The Playful Search for Beauty
Eva Zeisel
Industrial Designer
Born November 13, 1906
By Karen E. Steen
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Eva Zeisel's indomitable love of life, expressed in exuberant
curves, guarantees her a unique place in design history.
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There's an aura of wonder about Eva Zeisel. It's in the fantasy of her forms,
her passionate
engagement with the world, and the extraordinary twists of her life.
How, one must ask, does a 94-year-old find herself writing three
books, designing a retail interior, and developing new lines of
furniture and tableware? How does an industrial designer who is
almost blind develop the look of objects? How does someone who survived
solitary confinement as a political prisoner maintain such a love
of life that it's visible in every piece she has ever made?
"Her will is
overwhelming," says filmmaker Jyll Johnstone, who is working on
a documentary about Zeisel. "She has her frailties, but she won't
talk about them." That will has been the one constant along Zeisel's
path from bright daughter of Hungary's cultured aristocracy, to
hardworking designer in European factories, to political prisoner
facing execution in Stalin's Russia, to Jew fleeing Nazi Austria,
to influential
 American
teacher and industrial designer. The turnabouts
can be hard to fathom. How, for example, did exuberant designs such
as her Belly Button room divider follow 16 months of solitary confinement
on false charges? "Well, you come out so pleased with life," Zeisel
explains. "Everything is unexpectedly colorful. Life is a present.
That is why one shouldn't have scandals, one shouldn't have ill
humor, one shouldn't be cranky--that is the moment that is life.
One should respect it."
This past July
Zeisel returned to Russia for the first time since her release from
prison in 1937. The Lomonosov Factory, where she worked as a designer
in the 1930s, had invited her to participate in a critique of the
factory's work, and Zeisel offered to develop a new line of tableware
while there. In the factory's museum Zeisel discovered a tea set
she'd made. The design had later been adopted by the government
as a commemorative trinket; one iteration featured a picture of
Stalin himself. Zeisel recounts this with an amused grin.
"The playful
search for beauty"--what Zeisel says best describes her work--is an
equally accurate
account of her personality. "She comes through in
everything she makes," says David Reid of KleinReid ceramics studio.
The vases Zeisel designed for Reid and his partner, James Klein,
in 1999 have a voluptuous dignity that reveals her trademark touches:
the hourglass silhouette of traditional Hungarian pottery, an essence
of love and abundance, and a certain pettability to the arc of each
curve. This is true of the gentle, rounded creatures in her 1946
Town and Country dinnerware, and of the crystal vases and metal
bowls she's recently created for Nambé.
"How she relates to curves is so amazing," marvels designer Von
Robinson, Zeisel's assistant on an interior for the Original Leather
Co., in Manhattan, and a line of wood-and-glass furniture. "She's
never done a wrong curve."
The locus of
the Zeisel magic is in her hands: she uses them to describe anything
visual--shaping air into arcs and bowls--and to design despite her
poor vision. She cuts out paper silhouettes, then works back and
forth with a modeler, gesturing to explain a curve, until the piece
is correct. As a result, her designs have an expressiveness that's
rare in household objects.
"There is some sort of emotional transfer," she
says, citing the devotion in her fan mail. "I love the people for
whom I made it, and it comes across--they accept my love."
This exchange
fuels one of Zeisel's current projects: a book-length essay called
"The Magic Language of Design." In it she argues for a return to
the ornamentation she grew up with and is still surrounded by in
her Manhattan apartment, crammed with the Biedermeier furniture
her family brought over from Hungary.
"[Things] talk to us by their shapes, contours,
color, weight, temperature, surfaces, sound, and most clearly by
their associations," she writes. "Our century's designers believed
that their rules and principles would permanently dictate what divided
good design from bad. These rules aimed at silencing communication
between the maker of things and his public. The things themselves
lost their magic." It's a position she's argued solidly since 1931,
when she wrote an article called "The Designer Speaks Her Mind"
for the trade paper Die Schaulade. "[The Bauhaus] was against all
personality, all individualism," she says dismissively. "It was
rejecting the eI.'" Though her work in the 1930s and '40s used geometrical
forms characteristic of the era, Zeisel always felt she worked outside
of trends. "I don't fit into art history," she says.
Perhaps
the most accurate attempt to contextualize her work is now under
way at the British Museum,
where curator Judy Rudoe is planning a permanent display of twentieth-century
design that will feature Zeisel as its centerpiece. "She's one of
the few important twentieth-century designers who's still with us,
who we can talk to," Rudoe says, "so I'm using her as a case history
to explain how a designer for industry works." With samples of Zeisel's
work, Rudoe will illustrate the process behind the creation of objects
we use every day.
Rudoe couldn't
have a better subject. Process is the essence of Zeisel's work,
and she's very articulate about it. "One doesn't do the style of
the time, one does what a particular problem requires," she explains.
She recalls that her Baby line, a set of dishes for feeding infants,
came about when car manufacturers stopped making spark plugs out
of porcelain.
 The
factory that had supplied them ended up with a vast amount of five-inch-tall
kiln space to fill. "That is why we made the Baby line--not because
children didn't have enough dishes," she says, "but to fill in what
the spark plugs left open."
Now companies
let Zeisel design objects of her own choosing. That freedom--paired
with a philosophy that melds together work, play, and creative expression--makes
retirement a moot point. After all, the "playful search for beauty"
is a quest without an end point. "If you're doing this because you
have something to give, it doesn't matter how old you are--you're
just going to keep doing it," Robinson says. "She can't be stopped.
She's so alive with projects, so alive with design." |
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