Eva Zeisel

At 100, Eva Zeisel is one of the most important and best-known designers in the United States. Born Eva Amalia Stricker in 1906, the artist grew up in Budapest and Vienna. She briefly enrolled in the Budapest Academy of Arts, but soon abandoned it to train as a potter. She became one of the twentieth century’s first industrial designers when she took a job with the German ceramics manufacturer Schramberger Majolika Fabrik in 1928.

In 1932 she traveled to the Soviet Union and as an experienced industrial designer she was offered a position assisting in the modernization of the ceramic industry, where her creativity and dynamism stood her well. She traveled to many parts of Russia in order to understand and coordinate efforts to create a central manufactory which would make products for the homes of the everyday citizenry. Her efforts were recognized, and she was soon transferred to the Lomonosov factory in Leningrad. This in turn led to her appointment as Artistic Director for the Porcelain and Glass Industries for the entire country.

Her work came to an abrupt halt in 1936, when while in the Soviet Union she was arrested on trumped-up charges of conspiring to assassinate Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Eva Zeisel was imprisoned for sixteen months, spending most of that time in solitary confinement. After her release in 1937, she fled, only steps ahead of the Nazis, first to Vienna and then to England.

In 1938 Zeisel immigrated to the United States, where she went on to design wares for the Hall China Company, Red Wing Pottery, and many other companies. Her career progressed so rapidly that the Museum of Modern Art and Castleton China commissioned her to design the first modern porcelain dinnerware for the United States. Her work on that project became the subject of the first one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art. Zeisel sums up her career and her many designs as the product of a “playful search for beauty.”