In a 2001 interview, the prolific maker—who died in 2011—discussed growing up alongside modernism and her push against the movement’s insistence on simplicity.
Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the February 2001 issue.
Eva Zeisel has an opinion on Putin. Also on Totem, Hillary, and Beauty. That is, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, because she follows international politics; Totem, the New York design store, because she follows design politics; Hillary, the public figure without the last name, because she follows domestic politics; and Beauty, the life force, because she is wise.
She also has strong opinions about the design of the century she has lived through. She was born in 1906 and began work in about 1920, when she was an educated, prosperous, potter’s apprentice in her native Hungary. After firsthand experience of Europe’s upheavals that, for Zeisel, included solitary confinement in the Soviet Union and encounters with Nazis, she came with her family to New York just before World War II. She was welcomed with the offer to design a dinner set for the Museum of Modern Art, an affirmation for a designer if ever there was one.
In 2001, many of us have statements to make about modernism. But very few people (except Philip Johnson, who is Zeisel’s age), can speak with firsthand experience of most of the design movement’s decades.
In 1946, after the dinnerware commission, she was given an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. While she was setting it up, Greta Daniels, the curator of the show, told Zeisel of her idea for an exhibition on "the rise and decline of modernism."
In hindsight, Daniels was clearly early on to something half a century ago. However, rumors of modernism’s death have been greatly exaggerated. And interminable, too. While this eternally ending aesthetic may outlast all of us, "I was practically born when it was born," says Zeisel.
Photo by Matthew Hranek
"An exhibition of [Charles Rennie] Mackintosh was in Vienna in 1904 or 5, just before my birth. That had a large influence on early Hungarian furniture design. So my parents’ dining room was completely geometric. Our baby furniture was not only geometric, with round geometric rings on a square background, but was also made in unpainted fir, an influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. These were the first things I saw.
"I visited the Paris World Exhibition in 1925. It was a mixture of styles, most of them very sumptuous. However, it was the first showing of Le Corbusier’s furniture. It was awe-inspiring in its Puritan atmosphere.This I well remember."
At this point, Zeisel became, and remained, unenthused by the coolness of the modern aesthetic. She agreed with the negative opinion of critics at the time who said Le Corbusier’s work in the exhibition replaced sentimentalism with rationalism. "Simplicity is not a natural phenomenon. The shells of the sea, the leaves of the forest, the clouds of the sky, the wings of the butterfly, the palace of the spider—none would pass the test of modern simplicity," she protests.
In architecture and design circles the principles of the modern movement—"simplicity, truth in materials, geometric forms and lines, rejection of ornament"—have been dominant in the West since roughly the time they were displayed in Paris. We tend to think of Zeisel’s work as modernist, in a sense, when it employs clean lines, is monochrome, and is restrained. But for her part, Zeisel says, "The principles established in this century, which dictated what was good design and what was bad, stifled its inherently communicative nature. The modern movement tried to eliminate the communication between the maker and the people who looked at or used his things. To make things mute became an aspect of good design."
And she is not for the mute: She wants to delight the user of her products. She wants someone to find the bowl as beautiful as the strawberries it contains. It is as though she makes a gift for the user when she designs a piece for production.
Zeisel likes to tell a story that amuses her: Her daughter had been anxiously expecting delivery of a new printer, which had gone missing. Jean Zeisel got on the phone with the international delivery company and spoke with two regional directors, three office managers, and countless dispatchers. Computer systems were consulted, logs were perused. It turns out that the driver of the neighborhood delivery truck had thought the printer was too valuable to leave overnight and had taken it home to his apartment for safekeeping. His protective impulse had thwarted the entire organization, and Eva finds this absolutely hilarious and endearing.
So it’s not surprising to see that she abhors the idea of a home as a "machine for living." She has in fact embraced, if only to revile, Le Corbusier’s declaration that "we want objects to be our mute slaves rather than soulful friends. We want instruments. We exact from them punctuality, accuracy, and unobtrusive presence." Zeisel opts for soulful friends all the way.
And despite its popularity, when she saw modern work in Paris, even then, she chose not to emulate it. "I was always playful. I was far from taking my design seriously as any form of art at that time. But I thought then what I think now: that the designer must make soul contact with his client."
Images courtesy Ira Garber / Richard P. Goodbody / Montreal Museum of Fine Arts / Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts / Eva Zeisel
When it comes to things, this pleasing and connecting is done through what she calls the "magic language" of design. Its alphabet includes the shapes, contours, colors, sounds, and associations we have with objects. The lines of a vase might, especially in Zeisel’s hands, convey plumpness or silliness or elegance or grace or tenderness or wit.
And she may be Shakespeare—or perhaps Bach—in this language. In her Hallcraft/Century dinner service, two sensuous arcs rise to pull away from each other over a void; the whole set is a composition of echoing curves. Each element is a subtle form in itself, but they are infinitely recombinable. The shapes become like cyclical themes in a fugue, each more complex than the last through every new composition of bowl, plate, and cup.
What has been urgent for Zeisel are questions of purpose and meaning and intent in the making of objects, and she wants to know who is carrying this on. "Now, all over the world, museums are full of this good design. But it is not design itself, it is only what the modern movement said design was in this century! But what happens after that? If one museum says 2oth-century design, what does the next one say? What will the curators put in the next gallery? The modernists thought that they had finished design, but now something else must be made. What goes in the next room?"
Because she is 94, Zeisel does not feel any responsibility for answering that question. She has already filled rooms with her work, from MoMA to the British Museum. But she does advocate one value over all: "To me, beauty depends on one single person, on the person who looks at something and feels joy in looking at it because it pleases him without second thoughts, irrespective of whether it is useful, whether it is art, or whether it is in good taste. It is the love affair of the eyes with the things they focus on. As its enjoyment is immediate and spontaneous, it is quite impossible to put into words how to make beauty."
Zeisel, after all, has been at it for more than 75 years. We could say that she has fought the coldness of modernism in that time, but only if it is possible for giving pleasure to others to be a weapon, and for joy in that giving to be a strategy.
See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.
Related Reading:
From the Archive: Living in Le Corbusier’s Urban Utopia
From the Archive: Remembering Alexander Girard, the American Master of Colorful Modernism
