Wright Auction

In the West, Noguchi’s Marble Top Table is identified as a coffee table, but in Japan, a short-legged table is called a chabudai. Was the Japanese-American sculptor thinking about his dual identity with his design of low tables?

The Marble Top Tables of both series are each unique in terms of the differing colors of the stone slabs—shades of gray, pink, and white—which the artist would also use in his contemporary interlocking sculpture—and of the legs—black, brown, or blonde. The bowls in the version with dissimilar legs appear to be store-bought with welded-on copper wings that allow them to be fitted into the plywood support beneath the marble tops. In the present table, the bowl does not spin out, as it does in both variants of the Marble Top table, including the Greenes’ dining table. The Herman Miller checklist does not illustrate which variant of the table was known as the IN-62.

With George Nelson as its design director, the Herman Miller Furniture Company brought in several designers who created cutting edge modern furniture and objects. In the aforementioned publicity image, four cattails sit in “the well” of the table, which is placed in front of Charles and Ray Eames’ equally ground-breaking Folding Screen Wood (FSW) room divider utilizing the Eames’ novel technique of molded plywood with canvas bands from 1946. Herman Miller first marketed Noguchi’s table in 1947, while first selling the Eames’ screen the prior year.

The combined presentation of these biomorphic designs amplifies how these designers created Western and Surrealist-inspired twists on Japanese aesthetics...

The combined presentation of these biomorphic designs amplifies how these designers created Western and Surrealist-inspired twists on Japanese aesthetics—with the floral arrangement (ikebana) in a readymade and sunken spun aluminum bowl, and the Eames’ undulating and flexible screen, also available in different finishes, which could extend to five feet,⁶ modernizing a Japanese folding byōbu. This was part of a greater vogue in the United States for Asian art and philosophy that broadened with the birth of Abstract Expressionist painting.

As seen in other publicity photographs, versions of Noguchi’s table featured varied Japanese-inspired floral arrangements including incense. Another period photograph partnered the Eames’ screen alongside a variant of Noguchi’s Rudder Table from 1944, which showcases a similar bouquet of cattails in a vase held within an opening in the table’s surface. Like the Marble Top Table, this table and its stools also bear three legs.

Noguchi “has fused in his art the East and the West as they were fused in his body.”

In the West, Noguchi’s Marble Top Table is identified as a coffee table, but in Japan, a short-legged table is called a chabudai. Was the Japanese-American sculptor thinking about his dual identity with his design of low tables? In 1946, at the time of Noguchi’s sculpture being displayed in the exhibition Fourteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, the art critic and future executive editor of Art News, Thomas B. Hess, wrote how he “has fused in his art the East and the West as they were fused in his body.”⁷

Eastern and Western aesthetics also come together in the design of Noguchi’s Akari light sculptures, as seen in the ones featured in this sale. In 1951, on a trip to Japan, Noguchi discovered traditional folding chochin (lanterns) in Gifu, and shortly thereafter adapted their bamboo and mulberry-bark paper construction to his own contemporary forms, eliminating ornament, and using electric light. A few pay homage to Constantin Brâncuși‘s Endless Column sculptures, as in model T1-I. In some, he added color to the shades with abstract compositions, as in model 7AT, with its minimally colored grid. Several of the lamps have weighted curvilinear bases that echo the lobed foot of Noguchi’s table, and others feature three legs, also like the table. They can be folded down as the table can be easily dismantled by lifting off the marble and then removing the bowl from the plywood underside.

By engaging with his table, you become more aware of space. Fascinating from all angles, Noguchi’s table continues to mystify.

Depending on how you approach Noguchi’s Marble Top table, it appears to have either one, two, or three legs. If you stand far enough away, you can see the underside of its inset bowl hang below the table. Now the table appears more anthropomorphic, like a three-legged animal with a single gleaming udder. Similarly, the Chess Table has a prominent curved section on the underside—painted cast aluminum pockets that open to serve as storage. The 1948 Herman Miller catalogue that first featured Noguchi’s furniture included three photographs of the Chess Table, including one looking at it from below. The catalogue states: “The remarkable thing about this phase of Noguchi’s activity is that while his designs are always brilliantly conceived in relation to the production process to be used, he always works as a sculptor, imparting to the most inconspicuous objects a thoroughly personal feeling.”⁸ The company described his glass-topped coffee table as “sculpture-for-use” and that “Noguchi used the glass top in this design because he wished the table seen as a whole: an opaque top would have concealed the carved base.”⁹ By adding the subterranean planter to his Marble Top Table, he adds an element of intrigue, encouraging us to bend down and look more closely and treat his furniture like a sculpture. Noguchi wrote in his statement for Fourteen Americans, “The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence…I say it is the sculptor who orders and animates space, gives it meaning.”¹⁰ By engaging with his table, you become more aware of space. Fascinating from all angles, Noguchi’s table continues to mystify.

¹ “Isamu Noguchi’s New Table,” Miami Herald, July 10, 1948, p. 7-A.

² “Fashion and Function Are Combined: New Contemporary Designs Have Their Own Elegance,” New York Herald Tribune, October 3, 1948.

³ See Deborah A. Goldberg, “Table Meets Sculpture,” Sotheby’s (May 18, 2021), and Goldberg, “Poetry in Stone: Furniture as Sculpture,” (Isamu Noguchi, Important and Unique Dining Table for Mr. & Mrs. Milton Greene), Important Design, Wright, Chicago (June 7, 2018). For further discussion about Noguchi’s furniture, also see Goldberg, “Isamu Noguchi: Visionary Designer and ‘World Citizen,’” in Patent Holder, Isamu Noguchi: Designing the World of Tomorrow. New York: Noguchi Museum and Queens: St. John’s University, Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery, 2015, ex. cat.), 19-23, and Goldberg, Isamu Noguchi: The Artist as Engineer and Visionary Designer, 1918-1939, dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, September 2000, 404-409.

⁴ Checklist, October 1, 1947, Herman Miller Furniture Company, Zeeland, Michigan.

⁵ Herman Miller Furniture Company, “Twice a Month,” July 1, 1948, pp. 1-2, cited in Samantha Robinson, “Isamu Noguchi’s ‘Sculpture-for-Use,’” in A Rare and Important Table by Isamu Noguchi, Design, Heritage Auctions (November 22, 2024), n.p. See the Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné for the eight examples of the Marble Top Table.

⁶ The Herman Miller Collection. Zeeland, MI: The Herman Miller Furniture Co., 1948, p. 66.

⁷ Thomas B. Hess, “Isamu Noguchi ’46,” Art News (September 1946), p. 34.

⁸ The Herman Miller Collection, p. 54.

⁹ Ibid., 56.

¹⁰ Isamu Noguchi, statement, Fourteen Americans. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946, p. 39.