Eva Zeisel | Ceramic artist, 105

Eva Zeisel, 105, a ceramic artist whose elegant, eccentric designs for dinnerware in the 1940s and '50s helped revolutionize the way Americans set their tables, died Friday in New City, N.Y.

Ms. Zeisel, along with designers such as Mary and Russel Wright and Charles and Ray Eames, brought the clean, casual shapes of modernist design into middle-class American homes with furnishings that encouraged a postwar desire for fresh, less-formal styles of living.

"Museum," the porcelain table service that brought Ms. Zeisel national notice, was commissioned by its manufacturer, Castleton China, in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which introduced it in an exhibition in 1946, its first show devoted to a female designer.

Ms. Zeisel's work, which ultimately spanned nine decades, was at the heart of what the museum promoted as "good design": domestic objects that were beautiful as well as useful and whose beauty lent pleasure to daily life.

Born Eva Amalia Striker in Budapest on Nov. 13, 1906, she was the daughter of Laura Polanyi Striker and Alexander Striker. Her father owned a textile factory. Her mother was a historian, feminist, and political activist.

In 1923, Ms. Zeisel entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest to study painting. She withdrew three semesters later, inspired by an aunt's Hungarian peasant pottery collection to become a ceramist. She served an apprenticeship with Jakob Karapancsik, a member of the guild of chimney sweepers, oven makers, roof tilers, well diggers, and potters, and graduated as a journeyman.

During a summer trip to Paris in 1925, she visited the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes - the source of the term art deco - which exhibited work by such leading new designers as Le Corbusier and which introduced Zeisel to modern movements including Bauhaus and International style.

In 1928, a ceramics manufacturer in Schramberg, Germany, hired her to design tableware. The job transformed her from a studio artist who threw pots on a wheel into an industrial designer.

Ms. Zeisel moved to Berlin in 1930, immersing herself in the vibrant cafe society of the Weimar Republic. A visit to Ukraine in 1932 opened her eyes to a new realm of possibilities as a designer.

Taking a post at the former imperial porcelain factory in Leningrad, she realized through exposure to its archives of 18th-century tableware that "the clean lines of modern design could be successfully combined with sensuous, classic shapes," as she later wrote.

By 1935, she was working in Moscow as artistic director of the Russian republic's china and glass industry. On May 28, 1936, she was arrested, falsely accused by a colleague of conspiring to assassinate Stalin. She was imprisoned for 16 months, mostly in solitary confinement, an experience that Arthur Koestler, a childhood friend, drew upon in writing his celebrated 1941 novel, Darkness at Noon.

In 1937, Ms. Zeisel was released without explanation, and she went to Vienna. She left the next year when the Nazis entered Austria. Arriving in Britain, she was reunited with Hans Zeisel, a lawyer and sociologist whom she had met in Berlin. They were married and emigrated to the United States later that year. - N.Y. Times News Service