Ike and Adlai, C. 1950s Folk Art (Vote with Your Butts!) Ashtrays

Regular price $80.00

I wasn't yet around when Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson faced off, but I'd love to have met the person who made these clever folk art ashtrays marking the occasions (1952 & 1956), a brilliant early iteration of sample polling among focus groups, I'd say! A relatively simple gesture, but an iconic one, representing radically different ideologies, and rather poignant feeling one now, including as one imagines how different things might be had things gone the other way. Formally just right, too, with white slip trail lettering against nearly black grainy clay looking like the  icing decorating someone's chocolate birthday cake (or mayonnaise squeezed onto pumpernickel.)

Adlai: 3 3/4" x 3 13/16". Ike: 3 3/8" x 4".  A bit of loss to the lip of each, as documented, and some crazing to the lettering, the latter definitely to the good I think!