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http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/9325918.htm
A life full of curves
BY DIANE GOLDSMITH
Knight Ridder Newspapers
NEW YORK - (KRT) - She first created a splash in American housewares more than 50 years ago. But today, Eva Zeisel might be hotter than ever.
The Hungarian-born industrial designer best known for her curvaceous dinnerware has just come out with a picture book, "Eva Zeisel on Design: The Magic Language of Things" (Overlook, $37.50). She's the subject of a touring exhibition that will come to Washington in April.
And in her Manhattan apartment, her classic mid-century tableware and glasses jockey for space with myriad recently designed products - everything from stylish platters, lamps and pen sets, to vases that nestle vertically or sidle up to one another.
All breathe life.
A ring at the door brings an eye-popping glass table with an orange-resin base she created for Dune. A second ring, and it's early mock-ups of jewelry she's doing with another designer.
Did we mention that Zeisel is 97 years old?
Members of the Eva Zeisel Forum (www.evazeisel.org) are preparing not one but three volumes on her prolific output, and Karen Kettering, curator of the traveling exhibition - "Eva Zeisel: The Playful Search for Beauty" - is busy collaborating with the designer on a new biography. ("She makes me feel lazy," Kettering confesses.)
All this on the heels of a 2003 monograph (by Lucie Young for Chronicle Books) and documentary (Jyll Johnstone's "Throwing Curves).
"It's overwhelming," Zeisel's assistant, Allen Cordell, says of all the projects. "She just came back from Knoxville [Museum of Art, the exhibition's first stop], where she signed 500 books."
"She's gotten a major second wind," her friend Karim Rashid notes, tying much of the demand for Zeisel's fluid forms to revival of mid-century modern style.
Though her vintage work is big on eBay, Zeisel's shapely new vases for KleinReid have done well in museum shops and department stores. And her elegant new pieces for Nambe - bowls, vases and lamps, largely in a metal alloy and porcelain - are among the company's best-sellers.
She's expanded on the concept of grouping pieces - her playful 1946 "mother-and-child" salt and pepper shakers for Red Wing are iconic - and tried some clever new things. Old or new, they're all expressive.
Indeed, the quest to design products that communicate is what Zeisel's new book is all about.
So what is her approach?
"To be happy," she says simply.
"Look how nice this is," she says, rubbing a little petal-tipped dessert bowl from 1957 and smiling. "My work is very bodily. It's not a shell, but a body. It's nice to touch, not just to look at."
"She's one of the first to adamantly and unabashedly be sensuous in her work - sensuous in a sweet way," says Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Zeisel also was one of the first important women designers, Antonelli says, a true pioneer.
Her life has certainly packed enough adventure. In a gently accented voice, the designer, surrounded by the Biedermeier furniture she and her husband brought over when they fled Europe in 1938, speaks of her remarkable journey.
Born in Hungary, she studied painting at the Budapest Royal Academy of Fine Arts and apprenticed to a local potter. After jobs in ceramics factories in Hungary and then Germany, where she designed colorfully decorated geometric forms, she ventured to the Soviet Union alone in 1932, curious about the social experiment there.
While dismayed at the primitive living conditions, Zeisel was placed in increasingly responsible positions.
At 29, she was made artistic director of the entire Soviet china and glass industry. Then in 1936, her world crashed when she was arrested on false charges of plotting to assassinate Stalin.
"An engineer who wanted to leave the country named my model-maker and me," she says.
After a harrowing 16 months in prison, a year of which was served in solitary, she was abruptly released and escorted to a train headed for the border. She proceeded to Vienna, Austria, where relatives and her future husband, Hans Zeisel, were living.
Six months later, on the very day Hitler marched into Austria, she caught the last train out of the country. Hans joined her later in England.
Asked about her prison experiences, Zeisel prefers not to trust memory, instead asking Cordell to fetch her prison memoirs - 136 pages, typed - which she wrote years later for her children to read. But with failing eyesight, she hands them over, resuming her narrative in New York, where one of the odd jobs she takes is making models of the Himalayas for a film company.
It leads to a teaching post at New York's Pratt Institute. A show of her students' work draws a Museum of Modern Art curator and an offer to do a major collection of dinnerware under MoMA's imprimatur. Issued in 1946, it's a sophisticated design showing Zeisel exploring curves and draws national attention.
In 1952, her most popular dinnerware line - Tomorrow's Classic for Hall China - comes out, grossing $250,000 that year alone, according to Lucie Young's "Eva Zeisel. The advance and royalty checks allow the designer to purchase what is still her country home and studio in Rockland County, N.Y.
By the late 1950s, though, the American china industry is on the downswing, and Zeisel looks abroad for work. Indeed, by the mid-1960s, she's embarked on what will become a 20-year hiatus, preferring instead to write (none of it's been published, Kettering says), and protesting the Vietnam War.
Zeisel has Cordell pull out her photos of demonstrations. In one wonderful shot, she's captured the thoughtful expression on a middle-aged woman's face; another shows African Americans joining a march.
Zeisel's return to product design in the 1980s was spurred by a major retrospective of her work, mounted by a Montreal museum and toured by the Smithsonian Institution. Since then, she's come out with a far wider range of products - even handbags and watches.
"She's so enthusiastic about all the new work. She always wants to know what's coming up next," says Nambe product manager Stephanie Sawyer.
Even when Zeisel broke her hip a few years ago and was in the hospital, "I brought models in," Sawyer recalls, "and she worked with them there."
Rashid, who brought Zeisel and Nambe together, says, "There's a certain poetry about her work, something about not forgetting there are things in our lives that should have a real sense of beauty.
"It's quite easy to get caught up in the commercial world and forget ... that, at the end of the day, anything physical around us should touch our soul."
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