Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) Japanese/American, Knoll Cyclone Table - AS IS. Iconic twisting green metal base with round clear glass top, a design first conceived in 1953. 

Condition: Commensurate with age. Chips on edge of glass top. 

Size: 42 x 42 x 28 1/4 in. 

Isamu Noguchi was born on November 17th, 1904 in Los Angeles, the son of the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and American writer Léonie Gilmour. Yone had left Gilmour earlier that year and proposed to The Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes, settling in Tokyo and awaiting her arrival, but their engagement fell through when Armes learned of Léonie and her newborn son. In 1906 Yone invited Léonie to come to Tokyo with their son, but upon arrival Léonie discovered that Yone had married a Japanese woman, and consequently he was mostly absent from his son’s childhood. In 1918 Noguchi was sent back to the United States for boarding school in Rolling Prairie, Indiana, and began going by the name “Sam Gilmour.” He became close with Dr. Edward Rumely, who preferred that Noguchi become a doctor but sent him to work as an apprentice to the sculptor Gutzon Borglum in Connecticut. Borglum insisted he would never become a sculptor, and Noguchi traveled to New York City to enroll as a medical student at Columbia University. The Japanese dancer Michio Ito used her celebrity status to help him find acquaintances in the art world, and he began taking night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. Within three months the head of the school arranged for his first solo exhibition of plaster and terracotta works, and he dropped out of Columbia to pursue sculpture full-time, going by the name “Noguchi” once again. Noguchi moved into his own studio, taking commissions for portrait busts, and won the Logan Medal of the Arts. He frequented avant garde art shows and applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926 to study stone and wood cutting in Paris. There he became the assistant to stone sculptor Constantin Brâncuși and trained in woodworking with Mateo Hernandes. Noguchi was denied an extension of the Fellowship and returned to New York, where he met Buckminster Fuller and collaborated with him on several projects. In 1930 he traveled to Asia, first arriving in Beijing, where he studied brush painting with Qi Baishi, and then heading to Kyoto where he studied pottery with Uno Jinmatsu. Returning to America amidst the Great Depression he struggled to find work, designing sets for theatrical productions and having a brief affair with Frida Kahlo while working on a relief mural in Mexico City. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he formed the “Nisei Writers and Artist for Democracy” group in California, and on the advice of John Collier, head of the Office of Indian Affairs, he became the only voluntary Japanese-American internee at the Poston camp located on a reservation in Arizona, trying to promote arts and crafts in the community. Faced with distrust and racism on all sides, he eventually was released and returned to New York City, where he became more and more engaged with surrealist art and mixed-media constructions. In 1947 he began a working relationship with Herman Miller and Knoll Furniture, resulting in several iconic modernist designs such as the Noguchi Table. Noguchi applied for a Bollingen Fellowship in 1949 to travel the globe, and in his later years he finally began to gain international acceptance as his large-scale works were installed around the world. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1962, made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1987. Noguchi died of pneumonia on December 30th, 1988 at New York University Medical Center. Today he is heralded as an important figure in 20th Century art combining influences from East and West, and his work is permanently displayed at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York City.

Commensurate with age. Chips on edge of glass top.