'Eva Zeisel: The Playful Search For Beauty'

Located on the estate of heiress and collector Marjorie Merriweather Post, the Hillwood Museum boasts the largest collection of Russian imperial art outside of Russia, as well as French decorative arts. Mrs Post's "Intourist" tea service, designed by Zeisel during her crucial years in the Soviet Union, is a fascinating feature of the exhibition. The show is displayed in Hillwood's replica of a Russian dacha.

Featured are Zeisel's well-known swooping ceramic bowls and platters, as well as metal, resin and wood objects. They reflect the designer's longtime interest in turning everyday objects into functional works of art by means of designs emphasizing sinuous lines and sensuous, rounded forms. The objects document Zeisel's career-long commitment to making "beautiful objects available to everyone."

They should "feel as good as they look," the industrial designer says. Adds Hillwood executive director Frederick J. Fisher, "The extraordinary popularity of Zeisel's creations for the modern home can be traced to her embrace of ornament. Instead of severe functionalism, Zeisel's work features abundant, curving, natural shapes that are playful, yet familiar."

Eva Zeisel, still actively working in New York, has had a long and fascinating life that began way back in 1906. Born Eva Amalia Striker into a prominent Budapest family, she took up painting as a teenager and was tutored in avant-garde art. After studying for a time at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, she left to become an apprentice to a potter and began to create her own works.

Moving to Germany in 1928, she created imaginative post-Cubist, geometric designs for ceramics that were highly successful. Zeisel "began to recognize," Kettering writes in the exhibition catalog, "the importance of the sculptural qualities of her work; particularly the rhythms established when pieces are grouped." A 1929 photograph shows Zeisel as an exceedingly attractive young woman with a real sense of clothing fashion design as well.

In 1932, intrigued by the possibilities of what appeared to be a progressive culture, she moved to the Soviet Union. Working at the Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory in Leningrad, she successfully took on the challenge of creating designs for mass-produced porcelain that met state-mandated standards of social realism. An intriguing example in the exhibition is the 1933 "Intourist" tea service featuring hand painted views of Lenin and Leningrad on astutely shaped pieces that could be inexpensively produced, easily packed and shipped - and were aesthetically pleasing.

For Dulevo, the largest Soviet ceramics factory, Zeisel designed numerous objects for mass marketing to both private homes and communal places. Given a freer hand, "the abstract ornament on her designs differs radically from the complex landscapes or figural painting shown in her 'Intourist' service," Kettering observes.

In 1936, out of the blue, Zeisel was arrested and charged with conspiring to assassinate Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Refusing to sign a phony confession, she was imprisoned for 16 months, most of them in solitary confinement, before being released and expelled from the country.

Her recovery in Vienna was aided by her friend Hans Zeisel, a sociologist whom she married in 1938. Later that year, after Germany invaded Austria, the Zeisels emigrated to the United States, settling in New York. Two children were born in the early 1940s.

In this country, Zeisel has been remarkably productive, creating the work for which she is best known - softly curving ceramics that combine Surrealist touches with clean modernist designs. Both her early and her latest designs are displayed in the exhibition, many for the first time in public.

As Kettering writes, Zeisel "chose to interpret her survival of Stalin's terror as a reprieve to which her response, at least in part, was aesthetic....[Her] will to work and design seem to have been strengthened by the trauma of imprisonment, dictatorship and war."

Hired by Pratt Institute to organize and teach the first course on ceramic design for mass production in this country, Zeisel and her students collaborated on a "Stratoware" line of kitchen and tablewares for Sears, Roe-buck and Co. These glazed earthenware casserole dishes and other durable, easily stackable pieces were adapted to modern patterns of eating and thus appealed to increasingly busy American housewives.

Drawing on her study of Emily Post's etiquette manual and her increasing knowledge of the desires of American consumers, in the early 1940s Zeisel teamed with Castleton China to design an all-white porcelain dinner service that accented elegant, modern lines. Shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946 - its first solo exhibition by a woman - her Castleton "museum" pieces established Ziesel's American reputation.

