George Nakashima was an interpreter of trees, listening to the voice of nature and translating wood and bark into timeless furniture.
That’s part of the allure of Nakashima (1905-1990), the iconic artisan whose sinuous, realistic studies attract a growing crop of admirers.
“One of the enduring qualities of his work is his ability to communicate his love of wood to other people,” says Robert Aibel, who sells Nakashima furniture at Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia. “He made furniture that people live with – the dining room table where you eat, the rocker where you nurse your baby.” Nakashima was the most prolific and best-known figure of the American Studio Furniture Movement (1940-1990), an artistic renaissance born in the City of Brotherly Love that promoted craft as an antidote to mass-produced modern furniture. Nakashima’s workshop in nearby New Hope, Pa., produced 25,000 pieces ranging from two-legged Conoid chairs to the massive Peace Table at the Cathedral of John the Divine in Manhattan. Matt Freeman, who grew up a few miles from the studio, was raised with Nakashima furniture his parents used and enjoyed every day. He remembers the list of pieces getting taller as he did, eventually including a dining room table and chairs, end tables, cabinets and shelves.
“My parents weren’t overly protective about the furniture, but all the pieces are in pristine shape today, 40 years later,” he said. “Even as kids we had this quiet respect for the way they were made … They’d just sort of sit there quietly glowing. We’d set down our soda glasses and sticky lollipops somewhere else, not on the Nakashima.”
Like children, each tree has its own personality. Nakashima was the first to embrace the knotholes, fissures and splits in wood as wondrous expressions of nature rather than imperfections. While most furniture makers discard the thin, irregular ends of slabs, Nakashima integrated them into his designs. Known as “free edges,” those elements are factors in determining the value of a piece. Basically, the more free edges, the greater the value.
That technique is personified in the “Arlyn” table, named for Nakashima’s friends and longtime patrons, Arthur (the “Ar”) and Evelyn (the “lyn”) Krosnick. Crafted from an exquisite slice of redwood burl, the table was shipped to an exhibit in 1989 and was one of only two pieces spared from a fire at the couple’s home in Princeton, N.J.; sadly, the other 109 works were reduced to ashes.
With the help of his daughter and protégée, Mira, a frail and aged Nakashima went to work re-creating the furnishings, down to wooden place mats.
“He promised to re-create them all – only better,” Evelyn Krosnick recalled. “He kept his word.”
The Arlyn table, auctioned at Sotheby’s on Dec. 15, 2006, shattered records for Nakashima at a jaw-dropping $822,400, nearly triple the previous record. Its new home will be an American Arts & Crafts museum the Two Red Roses Foundation is planning to build in Tarpon Springs, Fla.
Born in Spokane, Wash., to immigrant Japanese parents of Samurai lineage, Nakashima was the firstborn son of a newspaper reporter. As an Eagle Scout, he hiked in the Cascade Mountains, where he was enchanted by towering hemlocks and Douglas firs.
“Each tree, each part of each tree, has its own particular destiny, its own special yearning to be fulfilled,” he later wrote. “We work this material to fulfill this yearning of nature to find its destiny, to give this absolute inanimate object a second life, to release its richness, its beauty, to read its history and its life.”
Nakashima studied architecture in Paris, worked in Tokyo and spent two years in India as a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and integral yoga after he volunteered to design structures and furniture there without pay. At the ashram, he was given the name Sundarananda, which means “one who delights in beauty.”
On the eve of World War II, he returned home to the United States. In 1942, Nakashima and his family were interned in a camp for Japanese-Americans in Idaho, where he apprenticed himself to an elderly Japanese furniture maker. After the war, they moved to an artists’ colony in New Hope, where Nakashima would spend the rest of his long and productive life. Furniture is crafted at the compound to this day, which is operated by Mira Nakashima, also a trained architect.
She believes people are attracted to her father’s work because it balances strength and delicacy.
“His design makes a statement – and then there’s just letting the tree be itself,” she told Style Century Magazine.
Although there are no maker’s marks on Nakashima furniture, he sometimes signed pieces at the buyer’s request, always with India ink or a black magic marker. Most often, furniture is identified by its impeccable workmanship and the exceptional graining of the wood he brought to his barn from all over the world. Provenance is typically documented through original work orders, either saved by the owner or on file at Nakashima Studios.
His largest commission came in 1974, when he made all the furnishings for Nelson Rockefeller’s Japanese-style home in Potantico Hills, N.Y., more than 200 pieces.
Prices for Nakashima have escalated sharply in recent years. A dining table sold for $129,250 at a June 2004 sale at Los Angeles Modern Auctions, then a world record. The massive work – 8 feet in diameter — was crafted in the 1960s from an English oak log and features natural fissures, an intricate base of clustered braces and butterfly joinery in East Indian laurel wood.
“Everyone realized that this was a masterpiece,” said Peter Loughrey, LAMA owner and founder. “If it came on the market today, I think the price would be even higher.”
In October, a coffee table in the Minguren I, a design typified by a freeform maple burl top, single rosewood butterfly key and solid frame, and a walnut coffee table in the same form each fetched $144,000 at the Sollo Rago Modern sale in Lambertville, N.J.
John Sollo, who has been buying and selling Nakashima since the early 1990s, said tables have become the most sought-after form by the craftsman.
“In the beginning, it all seemed to bring the same money, no matter if it were a chair or a shelf,” he said. “As the collectors became more evolved, big dining tables and coffee tables became the most desirable.” Other highlights from the sale included: an English walnut pedestal desk for $132,000; a Minguren II walnut coffee table, $114,000; and a Carpathian elm burl coffee table with the original bill and written correspondence with the owner, $108,000.
Happily for aficionados of more modest means, Nakashima was a productive artist and many of his pieces remain within reach. Cabinets, dressers, armless sofas and headboards frequently can be bought at auction for less than $10,000.
“Nakashima has led the modern market because it speaks to people at a basic level,” Sollo said. “It’s beautiful, useful and absolutely true.”
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