Ambition doesn’t last 91 1/2 years. Passion can, though, if it is raw enough and deep enough to have stung the soul. Eva Zeisel is that kind of marked soul.
Zeisel is one of this century’s most important industrial designers. Ceramics was her main thing and still is. Her dinnerware for mega-companies such as Red Wing Pottery and Hall China in the 1940s and ’50s spread something new and exciting across kitche n tables and china cabinets all over the world.
Eva Zeisel was one of the first designers to do a set of formal porcelain with a modern shape and in translucent white, no pattern or color. Eva Zeisel was one of the first to do earthenware in which the buyer got the fun of mixing different colored piec es to create his or her own unique set. Eva Zeisel was the first and only to do Shmoo salt and pepper shakers, shaped like the quirky Al Capp cartoon character.
And now, it is Eva Zeisel who is proving that the first, can outlast everybody else. At just a few months shy of her 92nd birthday, Zeisel’s passion for design beats loud and strong. The small woman with the tufts of wild white hair and voice that barely wins out over the air conditioner in her studio is still creating, still designing.
“I am not creating, I am playing,” corrects Zeisel, who does not bother with segues and launches right into her spiel. “I want to show you something I want to put on the market. . . . It is these recyclers. This is meant to respond to all the recycling we have to do.”
Furniture, mainly the ready-to-assemble type made of wood pieces that fit snugly together, is something new Zeisel has dreamed up. Tables, a file cabinet, a magazine-holder and that recycler, made to corral newspapers, tin cans, plastic bottles, are what she has in mind.
Bathroom tiles are also new. Zeisel recently introduced three interlocking shapes, including a whimsical fish tile, for tub and shower surrounds and vanities. Manufacturers in North Carolina and Portugal are producing them.
Then there are her reissues. Zeisel found new manufacturers to resurrect about 25 of her old designs.
Among them: her Lacy Walls room dividers, made of earthenware or terra cotta modules, which are sold separately and assembled like building blocks, originally designed in 1958 but never produced; a variety of ceramic jars, bowls, candlesticks and salt and pepper shakers, done over the years; and, on a more heady note, her Zsolnay vases with spectacular iridescent glazes. Zeisel designed the art pieces in 1983 with the understanding that they were to be produced by a factory in Hungary. They never were. An Italian manufacturer is now producing the vases in limited edition.
The big news is the born-again status of her Town and Country earthenware, designed and produced in the 1940s by Red Wing Pottery of Minnesota. The informal dinnerware is a Zeisel triumph, and among her fanatics, some of her hottest collectibles.
This was robust earthenware–bold, colorful, modern, oddly shaped and sort of “Greenwich Villagey” as Zeisel once pronounced. It came in five colors. The buyer could mix up the possibilities, by choosing different colors for different pieces, even different colors for lids and vessels.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York unearthed a set of Town and Country from its storage, cast molds of the original pieces and will be reissuing a vast assortment of the collection, including five-piece place settings. Items will be available from the museum store come February 1999.
“This (collection) is fun,” says Dick Stevens, manager of three-dimensional reproductions at the Met, noting that T&C will be available in four colors and sold open stock. “No piece sits absolutely flat on the table. It has a lean to it. In the saucer, the indentation that holds the cup is off to one side. It is fun. It is somewhat whimsical.”
Maybe you will find whimsy in her designs, but not in her latest incarnation as author. She just finished a manuscript on an alleged slave uprising in 18th Century New York–a part of history she has been researching for decades; a guide on teaching students how to communicate through design; and a book that pulls together various people’s (Winston Churchill, Napoleon, Maya Angelou) thoughts on their childhood.
Then there’s the primer on design in the 20th Century that Zeisel is currently writing.
“She once told me, `I get high on designing.’ That’s part of it,” says Jean Richards, Zeisel’s actress-daughter, who also lives in New York, as she tries to explain her mother’s drive.
The other part comes from her lifelong pursuit of the moment–this moment, not yesterday, not tomorrow, says Richards, recalling a poem her mother wrote for her when Richards was 10 years old.
The first and last lines are critical: “It’s life you are living and life is here. It’s not sometime later, it’s now Jeannie dear. . . . Between the not yet gilded past and the time for which we strive, lies unnoticed and not to last, the moment which is life.”
“She really does live that way,” Richards says.
And it has been quite a life.
Eva Polanyi Stricker was born in Hungary in 1906. Her privileged upbringing stood in sharp contrast to her desire to get her hands dirty at the potter’s wheel. After a brief stint in art school, the young woman with unquenchable drive, decided she wanted to pursue the craft of ceramics, as well as painting.
