Steeped in Art

Teapots offer uninhibited artwork of tasteful expression to Dixon exhibition.
By Fredric Koeppel

If your knowledge of teapots extends no farther than “I’m a little teapot, short and stout; here is my handle, here is my spout,” then you owe yourself a trip to Dixon Gallery and Gardens to see “The Artful Teapot: 20th Century Expressions from the Kamm Collection.”
The exhibition opens Sunday and runs through Sept. 24.

On display are 250 teapots from the more than 6,000 amassed by collectors Gloria and Sonny Kamm, who are no relation to Dixon director Jay Kamm. The show was curated by ceramics authority Garth Clark, who wrote the accompanying catalog.
The eclectic exhibition, which offers a selection of historical teapots to set a context for the show, consists primarily of objects created by such important contemporary artists as David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein.

Despite the exhibition’s contemporary emphasis, said Jay Kamm, “The Artful Teapot” makes a good fit at the Dixon because it “sort of picks up where our Stout Collection of 18th Century porcelain leaves off. It’s kind of a takeoff on that.”

“The Artful Teapot,” said the Dixon director, offers “great stuff, wonderful stuff. The Kamms really challenged artists to take it to the extreme, to push the envelope. Some of it is outlandish and some of it is exquisite. Some are beautiful and some make you laugh.”

Drinking tea didn’t immediately result in the creation of the teapot.

From about the 8th Century, in China, Japan and India, tea was brewed in the cups from which it would be consumed, the tea leaves being rolled by hand and ground into a powder. Infusing the leaves themselves required a vessel in which they could steep; hence, the teapot, first produced in China circa 1500 in unglazed brown or red stoneware. By the end of the 16th Century, Chinese craftsmen were producing teapots made of fine glazed porcelain, a classic example of beauty and function.

Paradoxically, English designers came up with the familiar shape of the teapot, with its bulbous body and graceful spout and handle. Lacking a source of clay for porcelain, English tea merchants took the designs to China, where the teapots were manufactured. The discovery, in 1710, of suitable clay near Meissen, in Germany, meant that teapots of the desirable thinness and strength could be produced in Europe.

For Gloria and Sonny Kamm, collecting teapots came about almost accidentally.

“It was an outgrowth of collecting contemporary art,” said Sonny Kamm in a telephone interview from his office in Los Angeles, where he is general counsel and secretary of The Capital Group Companies. “We had bought a new house in the mid-’80s, and there were some narrow shelves in the bar, about 8 inches wide, too narrow for sculpture. And my wife made the fatal mistake of saying that a bunch of artists had made teapots, why didn’t we put those up there. So I looked through our stuff and found about 20.

“If you see isolated works of art it’s not the same as seeing them together. About the same time art glass, which we had been collecting, was getting kind of expensive, so we jumped into teapots with both feet.”

The next step was into antique or historical teapots, followed by mass-production teapots — “They’re fun,” said Kamm — found at flea markets and antique malls and then on to the Internet.

“We tried as best as we can do to move across the spectrum,” Kamm said. “We thought we could get our arms around the whole field and not limit ourselves, but now we know how broad the field is.”

While a teapot may be a prime example of form following function, it’s not essential, said Kamm, that the teapots commissioned for the collection actually work.

“We have commissioned probably 150 teapots in the past few years. We have commissions going all the time. But it’s not that important if they function. If you look at a painting of a woman, you know that it’s not really a woman. Similarly, if an artist depicts a teapot, you know it’s not a real teapot. The object has to have the traditional elements, you know, a handle, a spout, but it’s doesn’t have to function.”

On the other hand, he said, “some artists in the craft tradition won’t make a teapot if it doesn’t function. You know, making a functioning teapot isn’t easy. It’s asymmetrical, the spout on one side, the handle on the other. It’s not like throwing a dish or bowl.”

Kamm sees the exhibition as a way of easing viewers into contact with contemporary art.

“You know, people have difficulty looking at contemporary art, a painting can be a big green thing with two orange places, but nobody has trouble looking at teapots. They don’t think they’re looking at art, it takes away their inhibitions.”

The inevitable question is asked and answered thus:

“Yes, we like tea. I mean, I’m sitting here drinking coffee right now. I’m a fairly hyper guy, and tea requires patience. It’s more of a social beverage, for conversation. Coffee, you push a button on the machine and it comes out.”

(this article was written by Fredric Koeppel and taken from commercialappeal.com)