• Steven Litt, cleveland.com

Plain Dealer art critic Steven Litt on Schreckengost's place in history:

On his impact through teaching:

Viktor Schreckengost, a Cleveland artist, teacher and industrial designer who transformed America through his own work and that of the generations of students he taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art, died Saturday night at age 101.

Modest, pragmatic and deeply concerned for the end users of his highly affordable creations, Schreckengost combined artistic and functional brilliance in designs for everything from trucks to bicycles, furniture, industrial equipment and dinnerware.

But although he created enormous wealth for others, Schreckengost never sought fame or riches. He remained in Cleveland throughout his 70-year career, lived quietly in Cleveland Heights and juggled teaching and industrial design while turning out hundreds of watercolors, ceramics and sculptures in his sky-lighted attic studio.
Last year, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George Bush in a ceremony at the White House.

"He saw that people who spent time and energy running after fame took time away from the energy and focus it takes to do great work," David Deming, president of the art institute, said Sunday.

Stepson Chip Nowacek said Schreckengost died around 11:30 p.m. Saturday while vacationing in Tallahassee, Fla., as he did regularly in the winter. Brown-Forward Funeral Home on Chagrin Boulevard is handling the arrangements, though nothing has been made as of yet.

Schreckengost's body is expected to return to Cleveland Tuesday. Nowacek said Schreckengost had suffered from congestion. But added: "I'd say (he died) more of being 101 than anything else.

"We've been reaching out to personal connections and the predominant sense is yes, sadness," Nowacek said. "But the feeling that has been expressed most often is an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the influence and guidance and his example ... . That's very, very present in people."

Schreckengost's influence on American life and popular culture was immense, but largely anonymous.

Cleveland industrial designer John Nottingham, a former student of Schreckengost's, said his teacher was the last surviving member of the founding generation of modern industrial designers. Those designers included Raymond Loewy, famous for his streamlined cars and locomotives, and Norman Bel Geddes, who designed the "Tomorrowland" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair in New York.

But while art history textbooks are full of references to Loewy, Bel Geddes, Walter Teague and other industrial designers, Schreckengost has been largely overlooked because he stayed in Cleveland, Nottingham said.

"He wasn't in the media centers and he didn't seek the attention," Nottingham said. " He wasn't a promoter, he was a doer."

Schreckengost's output as a designer was immense. His products included pedal cars, printing presses, stoves, refrigerators, collators, machine tools, riding lawn mowers, lawn furniture, tractors, dinnerware, toys, streetlights, broadcast equipment, gearshift consoles, flashlights, theater costumes, stage sets, artificial limbs, typesetting machines, coffins, calendars, chairs, electric fans, lenses, logos, ball gowns and baby walkers.

"Chances are that almost every adult in America has ridden in, drunk out of, eaten off of, mowed their lawns with, sat on, placed a call with, lit the night with, hid their hooch in or had an arm or leg replaced with something created by Viktor Schreckengost," Nowacek said in an interview in 2005.

Schreckengost's designs kept entire industries humming for decades and delighted generations of American consumers. He embodied the can-do attitude of Cleveland at the height of its economic power.

In 1933, Schreckengost designed the first truck with the cab over the engine for the White Motor Co. This innovation made it possible to build trucks with longer cargo beds and better maneuverability.

A single Schreckengost dishware pattern, "Flower Shop," helped the American Limoges Co. in Sebring avoid financial collapse during the Depression. Demand for the design was so high that the company had to rent kiln space from a competitor to fill orders. Art historian Henry Adams, who organized a Cleveland Museum of Art retrospective on Schreckengost in 2000, said the Higbee Co. in Cleveland sold 28 railroad boxcar loads of the design.

In the 1950s, Schreckengost scored again by designing a wildly popular line of pedal cars for Murray Ohio, then the world's largest producer of bicycles.

"His career has an extraordinary way of one thing leading to another," Adams said of Schreckengost on the eve of the museum's exhibition. "He'll design bicycles, and that will lead to headlights, and that will lead to flashlights and then lighting systems."

