Eva Zeisel
2002 HONOREE
Designer
Eva Zeisel's career as a designer, ceramist and teacher spans most of the last century and brims over into this one. She has designed for everyday use by everyday people, and yet her work has always been art. In 1946, just eight years after she arrived in the United States, she was the subject of a one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition intended to define a new era in modern china design, one she helped launch. Her designs have been described as "strong yet elegant, fluid yet playful," and indeed they are that and much more: graceful, refined, sinuous, sensuous, and yes, whimsical. Her goal has always been to design objects that "please the eye, and invite the hand to touch".
She was born Eva Strickland in Budapest in 1906 and at the age of 17, enrolled in Hungary's Royal Academy of Fine Arts to study painting. Just a year later, however, she apprenticed herself to a traditional potter and after only a year opened her own workshop. She worked as a designer at the Kispester Factory in Budapest, then went on to other factories and potteries in Hamburg and Berlin. In 1932, she moved to Russia where eventually she was named art director of the China and Glass Industry of the Russian Republic but left during the 1937 Stalinist purges of foreigners and moved briefly to Vienna.
On the day in 1938 that Nazi troops moved into Austria, she boarded the only train allowed to cross the Swiss border. She made her way to England where she and Hans Zeisel, a sociologist and attorney she had met in Berlin, were married; later that same year they immigrated to the United States.
In 1939, she began teaching at Pratt Institute, a post she held until 1953. At the same time, Zeisel began designing giftware and china, and she set up an innovative apprenticeship program for her Pratt students that included work on a major 1942 commission from Sears Roebuck & Co. for the "Stratoware" dinnerware line.
Her 1946 Museum of Modern Art exhibition was sponsored by Castleton China and entitled "Modern China by Eva Zeisel." After that, she began working for a number of nationally renowned potteries. Among her most important commissions were the "Town and Country" line for the Red Wing Pottery (now available in reproduction at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and her several Hallcraft lines for the Hall China Company, including "Tomorrow's Classic"and "Century", which in the 1950s were among the best-selling dinnerware in the United States.Her designs for numerous manufacturers around the world have ranged from her famed china to experimental furniture.
Zeisel's work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Russian State Museum, and at World's Fairs in New York and Paris. Alfred University, home to the New York State College of Ceramics, honored her with an exhibition entitled Lost Molds and Found Dinnerware: Rediscovering Eva Zeisel's Hallcraft.Her work is in the permanent collections at MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Brohan Museum in Berlin.
Beth Dunlop