REDMOND, WA.- John Atzbach Antiques announces the sale of works by the renowned Hungarian-American designer Eva Zeisel (1906-2011) from the collection of Pat Moore and Dr. Gene Grobman (1929-2016) to be held on Thursday, October 12, 2017. Born into a family of Budapest intellectuals and entrepreneurs, Eva Stricker Zeisel was a prolific designer, historian, and educator who continued to work past her 100th birthday. During her eighty-five year career, she created works that came to exemplify organic abstraction in modern design. Responding to what she viewed as the coldness of modernism, Zeisel’s “friendly forms”—often nesting ensembles of related forms suggesting the familiarity and comfort of familial relationships—were produced by manufacturers around the world. Formed over 25 years, the Moore-Grobman Collection is the largest group of works by Zeisel in private hands, with the exception of the artist’s archive held by the family.

Moore and Grobman collected with the eyes of scholar-curators, seeking to create an index collection with at least one example of each of the shapes Zeisel designed for the retail market. Beginning with research on a family table service Moore had inherited, Pat and Gene soon formed a loving relationship with Eva and her family, later traveling across Europe and America, where they interviewed ceramics factory workers, local historians, and some of Zeisel’s earliest collectors, in a hunt to map out the designer’s career. Their efforts led to the formation of the Eva Zeisel Collectors Club (now the Eva Zeisel Forum www.evazeisel.org) in 1999 and culminated in writing, editing, and the publication of a multiauthor study of Zeisel’s career, Eva Zeisel: Life, Design, and Beauty (Chronicle Books, 2013), now the definitive account of the designer’s works. Moore has said: “[Zeisel] left an important legacy. Her output was so prolific and her designs so ubiquitous, that many people own pieces by Zeisel without even knowing it. I have often startled hosts by offering to buy their dinnerware or glassware.”

The sale of 400 lots of objects made between 1929 and 2013 comprises a large number of outstanding rarities including:

• Tea and coffee services, serving pieces, vases, and vanity table items designed by Zeisel for the Schramberg Majolika Factory (Germany, 1929-1930)

• Unique rocking tablewares in fine porcelain with experimental glazes designed for Riverside Ceramics (California, 1947)

• Rare biomorphic plexiglass vessels modeled by air pressure for the Clover Box and Manufacturing Company (New York, 1946-1947)

• A unique group of test pieces for a line of stoneware with forms inspired by birds at produced at Monmouth Pottery (Illinois, 1953-1954)

• Ceramic vessels and objects in the bright, iridescent eosin glazes of the Zsolnay Porcelánmanufaktúra (Pécs, Hungary, 1999), produced for the Orange Chicken Gallery

• A rare bone china tea service from the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory (St. Petersburg, Russia, 2002).

• Ephemera related to the production and sale of the Zeisel designs Moore and Grobman collected as part of their study of Zeisel’s career

John Atzbach, company president, said, “We are delighted to host this wide-ranging sale of works carefully assembled from every phase of Zeisel’s career. Hers was a key voice in modern design and the Moore-Grobman collection features the very best of her work together with rarely-encountered works that illuminate largely unknown parts of her creative legacy.”

Eva Zeisel began her artistic studies in the painting workshops of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, but left to train as a craft potter before finding work as a designer for a number of German ceramics factories. A brief trip to visit friends in the young Soviet state led to jobs in the Soviet porcelain manufactories before she was swept in the anti-spy hysteria of the Stalin era and wrongly arrested for “participating in an attempt to assassinate Joseph Stalin.” She endured 16 months of imprisonment and interrogation, but refused to sign a false confession and, unlike her fellow alleged conspirators, survived and was released. She returned to family in Austria, leaving Vienna just ahead of the German invasion to settle first in London and then in New York in 1938. Over the following decades, she created designs for ceramics, textiles, wood, plastic, and metal to be used in every aspect of daily life. She was selected by curators at the Museum of Modern to design the first all-white American porcelain dinnerware (the Museum Service produced by Castleton China), exhibited in 1946 in the first one-person exhibition by a woman at the museum. Examples of her work are held by MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, Bröhan-Museum (Germany), Museum Kurhaus Kleve (Germany), the Lomonosov Porcelain Museum, part of the Hermitage (Russia), and many other public and private collections.