The playful search for beauty

I love that...and what a life!!!! Indeed...

Eva Zeisel has made everyday objects sensual, laden with luscious curves. She's crafted mundane implements with a playful twist. Her astonishingly prolific career spans more than 75 years.

Eva..not just a designer...not just a woman...not just a philospher...oh...so much more than that.

Her story...as splendid as her work.

In 1936, however, she was caught up in one of the Stalinist purges, accused of plotting against the life of Stalin. She was imprisoned in the NKVD prison for 16 months, most of the time in solitary confinement. She was subjected to early forms of brainwashing, torture, and the constant possibility that each day would be her last. (Arthur Koestler, a lifelong friend, based his book Darkness at Noon on her prison experiences.)

Then one day she was unexpectedly led out of her cell to what she feared was to be her execution but was instead put on a train to Austria in the clothes she was standing in. Just as the reason for her imprisonment was never really known, so is the reason for her release. (More details of Zeisel's Russian experience at our Membership Benefits page.)

Once in Austria, she left on the last train out at the time of the Anschluss and went to England, where she married Hans Zeisel, who had waited seven years for her. In 1938 they went to New York where they settled permanently.

There is more there...but I rather think it is what she suffered in this life that made her romance with life so extraordinary. How do you judge a lifetime of art...and search? You do so by celebrating it.

To Eva, my Hungarian relatives surely must be proud of the woman whose life was a playful search for beauty.


Love,
The Lass