PROLIFIC.(The Talk of the Town)

Eva Zeisel, the ceramicist and industrial designer, doesn't like to call herself an artist, even though it has been sixty years since the Museum of Modern Art gave her a solo exhibition--a first for a creator of mass-produced housewares. "I am a maker of useful things," she said the other day in her apartment, near Columbia. "Art has more ego to it than what I do." But if it's modesty that makes her wary of enshrinement it's also a pioneer's intolerance for being confined.

Born into a Jewish Hungarian family of freethinking patricians, the teen-age Eva was happiest in the wild garden of her parents' villa. She left its sanctuary eighty years ago and apprenticed herself to a potter and oven-maker in Budapest. For the next decade, she camped cheerfully in a series of makeshift lodgings near the various factories in Germany and Russia where she learned her trade. The months in Jazz Age Paris that Zeisel spent with her childhood friend and sometime lover Arthur Koestler, and an interlude in Weimar Berlin, living near the Romanisches Cafe, were the idylls in a youth of hard travel, ephemeral romance, and the gritty labor of creating beauty.

By her mid-twenties, Zeisel had mastered every phase of manufacture, from drafting to product promotion. She moved to the Soviet Union in 1932, and by 1935 she had become the artistic director of Russia's china and glass industry. Her mother was visiting her in Moscow a year later, when the secret police knocked at their door. Zeisel was imprisoned for the next sixteen months, mostly in solitary confinement, on the charge of plotting Stalin's assassination. She resisted her interrogators until the day that, as she put it in her memoirs, she betrayed her dignity with a false confession. (Koestler drew heavily upon her accounts of this ordeal for "Darkness at Noon.") But the authorities, rather than shoot her, as they had done to most of her alleged co-conspirators, deported her to Vienna, where she somehow caught the last train out before the Nazi invasion.

Last month, Zeisel celebrated her hundredth birthday. "Still ...