Crafting Modernism: Masters of the American Studio Design Movement from the Pinnacle Art Collection
Crafting Modernism: Masters of the American Studio Design Movement from the Pinnacle Art Collection
George Nakashima
Screen from the International Paper Company, New York
Auction Closed
June 10, 03:47 PM GMT
Estimate
80,000 - 120,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
George Nakashima
Screen from the International Paper Company, New York
circa 1980-1981
American black walnut, rosewood, enameled stones
70 x 117 x 15 in. (177.8 x 297.2 x 938.1 cm)
International Paper Company, New York, commissioned directly from the artist, 1980
DeLorenzo 1950, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1993
DeLorenzo 1950, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1993
"Validating the Corporate Image," Interior Design Magazine, 1981, n.p. (for a related example)
Robert Aibel, "The Soul of Nakashima," Modern Magazine, March 2015, p. 81 (for the present lot illustrated)
Robert Aibel, "The Soul of Nakashima," Modern Magazine, March 2015, p. 81 (for the present lot illustrated)
George Nakashima’s outsized presence in furniture history is due, of course, to the quantity and quality of his work. But it’s also thanks to a book: The Soul of a Tree, which he published in 1981. It is the ultimate statement of spiritual commitment to a craft, evenly balanced between autobiography, process, and philosophy. Rather like his contemporary Isamu Noguchi, Nakashima perceived himself to be a man outside his own time. “In ages past,” he wrote, “it would have been easy to join a crusade, to become a member of a community dedicated to building a great cathedral, to hew the great timbered doors, to carve a spirit in stone to grace the glorious facade. But one must work alone, building objects of wood. With a mendicant's eye, a sadhu’s perception, a ragpicker's sense, I poke my way through the valley of the fallen giants, finding here and there fragments which will be given a second life.”1
As The Soul of a Tree was nearing publication, Nakashima received one of his largest commissions, for the office suite of the International Paper Company in New York. It’s easy to see why this particular client, one of the largest in its industry, found him an appropriate choice. They, too, were involved in giving “second life” to wood, transforming it into the stuff of the modern clerical world. In choosing Nakashima, famous for his “natural edge” furniture, in which the original silhouette of the timber is preserved in the final design, they were metaphorically exposing the roots of their own profitable business.
To be sure, there was a strange tension in this commission, with Nakashima’s reverential organicism put in the service of a mass manufacturer. Yet that dichotomy is already anticipated, to some degree, by his designs. As leading Philadelphia-based design dealer Bob Aibel has put it, “No board ever cut itself, jumped on a base and made a beautiful table.”2 Nakashima tended to focus attention on the long life of his materials, before he ever got to them; he saw himself as a sort of amanuensis for nature itself. Yet he was also a modernist through and through, and a designer of extraordinary ingenuity.
This synthesis between the organic and the invented is quite evident in the individual works of the IPC commission. Nakashima furnished them with a pair of freestanding room dividers, a standard office typology which he reimagined completely. The expanses of bookmatched black walnut, punctuated by his signature butterfly keys, resemble nothing so much as abstract paintings of the kind that were just filtering into other corporate office collections of the time. A pair of armchairs continue Nakashima’s ongoing inquiry into the Windsor chair, which he adapted with shaped crest rail and arms.
Most impressive of all are the tables for the commission, which do indeed have the feeling of stately trees felled right into the room. The larger of the two anticipates the “altars of peace” that he would begin making in 1984, after having a dream in which a walnut tree appeared to him in the guise of “a giant table… which would be an instrument of reconciliation, of bringing people together.”3 Do these magisterial works of Nakashima’s express the soul of the walnut trees from which they are made? Certainly. But no less the soul of the man who made them.
[1] George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree (Kodansha, 1981), 109.
[2] Robert Aibel, “The Soul of Nakashima,” Modern Magazine (Spring 2015), 76.
[3] Magai Roman, “A Black Walnut Dream: George Nakashima's Altars of Peace,” Rikumo Journal (Dec. 20, 2016). Nakashima intended to make six “altars” but completed only one “in his lifetime, for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
GLENN ADAMSON
As The Soul of a Tree was nearing publication, Nakashima received one of his largest commissions, for the office suite of the International Paper Company in New York. It’s easy to see why this particular client, one of the largest in its industry, found him an appropriate choice. They, too, were involved in giving “second life” to wood, transforming it into the stuff of the modern clerical world. In choosing Nakashima, famous for his “natural edge” furniture, in which the original silhouette of the timber is preserved in the final design, they were metaphorically exposing the roots of their own profitable business.
To be sure, there was a strange tension in this commission, with Nakashima’s reverential organicism put in the service of a mass manufacturer. Yet that dichotomy is already anticipated, to some degree, by his designs. As leading Philadelphia-based design dealer Bob Aibel has put it, “No board ever cut itself, jumped on a base and made a beautiful table.”2 Nakashima tended to focus attention on the long life of his materials, before he ever got to them; he saw himself as a sort of amanuensis for nature itself. Yet he was also a modernist through and through, and a designer of extraordinary ingenuity.
This synthesis between the organic and the invented is quite evident in the individual works of the IPC commission. Nakashima furnished them with a pair of freestanding room dividers, a standard office typology which he reimagined completely. The expanses of bookmatched black walnut, punctuated by his signature butterfly keys, resemble nothing so much as abstract paintings of the kind that were just filtering into other corporate office collections of the time. A pair of armchairs continue Nakashima’s ongoing inquiry into the Windsor chair, which he adapted with shaped crest rail and arms.
Most impressive of all are the tables for the commission, which do indeed have the feeling of stately trees felled right into the room. The larger of the two anticipates the “altars of peace” that he would begin making in 1984, after having a dream in which a walnut tree appeared to him in the guise of “a giant table… which would be an instrument of reconciliation, of bringing people together.”3 Do these magisterial works of Nakashima’s express the soul of the walnut trees from which they are made? Certainly. But no less the soul of the man who made them.
[1] George Nakashima, The Soul of a Tree (Kodansha, 1981), 109.
[2] Robert Aibel, “The Soul of Nakashima,” Modern Magazine (Spring 2015), 76.
[3] Magai Roman, “A Black Walnut Dream: George Nakashima's Altars of Peace,” Rikumo Journal (Dec. 20, 2016). Nakashima intended to make six “altars” but completed only one “in his lifetime, for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
GLENN ADAMSON