Isamu Noguchi – Peking Drawing {Man Reclining} (1930)

The longer I spend as an art nerd obsessing, the more I am becoming aware of this sort of feeling halfway between déjà vu and jamais vu–seeing something that is at once something you swear you’ve seen before while at the same time feeling certain that what you are looking at is entirely unfamiliar.

It’s the feeling I had upon seeing this–though the name Isamu Noguchi meant nothing to me. Turns out he was a sculptor and designer. He designed the Red Cube sculpture across from Zuccotti Park and produced the sets for several Martha Graham’s productions. (As a side note: I think one thing that is sorely overlooked in modern education with regards to creative practice is the value of relationships. Even in the times before the advent of the internet, email and social media, the artists that we are still enamored with today almost all maintained expansive written correspondence with a cohort of folks with similar interests, sensitivities and aesthetic preoccupations. I am at a point in my own creative development where I’m realizing that this is something my practice is sorely lacking.)

But–the reason I had that feeling of both the foreign and familiar with this drawing has to do with the thing that Noguchi is arguably most well known for: designing furniture.

He worked with Charles Eames and several other prominent designers to create items for Herman Miller. The so-called Noguchi table came out of this collaboration and remains one of the most popular pieces of furniture ever manufactured.

Even though I didn’t realize they were called Noguchi table’s, my nesting instinct–which I struggle to never indulge–has had a jonesing for such a table for years now. (Further now that I’ve realized the connection, it’s fun to see the heavier lines in the drawing above as echoing the wooden supports for the table.