American Craft Magazine, April/May, 1994

"What would the world do without tea?" the English essayist Sydney Smith wrote in the early 1800s. The same question might well apply to the teapot, for 500 years an object of fascination, a symbol of ritual and refinement, gentility and warmth.

Now more than ever, this curious composite of belly, handle, lid and spout is thriving as art medium and collectible, with an explosion of gallery exhibitions devoted to it. The San Francisco art dealer Dorothy Weiss, for one, featured a dozen artists in her first teapot invitational a few years ago. The show has since doubled in size, and Weiss has sensed the emergence of an increasing number of collectors whose focus is the teapot. The annual "Tea Party" at the Ferrin Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts, has grown from a handful of makers in 1979 to around 100 today. According to owner Leslie Ferrin, who has three teapot shows scheduled this year, "eighty percent of my time with collectors is spent on teapots." For many other galleries as well, the teapot show has become a perennial client favorite.

What is it about the teapot that we find so alluring? "The essence varies from person to person. Some have an interest in the culture of tea, and the teapot is an icon for that. Or they fall in love with the vitality and jauntiness of the form," says ceramics gallery owner Garth Clark, author of The Eccentric Teapot and a collector himself. "Visually, it's very arresting and interesting. And it's lively - it moves. It also allows for all kinds of games with anthropomorphism - legs, arms, sexual organs. Beautifully resolved, it can be the most expressive object a potter can make.

There's a teapot to suit every taste and pocketbook - commercially produce novelties for a few dollars, handmade wares for hundreds, works by established ceramic artists for thousands, and historical treasures for up to six figures. Some collectors concentrate on the Western tea tradition, others on the East. Some favor a genre (Chinese Yixing teapots, for example, have their own following). Some collect the accoutrements of tea - bowls, cups, infusers.

"People are attracted to teapots because you can collect all elephant ones, all figurative ones, all pottery ones, all women artists. And you don't necessarily have to spend allot of money. They're relatively approachable and affordable," says the Los Angeles businessman Sonny Kamm, and art collector and former dealer in contemporary glass who, with his wife Gloria, as amassed over 800 teapots dating "from 1700 to yesterday." For Kamm, who doesn't even like tea much, teapot collecting is pure enjoyment, done with discernment, but "lightly". He scours flea markets as well as galleries, appreciates cheap kitsch as much as Meissen: "We never buy anything just to 'ooh' and 'ahh' over." Their eclectic approach encompasses everything from object by the cream of artists working with the form to a Miss Piggy Teapot Kamm keeps in his office ("a lowlight," he says fondly), from Fiesta ware to fanciful pieces that are "beyond silly - lions, rabbits, dancing monkeys."

For those whose interest is contemporary craft, the teapot offers a way to collect broadly in the field, with extraordinary variety, and still have what Dorothy Weiss calls "a body of work that's coherent." Sanford and Diane Besser of Little Rock, Arkansas, have teapots by more than 200 American and British ceramists, the earliest from around 1970 by Robert Brady, the "most interesting" a vision of the Mad Hatter's tea party by Michael Frimkess, featuring Freud and other offbeat guests. The couple had already been collecting ceramics for some years when they bought their first teapot, by Chris Staley, in 1984. "I assumed most, if not all, ceramic artists had done one or more," Sanford Besser recalls. "I became fascinated by the idea of how an individual takes the constants of handle, spout, lid and body and treats them."

It was the "tremendous breadth of ways to interpret it" that appealed to Donna and bill Nussbaum of St. Louis, who's 200-plus collection ranges from the classic functional work of Jeff Oestreich to representational teapots like a 1950s-syle diner by Jerry Berta and a family of woodpeckers by Annett Corcoran, to one of chicken wire by Leopold Foulem. "They can be fun, or serious, or both. The best are seriously fun," says Bill Nussbaum. Leslie Ferrin thinks "collectors very much capture contemporary American craft in this form" because it defies easy categorization: "A teapots stands there making this point about itself. It could be this, it could be that. It's East versus West, function versus nonfunction, art versus craft."

