Scene of much happy bustling last week was the old brownstone mansion on sedate James Street that houses the Syracuse (N. Y.) Museum of Fine Arts. Cause: the assembling, judging and opening of the eighth annual National Ceramic Exhibition. For ceramists, the occasion was excuse for a jolly get-together, as well as a chance to see what other designers were up to. Lay folk could admire and be amused by the assorted exhibits. Sum of their reaction: bric-a-brac is coming back.
Common denominator of U. S. ceramists is whimsy. Sculpture at the show ranged from Viktor Schreckengost's Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, three haloed Negroes smiling down at the flames, to Sascha Brastoff's boneless, bulbous, button-mouthed females, Emergence and Timid Maiden (see cut), who look like a pair of praying mantises. Ceramist Brastoff's figures, tastefully mounted on bases of grey velvet and satin, won a sculpture prize. Fit for the flossiest mantelpiece were such lively pieces as Annie Laurie Crawford's Dancers Martinique, Carl Walters' blue Hippopotamus.
Prime mover of the National Ceramic Exhibition is tall, energetic, sparkling-eyed Anna Wetherill Olmsted, director of the Syracuse museum. She started the show in 1932 as a memorial to Syracuse's ate gifted Adelaide Alsop Robineau, pioneer U. S. ceramist. On a shoestring budget Miss Olmsted has brought the show to national importance. Overjoyed was she in 1937 when a similar exhibition of U. S. ceramic art by European invitation toured Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and England, ceramic centres all, and won high praise. No mere praiser of museum pieces, Miss Olmsted is glad that many of he ceramists who enter the show are commercial designers, that the interest the show has inspired has spurred better design in mass production. Her aim: to remove from mantelpiece art the stigma of an inferiority complex.