60-year-old Noguchi designs light up modern décor
Unique lamps made by hand
NEW YORK — The round, white, paper light shades sold at Ikea for $5 are a familiar item in contemporary interior design. But these inexpensive lanterns are knock-offs of light sculptures created by the renowned artist Isamu Noguchi in the early 1950s.
The Noguchi lamps — called akari, the Japanese word for light — were inspired by traditional Japanese lanterns used in ancestor worship. Over the decades, the akari became classics of mid-20th-century modern home décor.
Noguchi’s original designs are still handmade in Japan; they come in a variety of colours and dozens of geometric designs — including the widely imitated white sphere — and range from $100 to $1,000 U.S. And they pop up in some pretty cool places, from painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in New Mexico to Tony Stark’s bedroom in Iron Man 3.
The story of how the late Noguchi came to create akari is rooted in the recovery of Japan’s post-Second World War economy and the crosscultural currents that influenced his spare, bold, modernist esthetics.
Noguchi’s mother was American; his father Japanese. They never married. Born in 1904, Noguchi spent years in both countries during his youth. After the Second World War, he was greatly admired by the art and design community in Japan, and at some point, met the mayor of the town of Gifu, where local industry centred around making lanterns for ancestry worship, using paper from mulberry trees.
“The mayor asked Noguchi, ‘Can you help us resurrect our lantern business?’ ” said Jenny Dixon, director of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, N.Y. “That’s how the akari were first produced. They were exported as an economic product and were well-received by the design community.”
She added that Noguchi papered them sculpturally. “He didn’t call them lanterns or lamps; he called them light sculptures.”
Noguchi’s concept “stood in sharp contrast to 1950s contemporary, modern, efficient lighting trends,” said Peter Barna, provost of Pratt Institute, the art and design college in Brooklyn, N.Y. Popular lighting options of the day included track lights, adjustable desk lamps and “pole lamps with conical shades,” Barnaadded.
Noguchi’s designs were radically different, “a sculptor’s memory of the soft magic of material and light,” Barna said.
Eventually, Noguchi developed a relationship with one family of lantern mak- ers. The same family still produces his designs today. “They’re all handmade, each one, individually, from moulds. They’re not massproduced,” Dixon said. “We’re now working with the third generation there.”
Depending on which lamp is ordered, “you might hit the jackpot and get a lamp right away or you can wait three to six months.” She added: “We lose a lot of business” from customers who don’t want to wait.
But why spend hundreds on an original when you can get a knock-off for a fraction of the price?
Aside from the difference in workmanship and materials, Danielle Berman, the production designer for Iron Man 3, points out that “the knock-offs aren’t quite his designs.”
Dixon also notes, “Noguchi made these lamps so that people could buy them and live with his sculpture. It was the idea that you too, the every man, for $100, a modest amount of money, could own an artwork by a prominent person.”