Los Angeles Potteries Avocado Vegetable Relief Square Bowl, c. 1960–1972

The Piece

A square serving bowl from Los Angeles Potteries, molded in relief with the makings of a kitchen garden and glazed in the deep avocado green of the 1960s California table. The bowl is a soft square with rounded corners and gently flaring sides, deep enough for a salad or a mound of vegetables, and the interior carries three raised motifs in the well: a bunch of garlic bulbs hanging by their braided tops at the left, a sheaf of wheat bound at the waist standing tall at the center, and a green onion with its root and blades leaning at the right, with a coiled rope or a sliced onion in low relief in the lower corner. The relief is crisp and the glaze pools dark olive in the recesses and breaks to a bright chartreuse on the high points, so the design reads as if it were drawn in two greens.

The glaze is glossy and even over the whole bowl, inside and out, with the slight variation in depth of color from one side to the other that comes from the dip. The piece is marked on the base for Los Angeles Potteries, California, with the mold number and the usual Calif. USA stamp of the firm's mid-century production. The bowl is whole and clean, with no chips to the rim or corners and no cracks; a close look shows the faint crazing in the glaze that nearly every piece of this pottery carries after sixty years.

History & Provenance

Los Angeles Potteries was one of the big Southern California tableware factories of the postwar boom, working from the 1940s into the 1970s and selling through the department stores and the housewares trade across the country. Its specialty was the oversized serving piece, the spaghetti bowl, the salad bowl, the chip and dip, the deviled egg tray, molded with raised fruit, vegetables and fish and glazed in the colors of the California kitchen: avocado, harvest gold, burnt orange and brown. The vegetable relief bowls, with their garlic, wheat, onions and corn, were among the best known of these and were made in several shapes and sizes through the 1960s, usually with the mold number and the year pressed into the base.

The attribution rests on the mark and the construction rather than style alone: the Los Angeles Potteries stamp, the mold number, the molded relief and the avocado glaze are all consistent with the firm's production between about 1960 and 1972, the years the vegetable series was in the line and the avocado color was at its height.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a bowl that works as hard on a table as it does on a shelf. It is the right size and depth for a salad, a pile of roasted vegetables or a bread basket, and empty it is a square of pure 1960s green that anchors a sideboard, a kitchen counter or an open shelf. The avocado color has come all the way back, and it sits as well with white dishes and wood as it does with the harvest gold and orange of its own decade. For a shop or designer client it is the marked, undamaged California pottery serving piece that the mid-century crowd asks for, and the garlic and wheat relief gives it a story the plain bowls do not have.