The Eccentric Teapot: Four Hundred Years of Invention - Hardcover

Clark, Garth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 089659923X ISBN 13: 9780896599239

Publisher: Abbeville Press, 1989

Synopsis

The Eccentric Teapot Short and stout, of course, is the very least of it. Inspired by the advent of tea drinking four thousand years ago in China, the form of the teapot has arrived in endlessly imaginative variations - humble, elegant, quirky, abstract. In the last two decades the investigation of the teapot as a pure art form has reached an inventive peak, but a fascination with the ceremony of tea drinking and with the objects designed for that ceremony has long flourished in both Eastern and Wester cultures. This beautiful and delightful book introduces us to come of the most sublime, outrageous, and exotic teapots ever to grace a Mad Hatter's tea party. The designed of these idiosyncratic vessels have fully explored the ceremonial significance, spiritual associations, and formal complexities of teapots and tea drinking, but they have given the results a distinctly eccentric spin. Both comfortingly familiar and utterly peculiar, this fanciful, provocative, and intriguing gallery of teapots includes portrait teapots of Oscar Wilde, Brooke Shields, and Queen Elizabeth; teapots impersonating animals, vegetables, and Three Mile Island cooling towers: the teapots so far removed from the concerns of function that they resemble nothing so much as drawings of teapots. The form of this simple object has fueled the creative genius of art, craft, and industry toward ends as diverse as pure aesthetics, perfect utility, lighthearted whimsy, and political satire. ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Abbeville Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 089659923X
• ISBN 13: 9780896599239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120