Grande Dame Of Design
At 97, Design Legend Eva Zeisel Shows No Signs Of Slowing Down
by CHRIS SCHMIDT
"Somehow I became old without ever having become an adult," laughed 97-year-old design legend Eva Zeisel, sitting in her 115th Street apartment earlier this week, surrounded by her creations.
The white-haired, Hungarian-born designer of ceramics, glassware, furniture, and tableware could easily rest on her laurels. Her pieces are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and the British Museum holds a near-complete set of her work. A retrospective of her career is currently on display,through June 20th, at the Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee.
But this impish woman is not ready to stop working. She is publishing a book in May entitled "Eva Zeisel On Design: The Magic Language of Things" (The Overlook Press, $35). And after seven decades, her design pace has barely slowed.
"She is still producing designs of the very first order," Pat Kirkham, a professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture said. A revived mid-century design of Ms. Zeisel's, the "belly-button" wall divider, graces the hip Standard Hotel lobby, designed by Shawn Hausman, in Los Angeles. A more recent creation of hers, a martini glass with a tropical-flower pistil emerging from the stem, was the centerpiece of a Bombay Sapphire advertisement in 2001.
The secret to Ms. Zeisel's longevity may lie in her aesthetic motto, which she will invoke any time she is asked to explain the inspiration for a particular object: "The playful search for beauty," she intoned in a beguiling, slightly accented sing-song. "Is this not clear?" she asked.
If Ms. Zeisel is able to smuggle a bit of her student excitement into her mature work, she is repaying the debt by imparting her design wisdom to today's student. Her new book is composed mostly of photographs that Ms. Zeisel puts in dialogue with each other. She aims to train the unschooled eye. "Before we can make things that are pleasant to see, we must find pleasure in seeing the things that are offered to our sight," she writes in one of the book's opening chapters.
While interviewing Ms. Zeisel at her home, the unpretentious nature of which matches her design aesthetic beautifully, I was privy to such an education. I asked whether the tea service on the table between us was her own design (Ms. Zeisel's place settings are among her most celebrated). She didn't answer, but instead replied, "The table is my design," then surprised me with her strength by single-handedly pivoting the heavy glass-and-wood design so we could see the "mother-child" motif carved in the table's folk-art legs.
"Much of what I do is mother-child," Ms. Zeisel said, a comment encompassing both the designer's iconography -- the larger figure nestling the smaller version of it -- and her relationship with her public. One of Ms. Zeisel's most beloved designs is a saltand-pepper shaker set she created for Red Wing in 1946 (the firm's assignment was to create something "Greenwich Village-y"), in which the two anthropomorphic forms list toward each other and touch. Ms. Zeisel's inspiration was a photograph of herself cradling her young daughter, Jean.The salt-and-pepper shakers are available in a reissue at the Metropolitan Museum's Gift Shop; plans are also in development to re-release the entire Town and County setting at a major American housewares store.
Ms. Zeisel's style is often described as "friendly," and, indeed, the designer herself identifies kindness, not artistic selfexpression, as a central tenet of successful design. And her audience clearly recognizes it. "Almost every letter I get about my designs includes the word 'love,'" she said.
I asked Ms. Zeisel about the curvilinear folk-art motif she's developed in some of her recent woodwork. "Curliques are one happiness. Another happiness," she said, pausing for dramatic effect, then smiling, "is the rejection of curliques." For all its playfulness, the comment was revealing. Ms. Zeisel has no ideological axe to grind, and her aesthetic is always changing.
And that aesthetic has evolved over the course of a 75-year career. Born in Budapest in 1906, Ms. Zeisel studied art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in her late teens, but left to learn a more practical craft and apprenticed with a potter.She began working at a ceramics factory and quickly became one of the first female industrial designers in the country.
Ms. Zeisel's instinct to be in the most artistically fertile place at precisely the right moment has no doubt also informed her design. She lived in Berlin in the 1920s when Bauhaus reigned, Russia in the 1930s, and New York in the 1940s and 1950s when Modernism was blooming in the city. (She instituted the first American course in ceramic design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1939.)
But Ms. Zeisel also paid a price for her curiosity. In 1936, while living in Russia, she was imprisoned as part of a Stalinist purge, and placed in solitary confinement for 16 months. Ms. Zeisel responded to her imprisonment not by living in memories of the past or dreams of the future, but by focusing on the present. "To stay sane, I had to control my mind," she recalled. Ms. Zeisel would keep her mind occupied by designing complicated objects -- a brassiere, say -- in her head.
"But let's not talk about the past. Memories of long ago are not true," she said. Indeed, as difficult as those years were, she says the mindset she developed there served her well in both her career and her life."When you are my age, you really live in the moment," she added.
Among Ms. Zeisel's most recent projects is a line of funerary urns for Nambe (www.nambe.com) in a metallic alloy. Even these objects are uplifting: The upper half of one of the urns functions, quite naturally, as a flower vase.
But it was a sugar bowl she designed for Brooklyn potters KleinReid (www.kleinreid.com), with a similar bud vase atop the lid, that Ms. Zeisel preferred to play with when I visited. She asked her assistant to fetch her a "naive" flower, a red sprig of geranium, which she then popped into the vase. "You see," she said proudly."This is not a very serious thing,putting a flower into a sugar bowl!"