She threw her first pot as an apprentice, in a basement pottery-shop operated by her Hungarian master.
Six months later, at the tender age of 18 1/2, she bounded solo into a career measuring 73 years running and spans three continents. She has worked for factories, small ceramic shops and industry in Budapest, Hamburg, the Black Forest, Berlin, the Ukraine, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and Moscow, where her drive and her title of art director of the China and Glass Industry of the Russian Republic, was shattered.
Zeisel spent 16 months and her 30th birthday in a Soviet prison cell.
“The accusation was I successfully attempted to kill Stalin,” says Zeisel, emphasizing the word “successfully” and the sheer madness of the claim.
Zeisel did not succumb to the Stalin purges or her thoughts of death. She was released in September 1937, landed in Vienna, met a lawyer and sociologist named Hans Zeisel, and via a circuitous route through Europe, the married couple escaped the German invasion and made their way to New York.
In the U.S., Zeisel reignited her spirit and career, in addition to mothering two children. She taught, too, most notably ceramic design at the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.
And she designed and designed some more–scores of everyday pieces, tableware, dinnerware, earthenware, glassware for the likes of Sears, Roebuck and Co., Red Wing, Castleton China Co., General Mills and, always, in the end, the general public.
Why, then, isn’t Eva Zeisel a household name?
“She did spend a good part of her career teaching,” explains Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which holds Zeisel pieces in its permanent collection and collaborated with her in the 1940s on her Museum porcelain service, widely regarded as her most elegant collection.
“Russel Wright wasn’t necessarily a household word,” continues Riley. “Same as Alvar Aalto. People may not know his architecture, but they see his stool, they see his chair, they see his vase and say `Oh, he’s the guy who designed those pieces.’ ” It’s the same with Eva.
With Zeisel, her curves are what give her away.
Zeisel was a Modernist, a believer in pure, simple forms. But unlike the strict Bauhaus types, the woman designer believed that beauty mattered. That playfulness mattered. That a bond between user and object mattered. She abandoned strict geometric forms for sleek, gentle, ever-touchable curves. She made teapots that looked bulbous. She made platters look like teardrops.
“She realized that design could be all the things that Modernism claimed,” says Riley. “It could be abstract. It could be machinemade. It could be efficient and inexpensive and, in her mind, it could be warm, human-scaled and interesting and important for the individual. . . . From time to time, you could say Modernism wasn’t quite so good at comfort.”
These days Zeisel is finding her comfort in work. Although people labeled her “retired” in the 1970s and ’80s, when Zeisel was living in Chicago with her husband, who was teaching at the University of Chicago, the designer was anything but finished. She was doing what her fellow Hyde Parkers did best–research, which she is now converting into books and manuscripts.
In 1992, following Hans’ death, Zeisel moved back to New York, where she divides her time between her Upper West Side apartment and a home-and-studio in Rockland County, and back into the design loop.
What’s next? More reissues, no doubt. Zeisel recently reacquired the original molds for her Hallcraft china, produced in the 1950s. And she is adamant about getting her furniture into production. As she is about enjoying every step of every day.
“That’s what one lives for.”
WHERE TO BUY
Items designed by Eva Zeisel are available at the following retail outlets:
– Dimpled spindle terra cotta blocks are available in unglazed terra cotta and in glazed colors. They measure 9 by 5 1/2 inches and are $18 a piece from Bret Bortner Design, 368 Bluff City Blvd., Elgin, Ill. 60120-8324, 847-741-3700.
– Ceramic fish tiles are available in many colors and cost $4 a piece from Totem Design Group, 71 Franklin St., New York, N.Y. 10013, 888-519-5587 (toll-free) or 212-925-5506; and at Artistic Tile Inc., 79 5th Ave., New York, N.Y. 10003, 212-727-9331.
– Zsolnay vases are available in a variety of styles, sizes and colors, $25 to $900 at Totem Design Group, 71 Franklin St., New York, N.Y. 10013, 888-519-5587 (toll-free) or 212-925-5506.
– Town and Country salt and pepper shakers (a k a Shmoo salt and pepper shakers) in white and black, $25 a set at Elements, 102 E. Oak St., Chicago, Ill. 60611, 312-642-6574.
– Other Town and Country dinnerware items, including five-piece place settings sold open stock, will be available in February 1999 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Store in New York. Inquiries should be sent to: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Customer Service Department, 1000 5th Ave., New York, N.Y. 10028.
