Eva Zeisel (1906–2011)

Eva Zeisel, née Striker, was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. Although many of her family became writers or scientists, Eva was attracted to art from a young age. At 17, she enrolled in the Hungarian Royal Academy of Fine Arts to study painting. She also apprenticed herself to a potter to learn ceramics. After graduating, she became the designer for a large German ceramics company, where she created playfully geometric designs, influenced by modern architecture. In 1930, she moved to Berlin, and got freelance design work, including for the Carstens factories. In 1932, she visited her fiancé, Alexander Weissberg, a physicist working in the Soviet Union, and they married in 1933. The couple separated about a year later and divorced in 1937. After several jobs in the Russian ceramics industry, Eva was named artistic director of the Russian Glass and Porcelain Trust. In 1936, while living in Moscow, she was arrested and falsely accused of plotting to assassinate Josef Stalin. She was imprisoned for 16 months, with a year spent in solitary confinement, and then deported to Austria. Details of her prison experiences were later included in Darkness at Noon, written by her childhood friend Arthur Koestler. A few months after Eva's arrival in Vienna, the Nazis invaded Austria, and she fled to England. There she married Hans Zeisel, a sociologist and legal scholar she knew from Berlin. The couple emigrated to the USA with only $67 between them. Her husband got jobs at New York University and the University of Chicago, while Eva re-established her career as a designer. She taught at Pratt Institute and worked for many years on projects and commissions in glass, wood, metal, and plastics. She is best known for her practical yet beautiful modern tableware. Her work is in permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the British Museum, MoMA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her books included Eva Zeisel on Design (2004). In 2005, she received the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. Eva Zeisel: A Soviet Prison Memoir was compiled by Jean Richards and Brent Brolin and published posthumously in 2019.