In 1952, Hall China Company released Zeisel's "Tomorrow's Classic" line, mass-marketed tablewares with un-usual oval, squared and teardrop shapes. Standouts among these intriguing glazed earthenware pieces are a sensuously curved "Sauceboat" that could double as a vase, and evocatively rounded sugar bowls and creamers.

"'Tomorrow's Classic,'" says Kettering "became one of the most popular designs of the Twentieth Century. It was inexpensive - only $8.95 for a [16-piece] starter set in white - and the refreshing design...pleased...[a wide variety of] buyers."

For her highly popular "Town and Country" line of earthenware serving pieces, manufactured by Red Wing Pottery, Zeisel created the first asymmetrical tableware in this country. Her softened, biomorphic designs lent themselves to sculptural groups that fitted the warmth and intimacy of ideal family life. Among the most endearing pieces are salt and pepper shakers that Kettering suggests "recall a mother embracing her child."

This sense of familial relationships was carried into several other Zeisel designs in the 1950s, notably for Western Stoneware Company. A gathering of charming, bird-shaped pieces suggested interactions among a happy family group.

After a hiatus to conduct historical research and write about her memories, Zeisel returned to design work with renewed zest in 1983 at the age of 77. In addition to tableware, she ventured into designs for ceramic garden dividers, fountains, furniture, lamps and toys.

In the mid-1990s, for the firm Nambe, she created designs for objects made of a special aluminum-based alloy, including bowls, platters and vases, based on pieces from her 1952 "Tomorrow's Classic" line. The handles on her Nambe bowls and serving bowls convey a special grace when shown together.

The most spectacular objects in the show are prototypes for multicolored glazed porcelain modular wall dividers or wall ornaments, with softened forms suggesting indented belly buttons. They were produced by the Italian firm Manifattura Mancioli in 1958. Thirty years later, an all-white, terracotta modular screen was installed in the lobby of the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles.

In collaboration with Brooklyn-based KleinReid, starting in 1999, Zeisel created a series of upright and pillow porcelain vases that were designed not only for practical use but, when garnished with flowers, to form sculptural compositions. These pieces, observes Kettering, "took her notion of 'families' of objects for the domestic interior a step further." Similarly, blue mouth-blown crystal vases, designed for KleinReid, can be combined into familial, sculptural units.

In the 1990s, as part of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform program, the Soviet government's old, trumped-up charges against Zeisel were overturned and she was declared legally rehabilitated. That cleared the way for her to return to Russia in 2000 to work with model makers at the newly privatized Lomonosov Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) on the prototype of a table service made of a fine, translucent bone china. The delicate quality of the bone china permitted Zeisel to create forms that are at once joyful and transparent. Hillwood is the first museum to acquire and exhibit the new limited-edition service in full.

According to Kettering, in her late 90s, "Zeisel continues to design at a whirlwind pace, always seeking out new projects and new challenges....[A]lthough she was witness to some of the Twentieth Century's greatest horrors," she adheres to her philosophy that designs can convey joy, playfulness and happiness.

Little wonder that Eva Zeisel's sensuous, curving and comforting forms have earned her the lofty Cooper-Hewitt award for "profound and long-term contribution to design," and that her work continues to attract new legions of admirers.

The exhibition is accompanied by a brief, 29-page, illustrated catalog, written by Kettering, that is informative and insightful. In conjunction with the show, Hillwood's Museum Shop is carrying Zeisel-designed objects and wares manufactured by Geo Art, KleinReid, Marinha Grande Glass and Nambe. Crate & Barrel stores also feature a new line of Zeisel dinnerware, reissued as "Century Classic," using molds from the 1950s.

Hillwood Museum & Gardens is at 4155 Linnean Avenue, NW. Reservations are required; call 877-HILLWOOD or visit www.hillwoodmuseum.org.