Eva Zeisel | Hungarian-American Ceramicist & Designer

Eva Zeisel (born November 13, 1906, Budapest, Hungary—died December 30, 2011, New City, New York, U.S.) was a Hungarian-born American industrial designer and ceramicist. She is best known for her practical yet beautiful tableware, which bears a unique amalgamation of modern and classical design aesthetics.

Stricker’s father, Alexander Stricker, owned a textile factory, and her mother, Laura Polanyi Stricker, was a feminist activist who earned a Ph.D. in history from Budapest University. As a young woman, Eva Stricker adhered to a simple life that aligned closely to the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement and its respect for beauty in nature and the handmade. In 1923 she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest to study painting. However, at the urging of her mother to learn a practical trade, she left after only three semesters and started an apprenticeship with potter Jakob Karapancsik. She graduated as a journeyman (an artisan with proven training) in six months and began creating her own pottery. A trip to Paris and the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes that summer introduced her to the Bauhaus, the International Style of architecture, and other modern trends that favoured sleek, clean-lined designs. She established a pottery studio with a kiln at her family’s home in 1925. The following year her work found an audience in the United States at the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial, at which she received an honourable mention. That same year she began working with Kispester-Granit Pottery in Budapest, making designs for decorative art objects, which were then mass-produced. That position lasted for less than a year before she moved to Hamburg to work briefly with Hansa Kunstkeramik pottery and then, in 1928, to Schramberg, Germany, where she worked for two years as a designer in the Schramberger Majolika Fabrik, a large industrial design operation. Her work at Schramberger—tea services, dinnerware, vases—with its combination of geometric pattern and sinuous, sleek lines, can be characterized as Art Deco.

She moved to Berlin in the summer of 1930. There she thrived in the intellectual and artistic community and worked as a freelance designer for a number of companies, including the Christian Carstens Kommerz Gesellschaft, where she took part in the entire ware-production process, from design to manufacturing to marketing. She spent the years from 1932 to 1937 in the Soviet Union. She obtained a visa to travel there as the fiancée of Alexander Weissberg, an Austrian physicist and author who was working in the U.S.S.R. at the time. She stayed in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and in 1932 accepted a position as a designer at the Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory. The designs for tableware that she created there were rooted in the Modernist aesthetic as well as in classical 18th-century Russian designs, which she saw in the factory’s collection. Stricker and Weissberg married in 1933 but separated about a year later (divorced 1937).

In 1934 she moved to the outskirts of Moscow to work at the Dulevo porcelain factory, where she made designs for mass production and soon became the art director of the China and Glass Industry of the Russian Republic. Her career came to a halt when in 1936 she was suddenly arrested and accused of conspiring to kill Stalin. She was detained that May (as was Weissberg, soon after) and spent much of her incarceration in solitary confinement. After she was abruptly released in September 1937, she moved to England and married Hans Zeisel, whom she had met several years earlier in Berlin. In 1938 the couple sailed to New York City, and she soon found work as a designer for several companies.

Eva Zeisel accepted a teaching position in 1939 in the industrial design department at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Intent on dispelling the notion that ceramics was a craft rather than a form of industrial design, she had her students take note of the practical aspects of the production process, from design to manufacturing and mass production. In 1940 Sears, Roebuck and Company commissioned her to design a dinnerware set. Examples of the resulting design, Stratoware (a reference to the new TWA Stratoliner airplane), were later acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 1942 the Castleton China Company of Pennsylvania and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) also commissioned her to design dinnerware, which resulted in her celebrated Museum service, a white, modern and refined, yet casual dining service. MoMA featured Museum in a solo exhibition of Zeisel’s work that helped launch her career in the United States.

In 1946–47, for Red Wing Pottery of Minnesota, she designed a more-informal dining set, Town and Country, which included a set of salt and pepper shakers that nestled together like a mother and child. Among her many other commissions were Tomorrow’s Classic (1950–52) for Hall China Company and other wares for Western Stoneware Company, Federal Glass Company, and Hyalyn Porcelain. In the late 1940s she made a foray into furniture and designed the Eva Zeisel Resilient Chair (patented 1951).

She resigned from her teaching post in 1953 and moved to Chicago, where her husband became a sociology professor at the University of Chicago. When business in the United States slowed, she worked for companies across the globe, including Rosenthal Porcelain (West Germany), Mancioli Pottery (Italy), and Noritaki (Japan).

In 1995 the charges against Zeisel were dropped in Russia, allowing for designs she created in the Soviet Union to be resurrected and produced under her name again. She continued producing ceramics—as well as furniture, glassware, pens, interiors, rugs, metalwork, and other goods—up until her death at age 105. Her career was celebrated in a number of retrospectives in her last decade, including “Eva Zeisel: The Playful Search for Beauty” (2004–05) and “Eva Zeisel: Extraordinary Designer at 100” (2006–07). Her geometric and organic modern designs made with a comprehensive understanding of the production process made her pieces both functional and iconic. In that spirit, many of her designs have been reissued by museums for their gift shops as well as by major stores such as Crate and Barrel, which reissued her 1952 Classic Century tableware line in 2005.