Eva Zeisel

Eva Striker Zeisel (born Éva Amália Striker, November 13, 1906 – December 30, 2011) was a Hungarian-born American industrial designer known for her work with ceramics, primarily from the period after she immigrated to the United States.

Her forms are often abstractions of the natural world and human relationships.

Work from throughout her prodigious career is included in important museum collections across the world.

Zeisel declared herself a "maker of useful things."

She was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1906 to a wealthy, highly educated assimilated Jewish family.

Her mother, Laura Polányi Striker, a historian, was the first woman to get a PhD from the University of Budapest.

Striker's work on Captain John Smith's adventures in Hungary added fundamentally to our understanding and appreciation of his reliability as a narrator.

Zeisel's uncles are Karl Polanyi, a sociologist and economist, and Michael Polanyi, a physical chemist and philosopher of science.

Despite her family's intellectual prominence in the field of science, Zeisel always felt a deep attraction towards art.

At 17, she entered Budapest's Magyar Képzőművészeti Akadémia (Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts) as a painter.

To support her painting, she decided to pursue a more practical profession and apprenticed herself to Jakob Karapancsik, the last pottery master in the medieval guild system.

From him she learned ceramics.

She was the first woman to qualify as a journeyman in the Hungarian Guild of Chimney Sweeps, Oven Makers, Roof Tilers, Well Diggers, and Potters.

After graduating as a journeyman, she found work at the Hansa-Kust-Keramik, a ceramic workshop in Hamburg, Germany.

In 1928, Zeisel became the designer for the Schramberger Majolikafabrik in the Black Forest region of Germany where she worked for about two years creating many playfully geometric designs for dinnerware, tea sets, vases, inkwells and other ceramic items.

Her designs at Schramberg were largely influenced by modern architecture.

In addition, she had just learned to draft with compass and ruler and was proud to put them to use.

In 1930, Zeisel moved to Berlin, designing for the Carstens factories.

During this period, she met the physicist Alexander Weissberg, who later worked in Kharkov.

They became engaged in 1932.

After almost two years of a glamorous life among intellectuals and artists in decadent Berlin, Zeisel decided to visit the Soviet Union in 1932, where she would stay for 5 years.

At the age of 29, after several jobs in the Russian ceramics industry—inspecting factories in Ukraine as well as designing for the Lomonosov and Dulevo factories—Zeisel was named artistic director of the Russian China and Glass Trust.

On May 26, 1936, while living in Moscow, Zeisel was arrested.

She had been falsely accused of participating in an assassination plot against Joseph Stalin.

She was held in prison for 16 months, 12 of which were spent in solitary confinement.

In September 1937, she was deported to Vienna, Austria.

Some of her prison experiences form the basis for Darkness at Noon, the anti-Stalinist novel written by her childhood friend, Arthur Koestler.

It was while in Vienna that she re-established contact with her future husband Hans Zeisel, later a legal scholar, statistician, and professor at The University of Chicago.

A few months after her arrival in Vienna the Nazis invaded, and Zeisel took the last train out.

She and Hans met up in England where they married and sailed for the US with $67 between them.

When Zeisel arrived in the US, she had to reestablish her reputation as a designer.

Beginning in 1937, she taught at Pratt Institute in New York.

She and her students created designs for the Bay Ridge Specialty Company including Stratoware (a rare, short-lived line made for Sears), designed by student Frances Blod, under Zeisel'ls supervision.

In 1942, Zeisel was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and Castleton China to design a set of modern, porcelain, undecorated china that would be worthy of exhibition at MoMA, to be produced for sale by Castleton.

The resulting exhibition, "New Shapes in Modern China Designed by Eva Zeisel," ran from April 17 to June 9, 1946, and was the first one-woman exhibition at MoMA.

It was received with wide praise, but because of wartime constraints the porcelain dishware did not go into production until 1949.

Zeisel's dishes, known as "Museum" and "Castleton White," were manufactured and sold over the next several decades, initially in all-white as designed by Zeisel, and later with a wide variety of decorations.

Zeisel credited this commission with establishing her reputation in the US, remarking that, "it made me an accepted first-rate designer rather than a run-of-the-mill designer."

"Museum's" success brought Zeisel to the attention of Red Wing Potteries, for whom she designed the perennially popular "Town and Country" in response to their request for dishes inspired by Greenwich Village.

Around 1949–1950, Zeisel was commissioned by the Hall China Company to create her most popular line, "Hallcraft, Tomorrow's Classic."