Isamu Noguchi valuation
Sculptor, garden maker and designer of the Akari paper lamps, working between America and Japan.
Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904 to the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and the American writer Léonie Gilmour, and spent much of his childhood in Japan.
What a work by Isamu Noguchi is worth
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Bio
Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904 to the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and the American writer Léonie Gilmour, and spent much of his childhood in Japan. In Paris in 1927 he worked as an assistant to Brancusi, which set him on carved abstraction in stone and wood. He made portrait heads to earn a living, sets for Martha Graham's dance company over several decades, public gardens and playgrounds, and furniture, among it the glass-topped coffee table produced by Herman Miller from 1947. From 1951 he designed the Akari light sculptures in paper and bamboo, made in Gifu. He died in New York in 1988.
Unique sculptures in stone, wood and metal are the top of the market, and the furniture and lighting form a large separate field, much of it produced commercially in his lifetime and since. Akari lamps and Noguchi tables made under licence today are design objects rather than sculptures, and a vintage example is identified by its maker's marks, labels and construction. The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City maintains the catalogue raisonné, published online, and is the reference for attribution.
Brancusi, Martha Graham and Long Island City
A Guggenheim Fellowship took Noguchi to Paris in 1927. His first set for Martha Graham was Frontier, in 1935, and the collaboration lasted into the 1960s. In 1942 he entered the Poston internment camp in Arizona voluntarily, hoping to improve conditions there.
He designed the garden of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in the 1950s, and in 1985 opened the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, in a building he converted himself.
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