When was eva zeisel born

Once in Austria, she left on the last train out at the time of the Anschluss and went to England, where she married Hans Zeisel, who had waited seven years for her. They then went to New York in , where they settled permanently. One of her first designs in the US was for Sears, Roebuck. Honors collected by Zeisel include a commission from Castleton China and The Museum of Modern Art to design a line of fine porcelain dinnerware, which was presented in an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in l She has received a senior award from the National Endowments for the Arts l , and was the subject of a touring exhibition sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs de Montreal, in l She taught ceramic arts industrial design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from l to l She had retrospective exhibitions in dozens of museums, lectured widely, and received two honorary doctorates in recognition of her work, among other honors.

The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art both issued new releases of some of her early designs in new glazes and colors, always supervised by Zeisel. She produced new designs regularly, right up to the time of her death in , at age Reserve Tickets. Plan Your Visit. Getting Here. Upcoming Programs. Interaction Lab. National Design Awards. Corporate Support. The company specialized in sanitary products and toilets, but she became the lead of the decorative art department, a position that was created for her, after the manager of the company visited her studio and saw her pottery.

Zeisel started prototyping and molds were made and mass produced. It was here that she began designing prototypes with cut out paper models, which became key elements in designing her forms. After six months at Kispester-Granit, the factory returned to manufacturing and Zeisel moved on to work at Hansa Kunstkeramik, in Hamburg, Germany. Instead she started prototyping for production, but her boss was unhappy with her style of working and six month later she returned to Budapest.

In she returned to Germany as sole designer for the Schramberger Majolikafabrik. The factory specialized in mass produced dinnerware and common household objects. Although Zeisel did not have the skills of an industrial designer, she got some help with her drafting skills and decided not to produce her prototypes on the pottery wheel. She notes that, although useful objects make beautiful objects, they are still unnecessary.

Nobody needs an ergonomic pitcher to survive. Not all cultures use forks and knives. Her thoughts about creating objects, therefore, lay in the feelings these objects evoke. She wanted to create something beautiful that is comfortable to use. Zeisel watched closely as her prototypes were translated into actual wares, wanting her designs to be replicated precisely as she made them.

She started to document all of her work and controlled her own imagery for advertisements. She had a good eye not only for 3D objects, but also for photographs. Soon her work was featured at the bi-annual Leipzig trade shows and in trade magazines such as Die Schaulade.

Zeisel was lonely in the small southern town of Schramberg. She freelanced for the Carson Company and designed for Hirschau.

Politics in Germany had changed and her close ties to the communist intellectuals made her consider immigrating to the USSR. At the time she felt a desire for all things Russian, because she had been so close to its culture and its people. In Ukraine, she saw poverty for the first time. People were starving and the unemployment rate was staggeringly high.

The USSR was experiencing a great famine and people were dying on the streets. Zeisel decided to stay nonetheless, not only because she was highly valued as a designer at the renowned Imperial Porcelain Factory Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory in Leningrad, but also because she felt a strong bond with the Russian people.

Image 6: Leningrad tea service. Designed by Eva S. Her style changed dramatically, and she started combining her usual clean and modern lines with the sensuous shapes of the 18 th century Russian porcelain she discovered in the factory collection. The Russians rejected the modernist designs coming from Europe, so she sometimes spent hours with her modeler refining a single piece. While at the Imperial Porcelain Factory she separated from her husband. She resigned from Imperial Porcelain in and moved, initially to the small town of Orekhovo-Zuevo, close to Moscow, where she accepted a position at Dulevo factory, one of the largest ceramic producers in the world, and then to Moscow, where she became artistic director of the Ukrainian China and Glass Trust of the Russian Republic.

There she designed for the masses. Especially plates were in high demand for the hundreds of millions of Russians who were just discovering pottery. According to Zeisel, he was the love of her life. She was arrested on May 28, The majority of them were executed. Zeisel spent most of her time in solidary confinements where she occupied her mind by designing objects and playing chess games in her head to stay sane.

She once slit her wrists, after making a false confession and experienced a moment of complete despair and hopelessness. Fortunately she was saved. On September 17, , she was inexplicably released and went to Vienna, where she reconnected with her longtime friend from Berlin, Hans Zeisel. When Germany seized Austria in , Zeisel along with many other Jews, left the country. She and Hans went to England where they married in July of , right before they immigrated to the United States.

They settled in New York, which was the preferred destination for Jewish intellectuals who had fled the Nazi regime. Zeisel supported herself and her husband by designing household items, like vases, and boxes, before she landed a job teaching design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The designs had to be worked out in detail without compromising their functionality. She established an apprenticeship for her students at Bay Ridge Specialty Company, where the students gained practical experience with industrially designed ceramics.

Although these prototypes had not been in production yet, they established her reputation as a leading designer of ceramics in the United States. Wright was an industrial designer and had no pottery background. He went to Alfred University to develop the glazes for his wares. The dishes came in all kinds of colors, just like the Fiestaware that had been designed by Frederick Rhea in , although Wright chose a more muted palate.

These dishes were meant to be well designed, finely produced, yet cheap and affordable for the masses to purchase during the era of the Great Depression. The variety in color encouraged buying pieces in different colors to mix and match them. The colorful dishes were intended to lighten the mood during these hard times. She now worked from her basement studio and hired interns and assistants to manage the workload.

Most were her former students. Hans took a job as a law and sociology professor at the University of Chicago and the family moved with him to Chicago. Zeisel resigned from her teaching job at Pratt Institute and closed her studio.

Hans wanted her to be home with their two children, now that he was financially supporting the household. Zeisel became restless without a creative outlet and moved back to New York a year later and reopened her studio. She designed for Prestige Glassware, and then designed a line of dinnerware sets: Kitchenware and the highly acclaimed Hallcraft Century line , both for Hall China.

For her Hallcraft designs, modelers and moldmakers at Hall China helped Zeisel create her prototypes. Zeisel worked closely with her associates and former students from Pratt Institute. Eva's uncles were the economic historian Karl Polanyi and the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi.

The latter wrote on the importance of "tacit knowledge" as opposed to "explicit knowledge" and Eva's greatness as a designer was in part based on her profound tacit knowledge of clay, rooted in Hungarian folk craft.

After studying painting, she took the unconventional step of apprenticing herself to an artisan potter, treading out the clay with her bare feet and accompanying him from house to house installing clay ovens, a training that gained her membership of the Guild of Chimney Sweeps, Oven Makers, Roof Tilers, Well Diggers and Potters.

In the tradition of medieval guildsmen, she embarked on a modern version of a journeyman's travels, taking her to a pottery in Hamburg and to the Schramberger Majolika factory in Germany's Black Forest, where she had her first experience of designing for multiple production and learned prototyping skills. By she had a design studio in Berlin. Curiosity, recklessness and idealism took the strikingly beautiful young woman to the Soviet Union, where she married the Viennese physicist Alexander Weissberg in She became artistic director of the state-run china and glass industry, designing both for the mass and luxury market — her porcelain Intourist tea service was quietly classical and exquisitely handpainted with images of Lenin and Leningrad.

In she was arrested and imprisoned in the great purges, accused of being involved in plotting Stalin's assassination. Freed after 16 months, mostly spent in solitary confinement, she found herself in danger again, as a Jew in Vienna. She arrived in New York with the lawyer and sociologist Hans Zeisel in They married that year, after her first marriage had been dissolved.