Schreckengost's most famous creations included his Art Deco-inspired "Jazz Bowl," created for Eleanor Roosevelt, when her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was governor of New York. Glazed in black and faience blue with skyscrapers, cruise ships, pipe organs and street lamps, it showed Schreckengost's passion for New York City in the jazz age.

Schreckengost said he didn't know the identity of the client when he designed the bowl for Cowan Pottery in Rocky River. He simply pulled a work order out of a basket and did his job. It was only later that he discovered the original buyer wanted two additional bowls -- one for the family mansion in Hyde Park, N.Y., and one for the White House.

The Cleveland Museum of Art recently bought an early version of the bowl at auction for $110,000.

Nowacek and his mother, Gene Schreckengost, the designer's second wife, a retired pediatrician, organized a foundation to raise awareness about the designer's work. Last year, the foundation coordinated more than 100 exhibitions on Schreckengost's work around the United States at museums, libraries and other cultural institutions. Adams, who wrote the catalog of the Cleveland museum exhibition in 2000, also published a second book on Schreckengost, called "American da Vinci."

Schreckengost's working methods were down-to-earth. To create a mold for the seat for his metal Beverly Hills Lawn Chair in 1941, he put eight inches of soft clay on top of a barrel lid, covered the clay with plastic, and asked hundreds of employees at the Murray Ohio Co. to sit on the clay sandwich. Voila: A seat was born.

Such directness inspired generations of students at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he founded the Department of Industrial Design. Some of the most influential talents shaped by Schreckengost included Giuseppe Delena, a chief designer at Ford Motor Co.; Joe Oros, designer of the Ford Mustang; and Jerry Hirschberg, head of Nissan Design International.

Nottingham, an institute alumnus and former student of Schreckengost, once estimated that more than 1,000 industrial designers studied with Schreckengost, and that collectively they have had a huge impact on the national economy.

Nottingham said that as an example of Schreckengost's indirect impact, his own firm, Nottingham Spirk Design Associates, holds 503 patents for products that have generated $30 billion in sales.

On top of teaching and designing, Schreckengost made hundreds of watercolors, sculptures, decorative ceramics and works of public art. His creations have been collected by major American museums, including the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His giant relief sculptures of elephants and birds are among the beloved motifs of the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.

"The work on watercolor and ceramic sculpture was the kind of thing he could do on weekends, because he had a full-time job as an industrial designer," Adams said.

Born in Sebring, Ohio, in 1906, Schreckengost was the son of a potter who worked at the French China Co. The family name derived from German for "frightening guest," a reference to Viking raiders.

After studying at the Cleveland Institute of Art with leading Cleveland artists including Frank Wilcox and Paul Travis, Schreckengost won a scholarship and attended the Vienna Kunstgewerbe School for a year with the leading ceramic artist, Michael Powolny. He also took criticism from the great Viennese architect and furniture designer, Josef Hofmann.

He also traveled widely in the 1930s. He attended the May Day Parade in Moscow in 1930, the same year he designed the Jazz Bowl. He witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He exhibited sculptures at the New York World's Fair in 1939. He knew artists such as Charles Burchfield and Rockwell Kent.

During World War II, Schreckengost served in the Navy. One of his most important assignments involved repositioning radar equipment behind American lines to help win the Battle of the Bulge.

In 1935, Schreckengost married the former Nadine Averill, with whom he lived for four decades until her death in 1975. They had no children. Schreckengost remarried in 1991. Survivors include his wife, Gene, and stepsons Chip, David and Douglas Nowacek.

Schreckengost's many honors included a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects, which he won in 1958; numerous May Show prizes from the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Fine Arts Award from the Women's City Club of Cleveland.

In an interview in 2000, Schreckengost said that whenever he received a design assignment, he always asked himself "how could I take it and make it simpler and take labor out of it, so it's cheaper?" But underlying all his work was an even deeper question: "Why should only the wealthy have good design?"