Isamu Noguchi 1904 - 1988 was a sculptor, architect, furniture and landscape designer.

Born to Japanese poet Yonejiro Noguchi and Irish - American writer Leonie Gilmour, Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, America; but was raised in both Japan and the US.


One of the great sculptors of the 20th century, Noguchi created lived spaces for the theater, interiors gardens and playgrounds. He also sought to bring sculptural qualities to the many objects he designed for common use. As a young man, Noguchi studied medicine at Columbia University, but abandoned medicine to pursue painting and sculpture and in 1927, a Guggenheim fellowship took him to Europe. In Paris, he had the great good fortune to be apprenticed in the studio of Constantin Brancusi, whose investigations of form and space recalled the art and architecture Noguchi knew from childhood years spent in Japan.

In 1939, he designed a free-form dining table for the president of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, A. Congers Goodyear. The table's seductive organic form presaged the coffee table Noguchi would design for Herman Miller in 1944 and the wide range of products that he would design all during the 1940's, furniture informed by the biomorphic imagery of his sculpture.

From his sculpture to his garden design to the Akari lamps designed in the 1950's, Noguchi's work sought always to resolve life and aesthetic practice, the art object and the utensil, just as he sought to reveal the essential unity of form and space.

Noguchi constantly sought to combine and balance the influences of the Japanese and the American aesthetic in his work and in his life. Repeatedly moving between the two countries throughout his life, his work genuinely synthesizes elements of both cultures.