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Designer: Eva Zeisel
The Story: These midcentury gems are a rare moment of kitch from designer Eva Zeisel. Made for whiskey sipping, the shape is uniquely hers combined with the red “Low-Ball” type face for peak high/low design. Made originally for the Federal Glass company in 1950, they are in the permanent collection the International Museum of Dinnerware Design.
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Eva Zeisel was one of the most celebrated ceramic designers of the 20th century, whose career spanned an extraordinary eight decades and touched nearly every major chapter of modern design history.
Born Eva Amalia Striker in Budapest in 1906, she trained as a potter in Hungary before embarking on an adventurous and often dangerous life across Europe. In the 1930s she moved to the Soviet Union to work in state ceramic factories, believing in the promise of socialist modernism. Her time there ended catastrophically when she was arrested by Stalin's secret police in 1936 on fabricated charges, spending sixteen months in solitary confinement before being released and eventually making her way to the United States in 1938.
In America her career flourished. Her Museum White dinnerware collection, designed for Castleton China in 1942 and exhibited at MoMA in 1946, made her the first designer to receive a solo show at the museum. Her work was characterized by organic, softly curved forms she described as a conversation between mother and child shapes — pieces that felt warm and human rather than coldly industrial.
She continued designing well into her hundreds, completing projects in her late nineties. Zeisel died in 2011 at the age of 105, leaving behind a legacy of joyful, humanist design.
Designer: Eva Zeisel
The Story: These midcentury gems are a rare moment of kitch from designer Eva Zeisel. Made for whiskey sipping, the shape is uniquely hers combined with the red “Low-Ball” type face for peak high/low design. Made originally for the Federal Glass company in 1950, they are in the permanent collection the International Museum of Dinnerware Design.
….
Eva Zeisel was one of the most celebrated ceramic designers of the 20th century, whose career spanned an extraordinary eight decades and touched nearly every major chapter of modern design history.
Born Eva Amalia Striker in Budapest in 1906, she trained as a potter in Hungary before embarking on an adventurous and often dangerous life across Europe. In the 1930s she moved to the Soviet Union to work in state ceramic factories, believing in the promise of socialist modernism. Her time there ended catastrophically when she was arrested by Stalin's secret police in 1936 on fabricated charges, spending sixteen months in solitary confinement before being released and eventually making her way to the United States in 1938.
In America her career flourished. Her Museum White dinnerware collection, designed for Castleton China in 1942 and exhibited at MoMA in 1946, made her the first designer to receive a solo show at the museum. Her work was characterized by organic, softly curved forms she described as a conversation between mother and child shapes — pieces that felt warm and human rather than coldly industrial.
She continued designing well into her hundreds, completing projects in her late nineties. Zeisel died in 2011 at the age of 105, leaving behind a legacy of joyful, humanist design.