Charm and Function
New exhibition celebrates the love, beauty, and humanity in Eva Zeisel's homeware designs
If you've never heard of Eva Zeisel, you probably still know her work. Now age 100, she's produced by her own estimate 100,000 different objects, making her a gentle giant of industrial design who's created seemingly endless accoutrements to "bathe the home with grace."
In 1946, she won the first modernist dinnerware commission for the Museum of Modern Art; her clay, modular, "belly button" room dividers currently wiggle in the lobby of the Standard hotel on Sunset, and Crate & Barrel recently reissued her 1952 "Classic Century" dinnerware line in honor of her milestone birthday.
Now you can get to know her better, thanks to the Craft and Folk Art Museum's charming exhibition Eva Zeisel: Extraordinary Designer at 100. And I do mean her, as the show so ably integrates Zeisel's biography and loving spirit with examples of her work that you can almost feel her hand lightly scooting you through the collection. Zeisel always made "designs to delight," she has said. In fact, there is so much quirky joy on display here, you may find yourself wondering why there's often so little "fun" in functional household objects of high design.
Looking around the galleries, the answer seems to lie in part with the wide-ranging impact of modernism, which Zeisel, one of the few acclaimed women in her male-dominated field, strongly rebuked. "For the Moderns, things were not supposed to be soulful friends, but mute slaves serving us," she told Lucie Young, author of a small volume about Zeisel for Chronicle Books. Design should communicate with its user, she insisted, but with modernism, such communication was "shut off."
In contrast, Zeisel's "things"- plates, candlesticks, teapots, saucers, cups, glasses, serving platters, even salt and pepper shakers - emphasized expressiveness. During the 15 years she taught at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, for example, she instructed her students to convey in their creations feelings such as "happy" and "cozy," energy such as "melting" or "growing," along with more practical modes like "compact" and "slim." Humanism, not industrialism, was her concern.
Zeisel, born Eva Amalia Striker in Budapest in 1906, grew up among intellectuals. (Her mother, a feminist and historian, was the first woman to earn a doctorate from the University of Hungary.) She came to clay after dropping out of Hungary's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where she attempted to study painting. Her parents told her to learn a trade to support herself, so she apprenticed with a potter. The young artisan was captivated by the direct touch of her hands on her works' surfaces, affecting a personal connection - or "soul contact," she calls it - that she made a career of embellishing and extending to her audience.
But Zeisel's path, for all its privileges, was far from smooth. In 1928, she secured a position in industrial ceramic design at the Schramberg Majolica factory in Schramberg, Germany, on the strength of only two apprenticeships (although she had already become the first woman in the Hungarian Guild of Chimney Sweeps, Oven Makers, Roof Tilers, Well Diggers, and Potters). With her first husband, she headed to Leningrad in 1932 and became Artistic Director of Porcelain and Glass of Russia. Four years later, however, at age 30, she was arrested on charges of attempting to assassinate Stalin. Just as astonishingly, she was freed after a year of solitary confinement, during which time she survived physically and mentally by doing daily fitness routines and what she calls "thought control" - focusing on the here and now, which included design problems she conjured up for herself to solve. After fleeing to Austria, she lived briefly in London before settling with her late second husband in New York, where she lives today. Zeisel says that, since her imprisonment, she has regarded every day as a blessing. It's a sentiment she applies to her art.
Whether working in wood, plastic, glass, or clay, organicism and sensuality are among the traits that distinguish her items from so many of her famous contemporaries, such as Russel Wright, whose rigid adherence to mid-century modernism's efficiency-based, streamlined aesthetic - and the exceptionally enduring market for the style - ultimately limited the variety of his designs. Zeisel's products, however, changed over time and always reflected and solicited emotional engagement. (She was, by many turns, also a fervent political activist; in 1964, she ceased designing to take up protests against the Vietnam War. The hiatus ended up lasting 20 years, during which time she wrote about history and politics and turned her home into a boarding house for artists, poor women, and men dodging the draft.)
Indeed, there isn't a right angle "in the house." You can see her curvaceous stamp as early as her 1928-30 "Mondrian Line," made for Schramberg Majolica. A tea set composed of plump shapes, imperfect "straight" lines, and earthy yellow tones proves a warm and sunny alternative to the abrupt, grid-based paintings by the artist to which the name refers.
"I have rarely designed objects that were meant to stand alone," reads one phrase of large wall text at the museum. "My designs have family relationships. They are either mother and child, siblings or cousins." While a sense of relationships is a given in "sets" - whether dinnerware, utensils, or candlesticks - it wasn't until Zeisel designed her 1946 "Town and Country" line of dinnerware for Red Wing Pottery that she began to refine the idea by shaping pieces to "play off" and communicate with each other, in addition to the user. Red Wing approached her with a request for something "Greenwich Village-y," and out came a multicolored, kidney-curvy array of plates, pitchers, and more, with considerable variation between pieces. The accompanying, zoomorphically shaped salt and pepper shakers became icons; with one protectively hovering over the other, Zeisel affectionately nicknamed them "shmoos."
In fact, Zeisel's interest in relationships between objects may well explain why salt and pepper shakers, which already come as a team, prove consistent receptacles for her humor and whimsy. Take, for example, the MOMA "Museum" line, also from 1946, for which she created an elegant, white dinnerware with graceful curving lips and handles. She matched it with a friendly, squat, rocking saltcellar, as if symbolically "rolling" her eyes at the formality and pretension of the service. She also inserted her trademark humanism, making pieces that appeared to be "growing up from the table" in form (wide at the bottom, narrow toward the top), but perhaps also as a metaphor for family - the dining-room table being a place where we measure a family's maturation and "growth" over time.
Zeisel's approach suited the female-centered domestic spaces her pieces occupied, and doubtless brought cheer to the everyday housework they punctuated. Despite her professional success, she unquestionably empathized with the social expectations of women to skillfully - and enthusiastically! - manage their homes. Perhaps her aesthetic was also a form - so to speak - of reverie for women, since female body shapes are so detectable in Zeisel's designs (the reissued, 1958 belly button wall dividers for Italian manufacturer Mancioli among the most obvious).
This exhibition, which was originally curated by Joyce Corbett for La Jolla's Mingei Museum, extends up to the present decade, including some Lomonosov Porcelain from 2000 in thin-walled bone china so transparent, and with such swooping handles, it looks like it might just take flight. Given Zeisel's often repeated and truly sweet bird motifs, this china is an abstract cousin to that family. Also notice the array of glazes; from the iridescent beauties she perfected at Hungarian factory Zsolnay, to the 1964 "High Fashion" line for an American maker that, with depressions like those of wheel-spun pots, are drenched in earth-tone glazes so rich and glossy they resemble warm maple and chocolate syrups. It's a remarkable array of items, but not an exhausting one. Rather, they chirp at you lovingly, welcoming you to the nest.
Published: 10/11/2007
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