Peter Shire, the Los Angeles ceramist and sculptor, once called the teapot the "Holy Grail of pottery" (lately he's been making them in steel). "The teapot is the epitome of a potter's problem, materially, physically and aesthetically," says Tome Turner of Delaware, Ohio, a studio potter for 32 years. For Turner, who described himself as "kind of from the old school," the goal is a teapot that is "one hundred percent functional," meaning more than just drip-free. "To me, the greatest function is visual appreciation." His best customers, he says, are those who have maybe had a ceramics class, who will pick up a pot, lift the lid, notice the tight fit. "I make very quite pots. You really have to be looking."

The difference between the "potters' potters" and those whose intentions are more sculptural sets up "a healthy dialogue," thinks Dan Anderson of Edwardsville, Illinois, one of many who fall somewhere in the middle (his architectural teapots are exhibited in galleries but "do pour magnificently," he notes proudly). "We potters always say it really isn't finished until it's used. But when it sells for four figures, people don't want to use it." Anderson has been acquiring teapots for the three decades that he's been making them. "There are so many opportunities for it to become the individual that makes it," he says. "Everybody in my collection I know, and most are my fiends. I really see them in the teapots in a way that I wouldn't in, say, a cup. And after all, isn't that what we're doing it for? As an extension of heart, mind and spirit?"

"For potters, the teapot is the point-counterpoint of everything we make. It provides that ultimate challenge, to really make it work and have a voice," says Michael Sherrill of Hendersonville, North Carolina, who has used it for "explorations of space, light and color" for 15 years. "My teapots are in no way functional. I'm not interested in whether it pours or not, but does it work visually?" An admirer of the Shaker aesthetic, he tries to bring the teapot form to its essence. "For me, it's not How much junk can I put on it? but What does it need? It's a process of reduction." He likes its ability to invoke life's daily rhythms. "Everyone has archetypal associations with the the teapot. It doesn't push the viewer away saying, 'This is the holy of holies.' A lot of what we do in the art world does that."

Such seductiveness leaves plenty of room for mischief. The teapot has long been a vehicle for humor, satire and improbable content, a tradition carried on today by ceramists such as Adrian Saxe of Los Angeles, whose interpretations have included a demure 19th century maiden with a huge phallic spout protruding from her petticoats. "The need to categorize and identify is very strong in our culture," says Saxe, who, "rather than fit it," tries to "play with people's expectations." His teapots are homages to the ideas of ritual, contemplation, protocol and cross-cultural exchange embodied by the form. They are also wickedly campy spoofs of preciousness and pretension, of "borrowed prestige, the aspiration to a gentler life when, for the most part, granny's heirloom teapot sat on the shelf and people used teabags." Kurt Weiser of Tempe Arizona, finds the formal earthbound teapot effective as "a little stage set" for his exotic painted scenes of "total fantasy," such as a monkey pouring tea into a river. Perhaps no artist loads this comfy object with more unsettling imagery then Richard Notkin of Oregon, whose small, socially conscious teapots in the realistic Yixing style depicting such things as a nuclear blast or a human heart in chains, can be painful to look at.

"I like the tension between the tradition of the teapot and its most unlikely interpretations. Notkin's really nailing it," says Joan Takayama-Ogawa, a Los Angeles ceramist. She, however, makes unabashedly playful teapots, as "a form of recreation. They're fun. I use them as a break. It's a great way to explore form and surface, to pursue subtle, quiet gestures." Though a teapot can be a "flippant one-liner," she notes, "the elegance holds the humor in check." And like small netsuke, "it has the potential for monumentality in spirit and form."

The New York sculptor Raymon Elozua exaggerates the teapot's scale (and everything else about it) in works like the The Party's Over, best described as the decaying, chaotic remains of a monstrous teapot the size of a washing machine, a lifeless cup dangling at its core, dripping red. Elozua merrily characterized it as a black-humored take on "the death of teapots and the teacup and ceramics and the world as we know it." Though he believes "function limits vision," he like the teapot form for the usual reasons. "One, it's like juggling. You've got all these elements to play with. Two, it's the most iconic of ceramic symbols. And three, the sexuality. It's passive -aggressive." His focus is the interior. Taking the teapot as "a metaphor for the body, for life," he "draws" its figure by bending and welding a steel skeleton, then fleshes out the inside with shards of broken clay teapots, representing "remnants of the past," of craftsmanship and what Elozua sees as its tendency to "fetishize perfection."

