Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
The celebrated and influential ceramics designer Eva Zeisel died on December 30, aged 105.
Zeisel was considered to be one of the most important industrial designers of the 20th century, enjoying a career that extended over nine decades.
She is credited with creating modernist tableware and glassware styles that were acceptable to a mainstream American audience following the Second World War, and examples of her characteristically organic work are held in museums around the world.
Zeisel was born in Budapest but worked in the pottery industries in Germany and Russia before finally settling in the United States. She designed for companies including Rosenthal, Castleton China and Hall China, and the US homewares chain Crate and Barrel still sells a revised version of her Hallcraft dinnerware today.
In the UK, Zeisel’s ceramics can be seen in the British Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and examples can also be found in, amongst other places, The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Paola Antonelli, a curator of architecture and design at the museum, told the New York Times: “She brought form to the organicism and elegance and fluidity that we expect of ceramics today, reaching as many people as possible. It’s easy to do something stunning that stays in a collector’s cabinet. But her designs reached people at the table, where they gather.”
