George Nakashima

Mira Nakashima, Form, Nature and Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima, New York, 2003, p. 214 (for a discussion of the table within the Rockefeller commission)
Robert Aibel, "The Soul of Nakashima," Modern Magazine, March 2015, p. 79 (for the present lot illustrated)

In 1973, Nelson Rockefeller resigned from the Governorship of New York State, doubtless thinking that his career in politics was drawing to a close. As it turned out, fate had other plans: Gerald Ford would appoint him to the Vice Presidency the following August. But when furniture by George Nakashima arrived at his Hudson Valley estate, Greenrock, he probably thought he’d have plenty of time to enjoy it. 

The connection between Rockefeller and Nakashima had risen via the designer of Greenrock, Junzо̄ Yoshimura. Nakashima had known this leading Japanese architect for decades, having worked together with him in the Tokyo offices of Antonin Raymond in the 1930s. “He knew so well the elegance and power of simplicity,” Nakashima wrote of Yoshimura, “the beauty of proper materials in building, the delicacy of unfinished wood, the traditional and modern creative proportions, where the error of a fraction of an inch can make the design fail absolutely. He knew these things well in both the time-honored Japanese design and in the free, modern concepts, and he passed them on to me.”¹

Rockefeller, for his part, knew Yoshimura through the Museum of Modern Art. He had been president of the institution in 1953, when, as a gesture of postwar amity between the USA and Japan, Yoshimura was commissioned to create a teahouse for the museum’s sculpture garden.² Given his inclinations to hybridize tradition and modernism, it was only natural for him to turn to his friend Nakashima to furnish Greenrock. This Nakashima did, in a relatively restrained manner that recalls his early designs. The ottomans in the present sale, formed from a series of interlocking shaped boards and upholstered with a stenciled, indigo-dyed upholstery obtained in Japan, were the first iteration of a design that he would go on to make as a series. In their form, as much as their origin story, they suggest the satisfactions that can occur when trajectories meet.

[1] George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree (Kodansha, 1981), 58.

[2] Yoshimura’s tea house, called Shofuso, was relocated to Philadelphia and can still be seen in Fairmount Park.

GLENN ADAMSON