Pat Moore - Eva Zeisel: Life, Design, and Beauty

Edited by Pat Kirkham
Executive Direction by Pat Moore
Concept and Design Direction by Pirco Wolfframm

Photographs by Brent Brolin

Copyright 2013 by Pat Kirkham, Pat Moore, and Pirco Wolfframm.

Photography copyright 2013 by Brent Brolin.

All texts copyright the individual essayists.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2959-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available under ISBN: 978-1-4521-0852-0.

EDITOR : Pat Kirkham

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR : Pat Moore

CONCEPT AND DESIGN DIRECTION : Pirco Wolfframm

TAXONOMY ILLUSTRATIONS : Camila Burbano and Pirco Wolfframm

PHOTOGRAPHY : Brent Brolin

ASSISTANT PROJECT MANAGER : Barbara Weber

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, CA 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

I have always made my designs as gifts to others and I invite you to enjoy them in this lovely book.

I know that all those who contributed to this book did so with love and with incredibly hard work, and I accept their generosity gratefully.

Eva Zeisel, June 2011, Rockland County

I met Eva Zeisel through her dishes. Her Tomorrows Classic dishes in the Bouquet pattern were our familys Sunday-best dinnerware during most of my growing-up years, and I was given the set when my parents retired. Years later, when I was searching for missing pieces, I checked directory assistance and called Evas number. I heard a soft voice say, This is Eva Zeisel. It took me a second to respondI had learned enough about her by then to be in awe of herbut I introduced myself and began asking about her designs. I soon realized, however, that she was interviewing me. It was so typical of Eva, whose curiosity about the world extended to everyone and everything with which she came in contact. She asked what I did, and when I said I was retired, she asked my age (sixty-eight). You cant retire; youre just a baby, she replied. I laughed, but soon realized she was serious: one continues to work at what one loves. My new love became collecting all of Evas designs, and when someone remarked that it was a shame there was no collectors club for Evas designs, my husband, Gene Grobman, and I started one (in 1998, now the Eva Zeisel forum, EZf). Thus began an expanding circle of friends-with-a-common-interest: Eva.

I met both Eva and Pirco Wolfframm, the first member of the club, at an exhibition about Evas work in 1999, and we agreed that I would prepare, and she would design, a catalogue of Evas work. We published the Eva Zeisel Times newsletter, each issue focused on a different design line, but stopped when we realized it would take more than newsletters to cover Evas more than ten thousand designs and more than one person to write it. Members of the EZf joined the effort, and the distinguished design historian Pat Kirkham agreed to come aboard to write an overview of Evas life and work. The project went beyond a catalogue to become a fully rounded story of Evas life and accomplishments. We hope it adds to your life, as Eva has added to ours.

PAT MOORE

My first encounter with Eva was through soul contact, as she called itinstant, unabashed love for a pair of salt and pepper shakers at a thrift store on my third day in the United States in 1996. Like many, I hesitated to approach this famous lady only to be disarmed by her kindness the minute we met. I was pierced by her curiosity and hardly was able to satisfy mine. I came to take her remarkably soft, outreaching hands for granted, almost forgetting that the wonder of a long, whimsical life would still eventually be finite.

Our initial bond evolved from my interest in her design, our mutual interests in history, culture, and even mundane aspects of life, and from her keen interest in anybody who brought stories, music, good food, or who would read to her in the five languages she spoke. When equipped with a faculty development grant from Pratt Institute to pursue a small publication, I thoroughly frustrated her with questions rooted in the academic world of cultural criticism that she had little interest in. She turned my quest for her wisdom into an opportunity to tell me what was on her mind, such as her memories from childhood to her arrival in the U.S. Our friendship evolved into an exchange of storieshers versus mine or the latest interesting news. Though we never discussed design through the academic lens again, I was able to get my answers.

When watching her sketch and seeing her ideas unfold into piles of paper cutouts, models, and prototypes, and watching her touch them repeatedly to confirm or refine them, I understood that what she was doing was not about ideology or heavily theorized design; this process of form giving was indeed her playful search for beauty, her way of being alive, her love of making things, and her desire to give. It is with my various experiences in mind of Eva as a designer and as a friend that I have tried to find an appropriate visual voice to reflect the rich, enriching, and idiosyncratic continuum she lived.

PIRCO WOLFFRAMM

I am delighted to be part of this project. In the past, I had turned down offers to write a book about Eva, largely because I did not want anything to interfere with my relationship with her. By the time I joined this project, however, she was nearly 103 years old and I had to face the fact that she might not be with us much longer. To write an overview of her life and work, and edit the book, seemed the least I could do for someone whose designs have given pleasure to so many for so long. It offered me a way of thanking Eva for many things, including her salon evenings, talking with my students about her work, and the warmth and affection shown to me, my husband (whom Eva adored and who adored her), and the guests we took along to her apartment and home in the country. It was also an opportunity to think and write about Eva at greater length and to try to articulate some of the many thoughts that had crossed my mind over more than a decade of discussions with her, and others, about her life and work.

I was intrigued by the fact that the project was collector-led, in the sense that Pat Moore, the co-founder of the Eva Zeisel forum, and many of those writing about the individual commissions, are avid collectors of Evas work. It seemed a marvelous opportunity to transcend barriers between collectors and academics; between amateur and professional historians; between what some might consider old-fashioned connoisseurship, on the one hand, and design history and material culture studies, on the other. So often in the histories of objects, collectors and dealers have kick-started scholarship.

I met Eva in 1998 through the delightful Ron Labaco, who worked as Evas assistant while writing his MA thesis on her work under my supervision. Eva agreed to be featured in an exhibition I was organizing on women designers working in the U.S. in the twentieth century and I came to know her well. I hope that something of the flavor of how she was as a person comes over in my writing about her.

PAT KIRKHAM

Life

Jeannie, now that you are old enough I thought you might want to start to figure out how to live right, but how can you if you dont know precisely where and when life is? So I made this poem for your birthday.

Its Life you are living

and life is here.

Its not sometime later,