Knock Outs and Knock Offs

Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi
The Noguchi Museum
(Sept. 20, 2007 - May 25, 2008)

After riding our bikes to Astoria, we learned that the museum’s main attraction, their sculpture garden, is closed for construction, due to be completed late this year at the earliest. After checking out its other offerings, we headed to the nearby Socrates Sculpture Park, which despite an unsuccessful environmental-themed show, was a lovely place to have picnic lunch by the water.

If you kept to the dreary and overcrowded first floor of the Noguchi Museum in Astoria, Queens, you might be forgiven for thinking the artist was exclusively a middling sculptor of stone. It’s a shame, because, in fact, he had a varied artistic output, creating objects with much more lasting value than the often garish examples on display. Noguchi is so much more — set designer, muralist, creator of gardens and monuments. But he is best known for his coffee table with uniquely interlocking L-shaped legs. Designed in 1944, this icon of Mid-Century modern still being sold today (see above image).

Industrial design was something Noguchi only pursued for a period of about twenty years, beginning with an ominous-looking Radio Nurse, a bakelite baby intercom for Zenith he designed in 1939. Two years later, he was commissioned to create a three-legged, glass-top table for MoMA's first president, A. Conger Goodyear. Its biomorphic design, like his sculpture at the time, was indebted to surrealism, especially to Joan Miró, Alexander Calder and Constantine Brancusi (who he studied under). After sharing a similar creation with the designer Robsjohn Gibbings, he later discovered the table was being passed off by Gibbings as one of his one. In response, Noguchi revised the design for George Nelson, who was to become head of Herman Miller, sealing the deal for the famous table.

In 1950, following the suicide of his friend Arshelle Gorky, Noguchi visited Japan — his first trip back to his childhood home in nearly 20 years (the illegitimate child of a Japanese father and Irish-American mother, he spent the bulk of his childhood in Japan, before settling in the U.S. for his schooling). There he met designer Isamu Kenmochi, and the two briefly collaborate on a bamboo chair that joined traditional Japanese materials and technique and modern furniture design.

Visually rich but lacking connective narrative and context, "Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi," tells the non-quite-parallel stories of the two Isamus whose inventive furniture designs helped define Japanese Modern.

Featured are Noguchi's Herman Miller designs of the 40's — including the famous coffee table (which he once said was his only successful design) and his lovely Rudder dinette (1944) — named for the shape of its rounded, fin-like third leg. While the Goodwin table isn’t included, another commission is – a smallish cocktail table for another MoMA honcho, the museum’s architect Philip L. Goodwin (1941). There are also photos of a spectacular stingray-shaped dining room table he made for MoMA trustee William A.M. Burden (1947). (Noguchi was included in the MoMA’s show “Fourteen Americans” in 1946.)

Also on display are his designs from the 50s – including his rocker stool (1953), which, impractically, featured a rounded-bottom stool and dining table (1957) – both for Knoll; and his final industrial design, the prismatic table (1957) (see image to right), commissioned by Alcoa to showcase aluminum as futuristic and affordable. The latter table, while it received press attention in Time, Newsweek and the New Yorker, never made it into mass production, although it’s available today for $600 (if you ask me, the Herman Miller table’s the better deal at $1,300). That year Noguchi quit industrial design, because, he said, there were too many knockoffs (especially true of his paper lamp for Knoll, oddly not included in the exhibit). It’s easy to speculate that, much as he had supported himself doing portrait sculpture in 30s, industrial design was more of means than an end, paying his way towards his true passions of sculpture and making of gardens and monuments. After marrying Japanese actress Shirley Yamaguchi and living in Japan for six years, his marriage failed and he moved back to New York, which remained his main residence for the rest of his life.

Isamu Kenmochi was an active designer throughout the 50s, as a founding member of the Japan Industrial Designers Association and the International Design Committee (later called the Good Design Committee) as well as with his own design studio. In 1952, he traveled to California, where he met Charles and Ray Eames (a photograph of the three enjoying coffee in the famous couple’s backyard is featured in this exhibit). But his design breakthrough didn’t happen until 1960, with the design of his rattan rounded chair, a lovely wicker orb with a cushion in the middle that received design blessing from MoMA four years later by being included in the museum’s collection (see above image). Also included are his 1961 lacquered wood Kashiwado chair, its wide-bodied design named after a famous sumo wrestler, and his bowl-shaped 1963 Easy Chair, made of molded transparent plastic and metal. It was to be his last industrial design; like Noguchi, he was disillusioned by poor quality imitators. He did contribute a couple more furniture designs, including some excellent modular chairs and carpeting for the Kyoto International Conference Center (1963). In 1971, he would kill himself.

The show is not only a grouping of exquisite furniture designs, but an opportunity to reflect on the shared aesthetics of traditional Japanese design and high modernism — the clean functionalism of tatami mats and Bauhaus. Noguchi, with his shared heritage and upbringing, embodied this current — although his most Japanese designs, his stunning paper lanterns, are left out of the show. We also think about how, despite the utopian intentions of the “international style,” mid-Century modern design was a cut-throat business and dominated by Europeans and Americans. As Noguchi and Kenmochi collaborated on their bamboo chair, General Douglas McArthur remained in Japan, even though he had relinquished formal power to the new Japanese government in 1949.

Bonus: If you're in NYC, check out these three Noguchi public sculptures: his low relief for the Associated Press building (1939-40), his sunken garden for the Chase Manhattan building (1961-4) and his Helmsley Plaza red cube (1968).