VTT - Scuola Mazzon Postcards & Funny Face Potholders

I have had these Scuola Mazzon art postcards for many years, but I didn't realize what they really were until I started thinking about what postcards resembled the Funny Face potholders. I had assumed that "Scuola Mazzon" was the artist's name. I just recently realized that "Scuola Mazzon" is Italian for "Mazzon School." These four postcards show work by four different 13- and 14-year-old students--Ezio Sgarbi, Graziella Pozzi, Eugenia Caimi, Giorgina Lanzi. The art was done between 1950 and 1954.

The Mazzon School was an art school for children founded in 1929 by the Italian artist Galliano Mazzon (1896 - 1978). According to a British Museum webpage (with text quoted from Martin Hopkinson, 'Italian Prints 1875-1975'), "Mazzon challenged accepted academic methods, banning his students from copying from nature, and encouraging spontaneous expression of the emotions, fantasy, the imagination, and dreams."

There seems to be a difference of opinion about whether the school encouraged "spontaneous" expression. A review in Art Digest of a 1955 Mazzon School exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art says that "the teaching method represented in these pictures, emphasizes not the spontaneous approaches encouraged in more creative American schools…but more formal, flat decorative patterns which give most of the paintings here a handsomely stylized quality--and, it must be added, a rather similar style as well: with a few exceptions the paintings seem more like a one-man show than works by 15 or 20 children."

The Coates & Clark's Book No. 312 with "Funny Face" potholders on the cover is © 1955. The Funny Face Potholders Kit is © 1960 by Lisbeth Whiting Co. I found both of these items on eBay.

I didn't get these items at the same time and didn't realize at first that the kit was based on the same faces as the book. The potholders in the kit use thicker yarn and instructions adapted for children "ages 6 to 16." The next picture shows a side-by-side comparison of the designs.

The inside of the book's front cover is shown below. this page includes instructions for the designs of the man and woman wearing feathered hats.

click image to enlarge and read this!

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