Piero Fornasetti Ceramic Ashtray- The Day- Jewish Journal, 1961, Written in Yiddish

Details

Description

Piero Fornasetti Ceramic Ashtray, The Day – Jewish Journal, New York Yiddish Newspaper, 1961
Circa 1961

A front page you … Read more Piero Fornasetti Ceramic Ashtray, The Day – Jewish Journal, New York Yiddish Newspaper, 1961
Circa 1961

A front page you can actually put on the table. This small rectangular Fornasetti dish, a basin-shaped ashtray in the designer's own term, reproduces the masthead of the New York Yiddish daily Der Tog – Morgen Zhurnal (The Day – Jewish Journal) in crisp black on white ceramic. The English title runs across the top in Gothic letter, the bold Hebrew characters of the Yiddish title fill the lines beneath, and the paper's globe-and-torches device sits in the middle over the motto "THE NATIONAL JEWISH DAILY." The dateline reads Thursday, February 2, 1961, and the headlines below run off the edges as if the page had been cropped by the tray itself.

Fornasetti made a series of these ashtrays reproducing newspapers from around the world, and the New York Yiddish paper is one of the most characterful. It is the kind of object that carries a room's worth of story in the palm of the hand: at a bedside for rings and cufflinks, on a desk for paperclips, on a bar cart or coffee table simply as a conversation piece, or grouped with other Fornasetti black-and-white pieces where the typography holds its own against faces, suns and coins. For a family with New York or Yiddish roots it makes a small, pointed gift.

Dimensions
Width: 5½ inches (14 cm)
Depth: 4 inches (10.2 cm)
Height: ½ inch (1.3 cm)

Marks
Printed black circular seal with a serrated edge on the underside, the hand holding a pen reserved in white, lettered "FORNASETTI MILANO" around the top and "MADE IN ITALY" around the bottom.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good

Historical Context
Der Tog (The Day) was founded in New York in 1914 as a liberal daily for the Yiddish-reading intelligentsia and was the first Yiddish newspaper to put women journalists on its editorial staff, among them the poet Anna Margolin, who edited its women's column. In 1953 it merged with the Morgen Zhurnal to become The Day – Jewish Journal, the title printed here; the combined paper ceased publication in 1971.

Reference
Barnaba Fornasetti, Fornasetti: The Complete Universe (Rizzoli, 2010), p. 573, fig. 56, top left, for this example.

(Ref: NY10820-curx) See less