GEOMETRIC ART-DECO DOG BOOKENDS

Geometric dogs:  Molded Porcelain with green crackle glaze.  Height 8 inches. Weight 2 lbs each. Marked (see below). circa 1935.

Geometric themes were popular In the United States during the 1930’s Art Deco period. Bookend animals were sometimes abstracted with flattened surfaces and sharp angles.  These green ceramic dogs with a crackle glaze show such flat surfaces and the angularity is heightened by whitening the sharpened edges.  It is our assumption that these intriguing Scotties were made in the thirties. However, we have not been able to confirm anything about these bookends.  We do not know the pottery that produced them or the name of the artist.  Each dog bears a small impressed mark on the bottom so identifying the dogs should be easy, but we cannot identify the mark. The bookends are large, heavy and attractive but baffling.

Green crackle glaze on white highlighting on Geometric Dogs Bookends

Enlarged impressed Maker’s Mark on Geometric Dog Bookends

We have spent quite a bit of time trying to unravel the mystery Maker’s Mark – to no avail. We were guessing that it was either Japanese or Chinese. However, a cat fancier and collector, who goes by the moniker, Kait-Kat, contacted The Bookend Collector regarding her geometric Cat bookends. The photos of her Cat bookends are remarkably similar to our Geometric Dogs. The Maker’s Mark, “Made In Japan”, on her bookends is quite clear and most probably dates from the 1930’s.

Porcelain Green Art Deco Cats made in japan, Property of Kait-Kat

Geometric Cats Maker’s Mark. “Made In Japan”, paint stamp under glaze.

 

FEMALE PHARAOH BOOKENDS: HATSHEPSUT

Hatshepsut Bookends: Material electroform bronze, Height 10.25 inches, weight 4 lbs. each.  circa 1925, Attributed to Paul Mori &Sons foundry.  Part of the Egyptian revival following the opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1923.

Hatshepsut (1508-1458 BCE)  was born a princess in the Egyptian royal line and became the regent for the the infant who would become the next king,  Although only a regent , she assumed the title and the trappings of a king with the additional title of Pharaoh.  She then ruled Egypt from 1473 to 1458  BCE, a rare woman to achieve that position in 3000 years of Egyptian history.

Hatshepsut proved to be a successful and important ruler as she restored many monuments and restored trade with western Asia, with Punt, and with the Aegean Islands.  No other female king  appeared until Cleopatra (51-30 BCE). 

Statue of Hatshepsut in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. This statue of Hatshepsut was recovered from her mortuary temple.  The resemblance to the bookends helps to identify the bookends, although there was no other female pharoah that could confuse the identity.

A statue in THE MET in New York City is very similar to these bookends.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Expeditions in 1926-27 and 1929 excavated bits and pieces of a statue of Hatshepsut near her funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri in Thebes.  In 1929 they acquired a fragment that had been excavated and taken to Berlin in 1845. Click here for the link to The Met page  on the Hatshepsut statue.  It is on view at THE MET Fifth Avenue in Gallery 115.

Another bookend depiction of a female pharoah is a bust by Dodge Inc. probably in the 1940s.

Grey metal. Height 6.75 inches.  Inscription: Dodge Inc.  circa mid 1940s.

 

MAGNIFICENT CATS: THE LION AND THE TIGER BOOKENDS

Just the type of bookends to hold up your adventure tomes.  Are you a collector of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan”, or Roosevelt’s “African Game Trails”, Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” or Dinesen’s “Out of Africa”?  If so, these are the bookends for you.  Big, beautifully sculpted African Lion and Asian Tiger stealthily menacing as they step from the jungle overgrowth.  

Lion and Tiger: Upright and base – Iron, animals – grey metal. Height 7 inches. Shopmark: Bradley and Hubbard.  Circa 1915.

One bookend shows an African lion stepping forward from a jungle and the other bookend shows an Asian tiger stepping forward from a jungle.The bookends are admirable as sculpture, but perhaps even more admirable because they are massive – 17 pounds per pair.  A photo does not do justice to the power exhibited by these bookends.

Bradley & Hubbard, makers mark.

