Wizardry in Wood
George Nakashima is the mid-century Modernist collectors seek when Eames is not enough. His work is finally getting the attention it deserves.
By Greg Lindsay
NATHAN BENN / CORBIS Nakashima in his New Hope, Pa., studio in 1980
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Spring 2005 Style & Design
At Los Angeles Modern Auctions' December sale, vintage plywood pieces by
Charles and Ray Eames were practically raffled off while the serious
money zeroed in on the furniture made by the late Japanese-American
designer George Nakashima. The star was a cabinet nearly 13 feet long
handcrafted by Nakashima from black walnut and cedar. The winning
bidder—New York antiques dealer Anthony DeLorenzo—paid $123,375, more
than double the $60,000 estimate, almost breaking the auction record for
Nakashima that he had set the previous summer when he spent $129,250 for
a table by the designer.
This sudden surge in price isn't a sign of a speculative,
art-world-style bubble but is rather a long-overdue acknowledgment of
Nakashima's singular aesthetic. Although he was a contemporary of the
Eameses and the Scandinavians who make up the mid-century canon,
Nakashima has only gradually earned the appreciation of collectors, who
wrote him off as too Japanese or even belonging to the Arts and Crafts
movement. His creations, always hand carved and often untreated and left
raw at the edges, have little in common with the clean geometry of most
mid-century designs. Today Diane von Furstenberg and Steven Spielberg
are among his high-profile aficionados.
"He made as many pieces in his lifetime as the Eameses did in a month,"
says Robert Aibel, owner and director of the Moderne Gallery in
Philadelphia, which has promoted Nakashima's work since his death in
1990. "Each chair is different. The form is the same, but the woods or
even a particular board is different. If you compare the price to an
Eames, [the cabinet auctioned in Los Angeles] was downright cheap."
Aibel estimates that Nakashima pieces have appreciated between 200% and
500% over the past decade.
Collectors can wax rhapsodic about how a Nakashima coffee table hewn
from a single slab can balance the chill of too many modern pieces
stuffed in one room. "It has a more soulful quality," says collector and
graphic designer Tom Voss. "It seems to me to be more authentic somehow
than all the mass-produced Eames stuff."
Nakashima was well on his way to being a chilly Modernist himself until
a religious awakening in India, combined with his internment in a camp
for Japanese Americans in Idaho during World War II, led to his
discovery of traditional Japanese woodworking. While in the camp, he
trained with a traditional carpenter, then after the war moved to New
Hope, Pa., to establish his studio. Today his daughter Mira Nakashima
continues to run the studio with several of her father's senior
artisans, working in his tradition and producing her own line as well.
"People who live in extremely contemporary glass-and-steel homes have an
affinity for his furniture," says Mira. "My dad said, 'People who live
in glass houses have lost contact with nature. And this is a way to
bring it back to them.'" •
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His life and death recalled in images
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