Eva Zeisel Papers

Éva Amália Striker Zeisel was born on November 13, 1906 in Budapest, Hungary.

In 1928, after working for two years in handicrafts, she began developing ceramic designs for mass production at the Schramberg Earthenware Factory in Germany. In 1931, she lived in Berlin and worked for Christian Carstens Co., an earthenware factory in Bavaria. In Berlin she was surrounded by friends like Arthur Koestler, Anna Seghels, Leo Szilard, Michael Polanyi and Victor Weisskopf. In 1932, she decided to take a two week trip to the Soviet Union and ended up staying there for over five years.

In the Soviet Union, she worked for the Lomonosov Factory in Leningrad in 1933 and then for Dulevo in 1934. At Dulevo, one of the world’s largest porcelain factories, she organized a department for experimental design. In 1935 and 1936, she acted as the art director of the china and glass industry of the Russian Republic in Moscow, and traveled to various factories throughout the country. In 1936, she was arrested for having “successfully” prepared an attempted assassination of Stalin. This was at the beginning of the purges, during which millions of innocent people were arrested. After sixteen months in prison, she was expelled to Vienna. She left Vienna six months later when Hitler entered Austria, and settled in London for a few months.

Zeisel arrived in the United States in October 1938 and began designing for several firms, including Sears, Roebuck, Co., Red Wing and others. From 1939 to 1954, she taught at Pratt Institute in the Industrial Design Department. She was introduced to Pratt by Carl Johnson, who she worked with at the Pratt Shop. She was invited to write a syllabus and teach mass production ceramic design by Professor Dohner while in Room B53 designing Himalayan Mountain plaster molds for a movie background for 50 cents an hour. Her mass production ceramics course worked closely with the Bay Ridge Specialty and Homer Laughlin companies; the finished pieces were shown at the Pratt Exhibition at Rockefeller Center in May 1940. Her students’ work was also shown at the Chicago Exhibit of Industrial Design at the Art Center, Chicago in 1940-1941, as well as a special exhibition that was on display at the Chicago Merchandise Market that went on view at the Museum of Modern Art in October 1954.

As a lecturer at Pratt, the head of the design department at the Museum of Modern Art visited her exhibition of student work and in 1942 attended her lecture on handicraft and mass production at the Metropolitan Museum. He asked her to design a line of dinnerware for the Castleton China Company in collaboration with the design department of the Museum of Modern Art. The line was presented at a one man show at the museum in 1946. In the early fifties she participated in several round table conferences on design at the MoMA. Several popular lines that she designed during this time include Red Wing’s town and Country, Hallcraft’s Tomorrow’s Classic, and Federal Glass’s Prestige Glasses.

In 1958, Zeisel moved her studio to Rockland County, and worked there until 1970, when she moved to Chicago to be with her husband Hans Zeisel, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Chicago. During the 1970s she researched and wrote a manuscript entitled Sixty Days that Shook New York. It concerns a trial that took place in New York City in 1741 in which many slaves were falsely accused of taking part in a non-existent slave uprising. This topic was chosen for its reminsicence of the Russian show trials during the 1930s purges.

In 1991, after the death of her husband, Zeisel moved back to New York where she continued to design dinnerware, giftware, stemware, flatware, and furniture in a variety of materials. Her designs were produced by Nambe, Klein-Reid, and the Metropolitan Museum. Her writing projects include a manuscript on the magic language of design, her memoirs, an essay on slaves in New York, and an anthology entitled Remembered Children, a collection of childhood memories from throughout the ages (from St. Augustine to Eleanor Roosevelt).

In 2005, Zeisel won the Lifetime Achievement award from the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum.

Zeisel died on December 30, 2011.