In hindsight, The Row’s Fall/Winter 2018 show was a turning point. As models appeared in draped cashmere and gradations of beige, they traced a path between Isamu Noguchi’s eight-foot-tall cast bronze sculpture Bird Song and Atomic Haystack, a shorter, open steel work. It was a meeting of two worlds: The Row, modern arbiters of minimal, definitive luxury, setting their work in the context of the minimal artist of the preceding century. Or, fashion catching up to design. “We’ve been wanting to work with Noguchi for a while,” Ashley Olsen told Vogue. “We saw things in the sculptures and worked them out in our designs.”
Still, the show represented just a sliver of the wildly influential output of Noguchi, whose career spanned six decades and whose breadth of work has been, since 1985, collected at the New York City museum he founded and curated, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Born in 1904, the artist began as an assistant to Constantin Brâncuși in the 1920s before expanding into his own sculptural works. American-born and, for a short time, raised in Japan, Noguchi subsumed both these influences, creating something hybridized but organic, visibly his own. He became a master of material and form, creating objects with a roving, distilled focus. Work might be warm, sharp, powerful, round.
Along with the sculptures, he took on public commissions such as the UNESCO Garden in Paris and Red Cube near Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. He rifled off furniture — a handful of tables and settees that are exceedingly popular and still in production — some of which began as sculptural art. There were clothes and a stint in ceramics, which started on a crucial 1951 trip to Japan. There was an attempt to make the “perfect ashtray,” hints of which exist in metal bowls made by the Swedish company Bonniers.
Noguchi’s corpus is as beautiful as it is attainable. His work is so legible that both ateliers and IKEA take cues from it. But his most democratic output may be his light sculptures, or Akari lamps: made from washi paper, almost translucent, and, for a design classic, very cheap. They were conceived in a flash on that same Japan trip, inspired by fishermen lighting mulberry-bark lanterns after sundown. Noguchi imagined light sculptures that might be rolled out at scale. The day after, he designed the main idea — wire frame, mulberry-bark paper, flat pack.
Noguchi himself once said he hoped his Akari lamps would “bring sculpture into a more direct involvement with the common experience of living.” And indeed, they’ve remained the first and final word on soft light for decades, one of those rare classic pieces consistently used by forward-thinking interior designers. Sold at Bloomingdale’s for a time, they’re now available secondhand or in his museums and come in more than 100 shapes and iterations. “In their own way, they exert a gravity and a force over a room, drawing the eye as much as, say, a six-foot-high piece of steel,” Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner says.
Just as these lamps have become shorthand for great taste, so has Noguchi become an emblem for a certain sensibility. “Noguchi is more of a brand lately,” says The New Yorker writer and Akari owner Kyle Chayka. “He’s easily recognizable, and people can gravitate toward the name as one gravitates toward Picasso.” Many of today’s status symbol design signifiers are informed by ideas Noguchi transmitted or things he made: the minimalist lean into black and metal, powerful biomorphic shapes, restraint, luxury materials. (Think of his ubiquitous glass-topped coffee table.) “He’s one of the key people who created the material worlds we live in,” Chayka says.
Accessibility isn’t the only reason the work has endured, of course. Despite design’s tendency to shift — away from mid-modern, let’s say, then back to it — Noguchi’s work is “truly not a passing trend,” says Kimberly Sørensen, a design specialist at the auction house Phillips. Sørensen points to his Goodyear table, produced in 1939 and sold by Phillips in 2014 for $4.5 million. It’s a Noguchi table but different, a sculpture that’s one of one. How to explain the price? It’s a “famous commission,” Sørensen says, designed for A. Conger Goodyear, then the president of the Museum of Modern Art. Most importantly, she adds, it’s hand-crafted and sculpted by Noguchi himself. The materials — rosewood and plate glass — are more substantial than the stuff on newer production models sold through the museum, but the Goodyear table isn’t worlds apart. It went for that much, in some ways, because it’s a piece that Noguchi actually touched.
It’s a credit to Noguchi that both his democratic and canonical pieces resonate the same way. For a certain class of makers, his unapproachable work has become just as immediate and important. After The Row showcased Noguchi, newer designers whose clothes are sometimes Row-like took similar cues. Some of the houses are Japanese, some are not; some are newer, some are institutions; all play with minimalism and focus on material and restraint. AURALEE, Evan Kinori, MAN-TLE, Yohji, Miyake… the list goes on. In the shops that carry their clothes, Noguchi ephemera abounds. Geoff Snack’s art book curation project Wrong Answer often supplies cult favorite store Colbo with texts about the artist’s life and work.
Chris Green designed the interior of Ven.Space, the year-old Brooklyn menswear store, somewhere between the sculptor’s world and that of his own stock of restrained clothes. “I wanted the eye view to be linear,” he says, and so the paint on the ceiling and floor contrasts a bit with the color of the walls, their long, straight lines themselves softened by golden light from a couple of massive Akari lamps Green had at home. Noguchi’s work “speaks to a cleaner space and the mixture of light and texture together,” Green says. Or a place where the garment is as important as the paint as the walls as the lighting.
For the fashion world, Noguchi’s appeal as an artist, designer, and craftsman, rather than just a good-taste shorthand, speaks to his enduring influence. A renewed interest in Japanese minimalism — the heightened demand for Issey Miyake’s ’80s clothing, or, Weiner suggests, ambient musicians from that decade — also helps. There’s “a simple, pared-down set of components,” Weiner says, “whether it’s five notes [in a song] or the very limited media of a Noguchi piece.” These works have a “modernness and pleasing arrangement that doesn’t feel disruptive,” he adds; they’re “pacifying without feeling milquetoast.” It’s hard to be so stripped-down, yet say so much so directly. When someone does, everyone listens.
At the Noguchi Museum in Queens, sculptures are generally one material or maybe two; one color or two. They are, to state the obvious, pretty calming — even more so, the rock garden outside. Hints of our post-Row fashion era showed up all around. The rock garden’s just-so-ness felt translated in AURALEE’s researched precision, and the wood-and-Greek-marble sculpture Bird D struck the same wavelength as Evan Kinori’s hardy, earthy palette. Specific sculptures were akin to more specific looks: Core Piece #1, a 1974 work in black basalt, felt like it might belong on a MAN-TLE mood board, denoting something futuristic and rigorous for an upcoming line.
To be sure, Noguchi himself mostly focused on sculpture. “Noguchi really didn’t venture into fashion too much in his work,” says Noguchi Museum curator and director of research Matthew Kirsch in an email. “Everything was second to the art.” But his work and way of seeing have nonetheless had an impact on the way clothes are worn. An outfit he designed for the ballerina Ruth Page in 1932 resembles something between a sack-like dress and a jumpsuit and feels early Row or Issey Miyake in its drape. It’s plainly sculptural, and perhaps that was the genius of Noguchi: Everything he did was a standardization of his original medium at scale. Dresses, city commissions, coffee tables, paper lights — every object had its own physicality and therefore made its own statement. And in the studio, Noguchi didn’t make distinctions. “He viewed everything as part of the same artistic practice,” Sørensen says. It’s people “looking from the outside who ascribe categories” to things.
For Noguchi, a lamp was a stage set was a sculpture; this was an artist inherently interested in materialization. And so his legacy lives on in today’s designers, who translate the details into clothes. And in people who just want good lighting — as in, if you’ll permit me, someone getting dressed in the morning and preparing to face the world. It’s not surprising, in the end, how Noguchi shows up everywhere.
