The Eccentric Teapot: Four Hundred Years of Invention by Garth Clark, Constance Herndon (Editor), Julie Rauer (Designed by)

From the Publisher

The perfect gift for tea drinkers, this delighful book introduces us to some of the most sublime, outrageous, and exotic teapots to grace a Mad Hatter's table.

Short and stout is the very least of it. Since the advent of tea drinking in China four thousand years ago, the form of the teapot has inspired endlessly imaginative variations--humble, elegant, quirky, and abstract. The investigation of the teapot as an art form in its own right has reached an inventive peak in the last two decades, but a fascination with the ceremony of tea drinking and the objects designed for that ceremony has flourished in both the East and West.

This beautiful and delightful book introduces us to some of the most sublime, outrageous, and exotic teapots ever to grace a Mad Hatter's table. The designers of these idiosyncratic vessels have fully explored the ceremonial significance, spiritual associations, and formal complexities of teapots and tea drinking, and have given the results a distinctly eccentric spin. Both comfortably familar and utterly peculiar, this provocative gallery includes portrait teapots of Oscar Wilde, Ronald Reagan, and Queen Elizabeth; teapots impersonating animals, vegetables, and the Three Mile Island cooling towers; and teapots so far removed from the concerns of function that they resemble nothing as much as drawings of teapots.

This book's charming and intelligent text also covers the history of tea and tea drinking, as well as that of the teapot itself. Noted writer, critic, and author of American Ceramics, Garth Clark analyzes the fascinating connection between ritual, cusine, and design that finds its nexus in these wonderfully singular teapots.

OtherDetails: 130 illustrations, 100 in full color 120 pages 10 x 10" Published 1989

Booknews

Teapots selected for this book include both the delightful and unexpected and are a mixture of rare antiques, one-of-a-kind works by artists, and mass-produced industrial objects. Contemporary works tend to be featured. Perusing the book is a little like going to a surrealist tea party. Color photos are very nice. A fun book. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

There is no domestic icon more potent or evocative than the teapot. Its steaming spout fills the air with a reassuring fragrance, promising us that, after a cup or two of its ambrosia, calm will be restored. We reach for the teapot when we want to reward ourselves for a moment of achievement or to take a respite from the day's labors. But we also turn to the teapot at bleaker moments. With its cocky anthropomorphic stance and potbellied gravity, the teapot is the tangible symbol of a life-affirming ritual.

Just as the ceremony of drinking tea is much more than the sum of its parts, so too has the form of the teapot become, in the hands of artists and designers, more than just a receptacle for tea leaves and water. Over the course of centuries the teapot has evolved into a container of unusual ideas, a familiar format for expressing the unfamiliar. Teapots have been created in the shape of birds, fish, cabbages, kings, crowns, camels, and cars. Often it is the tension between these wildly improbable forms and the traditional function of the teapot that inspires the humor, irony, and strange genius of the truly peculiar teapot.

It is to this eccentric edge that this book is dedicated, and to the ability of men and women to transform the everyday into something both delightful and unexpected. Our survey explores a full range of aesthetic and intellectual perspectives, from whimsical visual one-liners to heartfelt political satire, from abstraction to representation. Although some of these teapots do manage to combine an eccentric sensibility with a classic beauty, most have not been created with "good taste" in mind and some do not even serve their function well. Butwhile many are works of art and others are merely clever novelties, all of these teapots share an identity as spouted mavericks far removed from a world of ordered utility. This is no paean to the ordinary teapot; indeed the preponderance of objects illustrated here would be more at home in the mayhem of the Mad Hatter's tea party than at a stately afternoon tea in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Their eccentricity celebrates individuality at its most expressive edge, at the point where conventions are overturned and pure originality blossoms.

The teapots selected for this book are a mixture of rare antiques, one-of-a-kind works by artists, and mass-produced industrial objects. Some can still be bought today for very little in a novelty store while others can only be acquired from the finest antique or art dealers. But aristocrat and commoner mix on these pages with egalitarian ease, and the friendly dialogue that arises between them may transform our ideas of what popular and high culture look like. Although the essays presented here discuss the history of tea ceremonies, teapot design, and tea itself, the gallery of images constitutes a visual history only in the most informal sense. While our teapots are drawn from a period of over four hundred years, contemporary works tend to be featured. Nor are the pots organized chronologically, for such a structure would, in a sense, offend the informal and seditious spirit of the objects themselves. Rather, my selections are personal ones, a group of favorite oddities that, during years of research in the ceramic arts, have struck and held my attention. Assembling them between these covers for a surrealist tea party has been an uncomplicated pleasure that I trust will be shared in the same spirit by the reader.