While the clay teapot is being pushed to the brink of deconstruction, what of the other archetype, the sterling silver teapot? If the teapot is as much the metalsmith's domain, why do relatively few make them? Harriette Estel Berman, a California metalsmith interested in domestic iconography (her sculptures refer to irons, toasters and the like), wondered about this after "watching the teapot phenomenon for a few years" and noting that all the action seemed to be in clay (she's never made one herself, but has studied them extensively). She conducted her own informal survey of the field, and, at last year's conference of the Society of North American Goldsmiths, presented her conclusion - that most activity and innovation in metal is in jewelry, and that "when metalsmiths do turn to the teapot, they tend to get very conservative. They get obsessed with function, letting it dictate design. I thought, 'Come on, people in ceramics gave this up years ago'," says Berman, who believes "there's a conceptual level that's not been explored" in metal teapots, except by a few. "Generally speaking, clay has left metal way behind in terms of exploration of the teapot form," agrees Tom Muir, a metalsmith from Perrysburg, Ohio, who attributes this to the considerable investment of time, labor, material and technical skill required to manipulate metal into a complex hollowware form. Muir's own sterling teapots, which are non-utilitarian ("but I'm interested in utility"), are formed and fabricated, with as many as 67 soldered joints.

"Potters can throw a pot in 15 minutes," observes Charles Crowley, a Boston-area metalsmith. Through spinning and other efficient hollowware techniques, Crowley can approximate a "potter's approach," work relatively fast, and increase his chances for that fortuitous mix of "the accidental and the intentional." Though his teapots are often sculptural, he finds function hard to ignore. "It's honest. Customers pay a lot of money. They should be able to use and clean it." He adds, "When people by silver, they want the thing that lasts, like their grandmother's." Even the most adventuresome art collectors, the "really wild guys," want an heirloom, says Crowley, "something they can engrave and pass on to their children." For the maker, then, "a lot of the fun materials and colors don't hold up."

Others known for their metal teapots are Susan Ewing, Randy Long, Chunghi Choo, Kee Ho Yuen, Nancy Slagle, Robly Glover, Robert Ferrell and Boris Bally, to name a few. "Most of these metalsmiths think of the teapot as sculpture," says Rosanne Raab, a New York City art consultant who coordinated the traveling exhibit "Silver: New Forms and Expressions" for Fortunoff. "They're not concerned with making the equivalent of Gorham, International or George Jensen. It is a vocabulary that is understood, but they're not competing on that level." At present, the market for service pieces by studio metalsmiths is generally limited to a "small collector's circle" and "some private commissions," according to Raab. "It's economics, and the fact that people are living a more casual lifestyle." Nevertheless, she notes, silver retains its special aura of "prestige, position and family."

"We have an attitude toward silver. Give anyone ten cents' worth, and the first thing they do is wrap it in a cloth and put it in a drawer," observes metalsmith Myra Mimlitsch Grey of East Kingston, New York. Yet a silver presentation piece exists expressly for conspicuous display, to project an image. "There's an irony to it that I really enjoy," says Gray, whose conceptual teapots are wry examinations of the silver object as a symbol of "bourgeois luxury." In her Encased series, she replicates "the ideal model" of an austere copper shell so that only hints of a spout, lid and handle are exposed. The work has a "feminist angle," an assertion of the tactile (female) over the visual (male), with overtones of containment and service.

Whether political statement, art object or cultural icon, the teapot is here to stay, say its champions. "There's a long and consistent history of fascination with the teapot," says Garth Clark. Even when "the commercial edge has gone off it," he predicts, the serious collectors will "stick with their obsession." In Leslie Ferrin's view, "there are pieces out there being made for the marketplace that don't stand up to the best" - which nevertheless satisfy a range of tastes and budgets - but "there's not a glut of the best." And at its best, says Clark, the teapot is evolving into an "extraordinary art form," as ceramists' creations become not just increasingly "ceramically literate" but also "more beautiful, more cunning - and I mean that as a compliment - more complex and sophisticated. I'd hate to think this is a golden era, because that tends to signal the end of something. Let's say a silver period. There's no problem with one metaphor. I don't think the potters are done with it yet."

"I see teapots getting more complex in terms of a grouping or environment," muses Dan Anderson, venturing a look into the future. After 30 years, the form continues to inspire him. "I think I can do a lifetime's worth of work. I really do."