"Number 9" Table Lamp by Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi was the "artist-designer" par excellence. No other formgiver before or since has been as comfortable, as natural, straddling the two worlds of fine and applied art. Much as he sought, all his life, to reconcile the Eastern with the Western aesthetic, Noguchi equally attempted to elide the boundaries and hierarchies separating the design of everyday objects from the creation of unique masterpieces.

Noguchi's three-legged table lamp, designed for Knoll in the mid-1940s, was his first and perhaps purest lighting design, predating his famous "Akari" paper lamps by five years. It is a truly sculptural lamp, with three slender but beautifully tapered legs of cherrywood internally supporting a cylinder of transparent parchment-like material. With, of course, a lightbulb in its fixture inside.