That Scott Burton article has tuned my antenna for furniture sculpture. While Burton’s own interests took him back to, among others, Brancusi, this apparently rare, pre-production marble-top table by Isamu Noguchi just dropped into my inbox.
It was introduced produced for Herman Miller between 1945-47, and introduced alongside Noguchi’s similarly scaled and more extravagantly shaped chess table in 1948. It was expensive and not a success, especially compared to Noguchi’s more famous glass-top coffee table. This table was bought from the showroom by a Marshall Fields employee, and has been in the family ever since.
Anyway, point is, Heritage Auctions’ email says, “Its perforated and tripod form relates closely to Noguchi’s work in sculpture of this period, specifically his interlocking assemblages of shaped slabs of marble, slate, and wood. Concurrently, Noguchi experimented with functional ‘sculpture-for-use’…” “Everything was sculpture,” Noguchi said of the table forms through which he experimented with abstraction alongside his non-functional sculpture in the 1940s.
Honestly, I would love nothing more than to crawl under this table with a book on the history of furniture-sculpture and not emerge until Wednesday. But there’s probably a chapter about how Noguchi met the fascist threat by getting himself locked up in a Japanese American detention center, and yet went on to design the most innovative coffee table sculptures in history.
22 Nov 2024, Lot 67030: Isamu Noguchi, Rare and Important Table, est. $700k-1m [ha.com]