The twentieth century s leading designer of pottery and ceramics reveals stunning insights on creativity and artistic passion lavishly illustrated with over 150 full-color photographs.

With a trailblazing career that spans more than seventy-five years and continues to this day, with recent creations that include a Martini glass featured in Bombay Sapphire ads and vases for Klein-Reid, Eva Zeisel stands at the forefront of twentieth-century designers. Her works are a reflection of a profoundly independent vision, unconstrained by design conventions, fads, or ideologies, and are featured in the permanent collections of museums throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Her belly-button wall dividers are part of the modern d cor in the lobby of Los Angeles s Standard Hotel.

In this lavishly illustrated, full-color book, the designer for the first time communicates the ideas that have guided and inspired her work throughout her career. Each aspect of the design process is analyzed variety, spontaneity, line, contour, shading, and texture, among others to see how the best works are the result of a dialogue between creator and object whose result is an environment that is pleasurable, comfortable, and elegant. The language in which this dialogue is conducted, the language of things, is one in which Zeisel s fluency is unparalleled, and her thoughts, read alongside the photos of her stunning creations and those that have inspired her, make this book indispensable to every enthusiast of art, ceramics, and design.

She is absolutely one of the greats of twentieth-century design. . . . Her work is about the emotional effect objects have on us. It is the most essential and meaningful activity. Christopher Wilk, Chief Curator, Department of Furniture & Woodwork, at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Born in Budapest in l906, Eva Zeisel emigrated to the United States in 1938, after having designed glass and pottery for factories in Berlin, Hamburg, and Russia, where she was art director of the china and glass industry. Among her many awards and honors, she has received a senior award from the National Endowments for the Arts, and was the subject of a touring exhibition sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs de Montreal. She lives in New York City.