The January 2001, Metropolis featured profiles of nine designers who were still working at the age of 90 and beyond. Most prominent among them was Philip Johnson [95 at the time, he died in 2005], but also Julius Shulman, Morris Lapidus, Al Hirschfeld, Viktor Schreckengost, Pauline Trigere, and Eva Zeisel, who died last week at 105 — the last survivor of the group lionized at the time.
I interviewed Zeisel for a story in April 2005, when she was 98 [or thereabouts], pegged to her appearance at a sale of modernist design where she was honored by the Art Institute’s Architecture & Design society. [My FB friend Karen Mozer posted this picture that Richard Cahan took of herself, husband Jordan, and Zeisel around the time she was in town for the event.]
I cannot say my phoner with Zeisel was a great interview: I am probably not unlike most writers, with a history of “challenging” telephone interviews with people for whom English is a second language; adding that to the fact that even an extremely high-functioning 98 year old has difficulty speaking on the phone [as I recall, her daughter was on an extension, and had to repeat everything she said], it was tough to extract a lot of scintillating quotes.
Despite this, it was a good story — not because I’m such a crack reporter, but because her story was just so fantastic. She literally lived history. Born into a prominent intellectual family in Budapest, she experienced many of the political and social upheavals of the 20s, 30s and 40s firsthand; her arrival in America and productivity as a designer there was emblematic of an important emigration pattern in the history of art and design.
The thing about Zeisel is the ubiquity of her designs. I’ve always thought we had her Hallcraft Fantasy dinnerware in the house when I was a kid,
although my sister says we actually had a similarly designed knockoff [another of those instances in which a sibling completely deflates a childhood memory], but I am sure we had a set of “lo-ball” Prestige drinking glasses.
And I think almost everyone who got married from the 1970s on probably received a piece of Nambe metalware she designed.
Longevity aside, the familiarity of her designs pretty much ensures her immortality.
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