Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi was born in 1904 to an Irish-American mother and a Japanese poet father. Although he was primarily a sculptor, Noguchi worked with a broad range of material and commissions – from gardens and plazas to stage sets and furniture design – with materials that included clay, wood, marble, stone, and paper. In 1939, Noguchi designed his first table for the new home of the then president of the Museum of Modern Art, A. Conger Goodyear. A low glass-topped table with articulated rosewood supports, his 1939 Goodyear Table work was the first of a series of related designs. Seeking inspiration from this earlier design, in 1944 Noguchi modified the idea, calling it “the Goodyear, but stripped down to its rudiments”. The revised design, with its base of two identical elements set at a right angle, derived from a loop of wood cut in two, reflected the biomorphic imagery of Noguchi's contemporary sculpture. The Coffee Table became one of Noguchi’s most well-known works, and late in his life the artist felt that it was the only instance in which he had been wholly successful in the field of industrial design.

His Dining Table was a later design, from 1955, which Noguchi himself used in the kitchen of his apartment in a renovated factory hall in Long Island City. It is also known as the Cyclone Dining Table, inspired as it is by tremendously strong Japanese architecture designed to resist fierce Pacific storms but at the same time remain true to a light aesthetic.