Viktor Schreckengost Gallery

The Schreckengost family has generously donated a selection of dinnerware and design drawings by Viktor Schreckengost.
Check back soon to see all the ceramic dinnerware designed by Viktor and donated to IMoDD by the Schreckengost family.

Dinnerware Design Drawings

Featured here are eleven plate design drawings on paper board.  Only two of the designs have pattern names, while the rest are untitled.  The plate sizes are generally 10 or 10.5 inches in diameter.  Each hand-painted design is approximately 14.5″ x 11.5″. Please let us know if you recognize any of the plate patterns!

Dinnerware Design Renderings

The Schreckengost family has also generously loaned the International Museum of Dinnerware Design seventeen original dinnerware design renderings and one original dinnerware design sketch. These all appear to have been designs created by Viktor Schreckengost in the 1930s.  None are dated, while some are signed, and occasionally have titles, too. All of the design renderings are mixed media on Monogram Illustration Board that is 20″ x 30″. It is unknown whether or not any of these pieces went into production.

About Viktor Schreckengost

Born in 1906, Viktor Schreckengost was the brother of Donald and Paul, all ceramicists, all sons of a ceramicist from Sebring, Ohio. Their father would bring home clay and other materials for the children to model. Every week he held a sculpture contest among the children, and the winner would accompany their father on a weekend trip into the local big city, Alliance, Ohio. Only years later did the Schreckengost children realize that their father systematically rotated the winner. Viktor graduated from the Cleveland School of the Arts (now the Cleveland Institute of Arts) in 1929. During this time he earned a partial scholarship to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna. Viktor began designing for the Salem China Company in the mid-1930s, and in 1946 he was named their chief designer. In addition to designing for Salem, he designed pottery for Cowan Pottery, American Limoges, bicycles and pedal cars for the Murray Ohio Manufacturing Company. One of his best-known designs is the Jazz Bowl that he designed by special request for Eleanor Roosevelt while he was working for Cowan Pottery. Viktor founded the Cleveland Institute of Art’s industrial design program (the first of its kind in the United States) and taught design there for over fifty years. Viktor’s design style was highly modernistic, using an avant-garde aesthetic language and applying it to comprehensible forms and products. Viktor Schreckengost passed away in 2008 at the age of 101. (Excerpted from an essay by Scott A. Vermillion.)