Eva Zeisel, who has died aged 105, survived two of the most oppressive tyrannies of the 20th century to become one of the world's best-known ceramic designers and the creator of fine china tableware.
As a young Hungarian Jew, she had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union and only just escaped from Austria to England on the eve of the Nazi invasion.
Her friend, the British writer Arthur Koestler, also Hungarian-born, based his stark wartime novel Darkness at Noon (1940) on Eva Zeisel's experiences.
Having settled in the United States, her big break came from the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1942, at the height of the modernist movement, when the museum asked her to design a set of tableware. The result became known as the first all-white modernist dinner service, and was introduced at her one-woman show in 1946.
In fact, Eva Zeisel rejected strict modernism, finding its tone negative and preachy. "The modern movement dictates all the things I must not do," she once explained, dismissing its mantra of "reduce, reduce, reduce". She devised a mantra of her own: "Be ample, be kind, don't reduce, but give."
Her influential, curvaceous tableware designs feature in the collections of the British and Victoria & Albert Museums in London. The British Museum's ceramics collection includes her whimsical Town and Country range of colourful dinner ware from the 1940s. With its plump salt and pepper shakers that gently curve towards each other, the set became another classic – and highly collectable – design.
This "nestling" theme, which recurred throughout Eva Zeisel's work, was redolent of nurturing human qualities. "All my work is mother-and-child," she once said.
Although chiefly acclaimed as one of the great tableware designers of the 20th century, Eva Zeisel's repertoire also extended to furniture and other items for the home.
Eva Zeisel reckoned that she had designed 100,000 pieces of tableware in the course of her career, in styles as diverse as Bauhaus and Russian Art Nouveau.
In 2005 another of her most attractive dinner ware ranges – her Classic Century earthenware from the 1950s – was relaunched following the discovery of the original moulds in the basement of a china company in Ohio. Eva Zeisel collaborated with the Royal Stafford firm in England on the reissue.
She was born Eva Amalia Striker on November 13 1906 in Budapest into a prosperous, avant-garde family of Jewish intellectuals. Her father was a textile manufacturer, her feminist mother the first woman in Hungary to earn a PhD in History.
Eva studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest before turning to pottery. Apprenticed to a journeyman potter, she became the first woman member of the Hungarian Guild of Chimney Sweeps, Oven Makers, Roof Tilers, Well Diggers and Potters. She trod clay with her bare feet and travelled from house to house with her mentor to repair and install ovens.
In 1927 she took a job in Germany, where the Bauhaus and modernism movements were establishing a new aesthetic. The next year, when she was only 21, she was appointed chief designer at the Schramberg Majolika Factory in the Black Forest.
Drawn by curiosity, she left Germany for the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, moving to Ukraine to study Russian art and culture, and marrying Alex Weissberg, a physicist. Rising rapidly through the ranks of pottery design and production in the Soviet Union, designing gifts for diplomats, by the time she was 29 she was art director at the state-run Porcelain and Glass Industries in Moscow.
In her thirties Eva Weissberg was inviting comparisons with Greta Garbo – glamorous, talented and determined to the point of wilfulness. But in May 1936 a knock on the door in the middle of the night put her burgeoning career on hold.
She was arrested on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Josef Stalin and imprisoned for 16 months. Her accused co-conspirators were shot, including one who – under police pressure – had denounced her. But Eva was released as suddenly as she had been jailed.
She arrived in Vienna six months before Hitler annexed Austria. She then fled to London, where her marriage was dissolved and she married Hans Zeisel, a lawyer she had known in Vienna. In 1938 the couple arrived in the United States with $64 between them. In New York, a china factory commissioned a design for a set of dishes, which she created overnight, earning her $100.
For her Town and Country dinner set in the 1940s she received only a flat $300 fee. By 1952, when she created the elegant Tomorrow's Classic range, she was able to buy a house on the proceeds. The 16-piece set sold for $8.95 and grossed $250,000 in the first year.
During the 1960s, when her style fell out of favour, she turned to writing and protesting against the Vietnam War. But in the 1980s an art museum in Canada mounted an exhibition of her work and she returned to product design.
She received design awards in the United States and Britain as well as Hungary's Middle Cross of the Order of Merit. Her husband Hans, who became a distinguished Law and Sociology professor at the University of Chicago, died in 1992 aged 86.
Eva Zeisel is survived by a daughter and a son.
Eva Zeisel, born November 13 1906, died December 30 2011
Although chiefly acclaimed as one of the great tableware designers of the 20th century, Eva Zeisel's repertoire also extended to furniture and other items for the home.
Eva Zeisel reckoned that she had designed 100,000 pieces of tableware in the course of her career, in styles as diverse as Bauhaus and Russian Art Nouveau.
In 2005 another of her most attractive dinner ware ranges – her Classic Century earthenware from the 1950s – was relaunched following the discovery of the original moulds in the basement of a china company in Ohio. Eva Zeisel collaborated with the Royal Stafford firm in England on the reissue.
She was born Eva Amalia Striker on November 13 1906 in Budapest into a prosperous, avant-garde family of Jewish intellectuals. Her father was a textile manufacturer, her feminist mother the first woman in Hungary to earn a PhD in History.
Eva studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest before turning to pottery. Apprenticed to a journeyman potter, she became the first woman member of the Hungarian Guild of Chimney Sweeps, Oven Makers, Roof Tilers, Well Diggers and Potters. She trod clay with her bare feet and travelled from house to house with her mentor to repair and install ovens.
In 1927 she took a job in Germany, where the Bauhaus and modernism movements were establishing a new aesthetic. The next year, when she was only 21, she was appointed chief designer at the Schramberg Majolika Factory in the Black Forest.
Drawn by curiosity, she left Germany for the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, moving to Ukraine to study Russian art and culture, and marrying Alex Weissberg, a physicist. Rising rapidly through the ranks of pottery design and production in the Soviet Union, designing gifts for diplomats, by the time she was 29 she was art director at the state-run Porcelain and Glass Industries in Moscow.
In her thirties Eva Weissberg was inviting comparisons with Greta Garbo – glamorous, talented and determined to the point of wilfulness. But in May 1936 a knock on the door in the middle of the night put her burgeoning career on hold.
She was arrested on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Josef Stalin and imprisoned for 16 months. Her accused co-conspirators were shot, including one who – under police pressure – had denounced her. But Eva was released as suddenly as she had been jailed.
She arrived in Vienna six months before Hitler annexed Austria. She then fled to London, where her marriage was dissolved and she married Hans Zeisel, a lawyer she had known in Vienna. In 1938 the couple arrived in the United States with $64 between them. In New York, a china factory commissioned a design for a set of dishes, which she created overnight, earning her $100.
For her Town and Country dinner set in the 1940s she received only a flat $300 fee. By 1952, when she created the elegant Tomorrow's Classic range, she was able to buy a house on the proceeds. The 16-piece set sold for $8.95 and grossed $250,000 in the first year.
During the 1960s, when her style fell out of favour, she turned to writing and protesting against the Vietnam War. But in the 1980s an art museum in Canada mounted an exhibition of her work and she returned to product design.
She received design awards in the United States and Britain as well as Hungary's Middle Cross of the Order of Merit. Her husband Hans, who became a distinguished Law and Sociology professor at the University of Chicago, died in 1992 aged 86.
Eva Zeisel is survived by a daughter and a son.
Eva Zeisel, born November 13 1906, died December 30 2011
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