Eva Zeisel was the designer of the clean curves acknowledged to have revolutionised the look of American dining tables and kitchens. She passed away a few days ago aged 105, after a prolific life in which she designed everything from the ceramics and glassware for which she is most known, to school furniture, lamps and even door handles, and which saw her still creative beyond the age of 100. Hungarian-born, she designed over 100,000 different artefacts in her lifetime, often as innovative as the first stackable cups and the first cylindrical teapots.
Eva Zeisel was inspired by everything around her, like the half-inflated balloon on which she based a kettle. Her vocabulary of curves was evolving when the Bauhaus was evolving exactly the opposite. She scorned the Modernist creed to"reduce, reduce, reduce" and their "exclusion of all but right angles." For her there were other ways of achieving simplicity.
Eva Zeisel's objection to Modernism was that it "resulted in a language devoid of communicative strength...it was purposely made mute." By contrast she declared that her salt and pepper pots were "made to love each other", as they curved around one another. Eva Zeisel's beautiful designs achieved a simplicity whilst feeding the senses; she had found a road to simplicity without sterility. These pieces show it was a timeless formula.
3 from Eva Zeisel's affordable Town and Country Range, 1945, photographed at the New York Museum of Modern Art by Ricky Webster
