NEHMA | Collection - White Elephant Teapot

Kurt Weiser

American, b. 1950

White Elephant Teapot
1994

Porcelain
11.5 x 14 x 5.5 in.
Gift of the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation
1994.37

White Elephant Teapot is a good example of Kurt Weiser’s elaborate china painting style, where he covers the whole surface of his porcelain pieces. These are mostly teapots and jars, although more recently he has added globes. The intense decoration of this teapot, overwhelming its simple functional use, produces an uncanny effect, blending apparently realistic images and naturalistic details with evident disproportions and ambiguous elements. The impression the work imparts is of a dreamlike, unsettling scene, where humanity and nature play a symbolic and complex role.

Born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1950, Weiser attended the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Michigan, where he obtained his MFA degree in 1976. He served as the director of the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, for almost a decade in the 1970s and is currently a regents professor at Arizona State University, where he started teaching in 1988. Initially he decorated pottery in an abstract way, but in the 1990s, as he adopted china painting, he developed his signature figurative style.

Sara Eco Conti, PhD.

Keywords
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This object has the following keywords:

animals, landscape, porcelain*, teapot, woman

animals
landscape
porcelain - A material comprising white clay, or "kaolin," and a feldspathic rock, that react when fired so the clay serves to hold the shape of the object and the rock fuses into a natural glass. In China, it includes any such ware that is highly fired enough to produce a ringing sound when struck. In Europe, it is limited to hard-fired ceramic that is translucent.
teapot
woman