Beschreibung:

Isamu Noguchi Rare "Chess Table," model no. IN-61 circa 1947-1949 Laminated bird's-eye maple, painted steel, the top with clear and red acrylic inlays. 19 1/4 x 33 7/8 x 30 3/4 in. (48.9 x 86 x 78.1 cm) Produced by The Herman Miller Furniture Company, USA.
Provenance Gansevoort Gallery, New York Michael and Susan Rich, Los Angeles, 1999 Los Angeles Modern Auctions, Los Angeles, "Modern Art & Design," December 16, 2012, lot 285 Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited "Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960," Brooklyn Museum of Art, October 12, 2001-January 6, 2002; then traveled to: The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, February 16-May 12, 2002; The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, June 21-September 15, 2002; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 17, 2002-February 23, 2003; Phoenix Art Museum, April 4-June 29, 2003 "Surreal Things: Surrealism & Design at the V&A," Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 22-July 22, 2007; then traveled to: Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, September 29, 2007-January 6, 2008; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, March 3-September 7, 2008 Literature ILLUSTRATED Brooke Kamin Rapaport and Kevin L. Stayton, Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, 1980, p. 30 Ghislane Wood, Surreal Things, Surrealism and Design, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum London, 2007, p. 304 RELATED EXAMPLES Nancy Grove and Diane Botnick, The Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi 1924–1979: A Catalogue, New York, 1980, p. 147, cat. no. 810 Derek E. Ostergard, George Nakashima Full Circle, exh. cat., American Craft Museum, New York, 1989, p. 134 Martin Eidelberg, Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was, New York, 1991, pp. 107-108 Bruce Altshuler, Noguchi, New York, 1994, p. 52 fig. 55 Alexander von Vegesack, et al., eds., Isamu Noguchi Sculptural Design, exh. cat., Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, 2001, pp. 78-79, 126-27, 287 Larry List, ed., The Imagery of Chess, exh. cat., The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York, 2005, cover, pp. vi, 129, 131 Mathias Schwartz-Clauss, Peter Dunas and Alexander von Vegesack, 100 Masterpieces from the Vitra Design Museum Collection, exh. cat., Weil am Rhein, 2006, p. 149 On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and his Contemporaries, exh. cat., The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Long Island City, 2011, pp. 77-78 Catalogue Essay Phillips would like to thank The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and Larry List, New York, for their assistance cataloguing the present lot. THE CHESS TABLE The 20th century sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi devoted a large part of his career to re-envisioning functional, traditional objects as expressions of modernism. Noguchi regarded furniture as sculptural forms with which people often had meaningful, prolonged, and intimate connection as part of their environment, hence objects worthy of serious aesthetic design and appreciation. This chess table design was developed by Noguchi in his Greenwich Village studio for the legendary 1944 Imagery of Chess exhibition organized by his friends Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst and held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. Newsweek magazine proclaimed that “the sculptor Noguchi…has created the most beautiful piece in the show…” The original design was bought the night of the gallery opening by prominent architect and furniture designer George Nelson who, in 1947 convinced The Herman Miller Furniture Company to manufacture the Chess Table and Noguchi’s ovoid glass top coffee table design. While the glass coffee table has become a design standard, produced to this day, its companion piece, a rarity, was produced for only three years. The few extant examples are predominantly in solid, ebonized black finish. This version, in mildly-figured bird’s-eye maple, may be unique, a custom order intended to harmonize with a specific interior. In this table design Noguchi pioneered his technique of notching together flat biomorphic shapes to create free-standing forms, an approach with which he later generated a signature group of sculptures, his notched planar abstractions of the mid-to-late 1940s. An artistic nomad, Noguchi presage