Reconsidering the Ashtray
"From Lowly to Lovely, the Humble Accessory Takes Its Place in History"
by Joseph Giovannini


One by one, they have vanished, swept unceremoniously off the coffee and dining tables, removed even from hotel lobbies and restaurants where they were icons of hospitality and glamour. Once the ubiquitous denizen of tablescapes, and sometimes the standout star, the ashtray has followed the fate of cigarettes as smoking has been purged from public spaces and health-conscious households. Even Detroit has stopped fitting them into dashboards as standard equipment. "It's definitely time to write the obituary on the ashtray", says Paul Warwick Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York.

Its distant ancestor appeared in Europe not long after the Crimean War of 1853, when French and British soldiers learned from Turkish officers how to hand-roll tobacco into cigarettes. Ashes were the consequence, and the term ash pan soon entered the dictionary, according to Nancy Wanvig, a Wisconsin ashtray connoisseur and author of Collector's Guide to Ashtrays. After smoking became socially acceptable for men in the 1880's, ash-tray earned its way into the lexicon. Ever the social barometer, Oscar Wilde singled out cigarettes in his writings as they insinuated themselves into polite society. Ashtrays themselves assumed various forms in a succession of styles, including Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

But only after smoking became acceptable for women in the late 1920's did the ashtray flood the domestic landscape. "With the emancipation of women in the 20's, when they could get jobs and they started bobbing their hair, women smoked, and they smoked indoors, and you see pictures of fashionably dressed ladies holding cigarettes," says Jane Shadel Spillman, a curator at The Corning Museum of Glass in New York. "The ashtray became a household accessory."

Ashtrays cut across all strata of taste and class, and their shapes were adapted to the dining room, parlor and boudoir. There were, of course, the simple varieties that did their job without fanfare, plain squares or circles that were handsome in their succinct simplicity. Dips in their rims held cigarettes whose ends cantilevered over bowls that caught the ash. Very early, ashtrays became advertising vehicles; in about 1915, tire companies started casting them in glass as miniature tires. Restaurants produced signature specimens that became objects of desire and theft: Marlene Dietrich left two dozen purloined ashtrays in her apartment at her death.

In the 1920's, once smoking became fashionable, luxury manufacturers----Lalique, Tiffany, Steuben, Wedgwood, Limoges, Rosenthal, Baccarat---responded to the demand, designing ashtrays with an elegance and character typical of the rest of their lines. At their best, ashtrays, whose function allowed a wide range of design interpretation in marble, ceramic, metal, crystal and glass, offered heightened moments of aesthetic focus in a house.

If cigarettes became a symbol of liberation for women, they were also a symbol of dynamic contemporary life, and the new modernist simplicity in design, a blend of form and function, expressed itself in machined ashtrays with plain geometries and an absence of fuss. Art Deco as a style-geometric, smart and uncluttered-suited the ashtray especially well, but Bauhaus modernism reduced designs to a more fundamental simplicity, with no surface decoration whatsoever.

Ashtrays played a supporting role as glamorous props when movies started dramatizing the act of smoking with photogenic plumes of smoke whirling up into celluloid space. Given a certain status in the house, ashtrays became socially necessary and made favored gifts, along with other tobacco-related accessories. "At their wedding in 1932, my in-laws received a silver cigarette box engraved with the signatures of the groomsmen as a present," says Spillman. "Then that was the height of fashion."

During the Second World War such luxury items went on hold, but after 1945, the pent-up desire for these goods, especially in the United States, and the strong dollar spurred elegant products from Italy, France and Scandinavia that were affordable for most middle-class homes. "An explosion of creativity met the new demand", says Stephen Saunders, owner of The End of History, a New York shop specializing in mid-century glass. "U.S. department stores everywhere bought this glass, and travelers on cruise ships to Europe had no weight restrictions, so a lot of glass ended up in America. "The 1950's and 1960's were the golden age of glamorous smoking, and hostesses in all brackets put out cigarettes with bowls of nuts and drinks for their cocktail parties."

Ashtrays came off the assembly line in the millions, but at the luxury end of the spectrum, they were crafted by hand into minor works of art, often with a lyrical beauty packed into a compact sculptural form. Ashtrays had become jewels of the household.

The glass manufacturers in postwar Venice achieved the apex of sophistication. Designers mixed luxury and fantasy, all realized through a craft that had developed in Murano since the 13th century. Ashtrays frequently came with matching cigarette lighters and boxes worthy of lingering shots in a Fellini set. Around the Venetian lagoon, artists unhooked form from function and took great liberties in shaping glass into organic compositions, where bubbles graduated through progressive strata of hazy colors. The artists dimpled the lavalike shapes in one or two spots so that there was always a cigarette rest above the bowl. Layered in up to four colors, the often heavy ashtrays had the interior complexity of a geode.

Artists sometimes gridded bubbles in a controlled technique, mixing the fizz with gold and silver leaf that pulverized into shimmering clouds of stardust when the molten glass was stretched.

In addition to creating organic ashtrays, Venetian craftsmen designed representations of pears, apples and leaves. The most extraordinary natural shapes were fashioned after nautiluses and other shells.

But by the 60's the dark little secret of smoking broke, and the impulse to turn ashtrays into the movie stars of the home diminished. "If from the 20's through the 50's it was fashionable to smoke, by the early 60's we were being told it was dangerous," remembers Spillman. By the 1980's and 1990's cigarettes and their ashtray accomplices were ostracized.

"When someone comes over and wants to smoke, there just aren't any ashtrays out anymore, and I dash around for a side plate or an old saucer," says the Cooper-Hewitt's Thompson. "But I do keep my favorites, only I put them into adaptive reuse. I have an Arne Jacobsen ashtray that now serves as a paper clip holder, and I love the one by Castiglione, with a coiled edge that locks the cigarette in place: It's rounded, chromed and very nice-looking." Thomspson says that adapted ashtrays have an anachronistic charm, "like having an old-fashioned washstand or lemon juicer that reminds you of what people used to do before plumbing and appliances." One of Thompson's favorites is Philippe Starck's Ray Hollis, an aluminum ashtray with a flip-over lid that snuffs ashes out of sight in the base, where odors are contained. "There's no reason to banish it, because it still has a sculptural function," Thompson says.

Out of use, endangered as an object, lapsing from production, they are becoming desirable again, coming out of the woodwork onto eBay. Rarity and provenance are, as always, factors in the value of these new collectibles: The tire-shaped ashtrays have emerged as a favorite of the species, along with those bearing the labels of, say, the Stork Club or the Brown Derby.

But as with most collectibles, intrinsic beauty is a primary reason that ashtrays are prized. "We sell a lot of ashtrays, but not for use as ashtrays," says Saunders. "Women love them on their dressing tables, for jewelry, and people serve nuts and hors d'oeuvres in them at parties. But most of the time they're out on the table just because they're beautiful."

The ashtray is dead. Long live the ashtray.


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