfaced since the Cleveland show—some of it from Viktor’s own attic. As far as the focus, Dr. Adams says there will be “more material on Viktor’s students and his influence on American product-design.” On the audience: “The first [show] did not travel outside of Cleveland. The Columbus show will be the first major traveling exhibition of Schreckengost’s work.” The new catalogue will have a “slightly shorter text but will be more visually appealing.” Finally, he says of the Columbus show, “Since there is more lead time, I am hoping that we can do a better job in promoting the show and in developing interesting events.”

As the date of the exhibition draws nearer, more details will be announced. Meanwhile, plan a visit to Columbus in 2007 or encourage an art museum near you to host the traveling exhibition in 2008!