Isamu Noguchi's Coffee Table Started as a Grudge

In 1939 Isamu Noguchi made a small plastic model of a coffee table for the decorator T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings and heard nothing back. In 1942, during the months he spent voluntarily interned at a relocation camp in Poston, Arizona, he saw a variation of that model in a Robsjohn-Gibbings advertisement. Nobody had asked his permission.

The Revenge Table

When Noguchi raised it, Robsjohn-Gibbings reportedly brushed him off with the line that anyone could make a three-legged table. Noguchi later wrote that the table he designed next was an act of revenge, and the V&A repeats the story in its catalog entry for an early example.

He had form in tables by then. Also in 1939 he made his first one, a commission from A. Conger Goodyear, the founding president of the Museum of Modern Art, in rosewood and glass with a more complicated sculptural base. Noguchi was a sculptor first. Born in Los Angeles on November 17, 1904, to the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and Léonie Gilmour, he arrived in Paris in April 1927 and went to work as a studio assistant to Constantin Brancusi.

The table that came out of the grudge is the simplest thing he ever sold. Two identical pieces of wood, one flipped against the other, pivot together and touch at one narrow point. A heavy freeform slab of glass sits on top, unfixed, held in place by weight alone. It is a sculpture you can put a drink on.

Herman Miller designer George Nelson wrote a piece called How to Make a Table and illustrated it with Noguchi's variant. In 1947 Herman Miller put that table into production in Zeeland, Michigan, as part of Nelson's first collection for the company, and it appeared in the 1948 catalog under the model number IN-50. It shares a showroom history with the Eames Lounge Chair, which Herman Miller launched less than a decade later.

Small Changes Over a Long Run

The table looks unchanged, but collectors know the differences. The first tops were 7/8-inch plate glass. In 1965 Herman Miller cut that to 3/4 inch and raised the base, taking the height from 15 inches to 15.75. Bases came in walnut, birch and cherry at first. Cherry lasted only the first year, birch was dropped after 1954, and ebonized walnut arrived later. In the late 1980s the company added indexing pins that set the two legs at a fixed 52 degrees.

That makes a birch base the quickest dating clue. The V&A's own birch example, it says, must have been made between about 1947 and 1955. Production also stopped for at least the decade from 1973 to 1983 before Herman Miller brought it back. New tables carry a medallion with Noguchi's signature, according to the Herman Miller design story. Vitra holds the rights everywhere outside North America, where MillerKnoll, Herman Miller's parent company, holds them.

Gifu, Summer 1951

The lamps came from a different trip. In June and July 1951 Noguchi visited the Ozeki and Co. lantern workshop in Gifu, a town known for paper lanterns, and the mayor asked him to help modernize them. He kept the traditional chochin structure, collapsible bamboo ribs under paper, and added electric bulbs and slender wire bases. He named them Akari, the Japanese word for light, and preferred the term light sculptures to lamps. Akari made its debut at a tea ceremony at the Eames House that same year.

The method has barely moved. At Ozeki, thin bamboo rods are stretched across wooden forms Noguchi designed, washi paper is cut into strips and glued onto the ribs, and once it dries the form comes out and the lantern folds flat. Over three decades Noguchi produced more than 200 models. The rights are split three ways. Vitra handles Europe, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum covers North America, and Ozeki sells in Japan. It is the same kind of slow handwork our Kyoto craft guide goes looking for.

Real Paper and Fake Paper

Counterfeit Akari are common. Genuine Ozeki pieces carry a printed red sun-and-moon mark. Bamboo ribs, visible fiber in the paper and that stamp are the giveaways. Wire ribs, plastic-feeling shades and listings that say Noguchi-style are the warning signs. Our design section has covered the same problem with chairs, and the rule is identical. Provenance first, silhouette last.

Noguchi spent the rest of his career moving between studios and countries. His garden at UNESCO in Paris opened on November 3, 1958. In 1969 he set up a studio in Mure, on Shikoku, with the stonemason Masatoshi Izumi, and began an ongoing series of large stone sculptures. The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, Queens, opened by appointment in April 1983 and officially in May 1985. Noguchi died in New York on December 30, 1988.

He belongs in the same conversation as Arne Jacobsen, another designer for whom furniture was never a separate discipline. For how Japan shaped a later generation of modernists, read our piece on Tadao Ando. The museum's next show, No Ordinary Light, Akari at 75, is scheduled to run from November 4, 2026, to September 5, 2027.

Seventy-five years after Gifu, the paper still goes onto the bamboo by hand, one strip at a time, at the same workshop.