 

Deco Eagle Bookend

Spread Eagle Bookends:  Solid bronze. Height 4 inches. circa 1930

 

The dominant Art Deco motif in nineteen thirties America was streamline, and all manner of objects were given streamlined exteriors to look modern.  To look modern was to look cool in thirties America.  Along side the streamlining, there was a geometric motif, which began earlier, in the twenties.  Objects were made in geometric shapes or covered with geometric figures.

The eagle Bookends shown here are composed of triangles, rectangles and trapezoids, all geometric angled figures.  Very deco. Angled features were called zigzag deco.

Not all geometric objects were were zigzag.  Some were composed of curving geometric figures, like the bookends shown here entitled Rings and Balls, made up in this instance almost entirely of spheres and circular rings.

Copper or brass?   Height 5.25  inches. Inscription:  Shopmark of Chase Inc.   Attributed to Walter Von Nessen.  circa 1936.

 

FRANKART Beauty: Semiclassical and Streamlined

WPA/AMERICAN MODERNE STREAMLINED LADIES: Grey metal, Height 5.5 inches.  Inscription: FRANKART INC.  circa 1935.

In nineteen thirties America, streamlining was the most prominent feature of Art Deco fashions.  The American/WPA Moderne art style was a subset of Art Deco.  Here we have bookends showing a bust of a streamlined lady on a Deco geometric, stairstep base with a semi-classical face that belongs to  American/WPA Moderne.  (Compare to the faces in our Post from June 3, 2014, entitled WPA Moderne Bookends.)  The bookends are FRANKART’s contribution to both styles at once.

 

 

Made-in-Japan Mexican Bookends

Japanese Mexican bookends:  porcelain, Height 6 inches. Made In Japan.

Each bookend in this pair shows a Mexican peon sitting against saguaro cacti.  We know he is Mexican because of his characteristic sombrero and his sitting in the desert.  We expect his face to look like the popular conception of a Mexican – swarthy with a mustache, but instead we see a light-skinned, clean-shaven, blue-eyed face, quite caucasian in appearance.  These bookends were made in Japan, so we can guess that the artist had no familiarity with actual look of Mexican peons.

The painted details on this bookend are very nice.

In the late 1920s and into the 1930s and 40s, a popular home decor in the American southwest was a kitschy amalgam of mission, cowboy, and Mexican motifs. Table cloths, table settings, home decorations all incorporated variations of the theme. These bookends fit beautifully into what could be called, “Mexico In The American Imagination”, a phrase taken from the SOUTH OF THE BORDER traveling exhibition mounted by the Yale University Art Gallery in 1993 and 1994.

A vintage Mexican motif table cloth with a page from Mexican Cookbook by Erna Fergusson, published by the Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1934.

Before World War II, Japan was making porcelain decorative items for export to the United States and Europe. These bookends appear to be from that period and made for the American market. They are nicely detailed and hand-painted. The stamp, Made In Japan, is one that could be pre-1941 according to the Kovel’s website. The Kovel’s indicate that 1921 is when the US government began to require the Country of Origin be in English and the Japanese started using Japan instead of Nippon. After the war the stamp “Made in Occupied Japan” was used until 1952. The quality of these bookends would indicate pre-war. We like them even though their light weight doesn’t bode well for holding up books.

Made In Japan mark.

 

FRUIT BASKET: American Art Deco Bookends

The ornamental image of a bounteous fruit basket was popularized at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (Paris 1925) along with the iconic images of leaping gazelles, chevrons, zig zags, and the sunburst.  Later, in 1966, the term Art Deco was proposed to describe all the art which had been done from 1925 through about 1946, and so these images took the identity of early French Art Deco.  The influence of the 1925 Paris Exhibition quickly became apparent in home decor. American bookend manufacturers were early adopters and distributors of these new and beautiful designs and styles.

These nicely cast FRUIT BASKET bookends, with their appearance of a well-painted still life on a background of french blue and resting on stylized leaves, are obviously a salute to the French decorative image.

FRUIT BASKET:  Iron, Height 5.5 inches.  Inscription: 9860 and a mark of a J with a c on one side of the J and and an o on the other.  Foundry:  Judd Co.  circa 1927.

Judd Company Maker’s Mark and Number

A second example of early Art Deco are these Hubley SUNBURST bookends.

SUNBURST:  Iron, Height 4.5 inches, Inscription 589, Foundry, Hubley circa 1927.

 

Click here to view our February 2016 post on Leaping Gazelles.