Set of Grass Seated Chairs and Stool by George Nakashima, Circa 1960s

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Set of Grass Seated Chairs and Stool by George Nakashima, Circa 1960s

$17,760List Priceper set

About the Item

Grass-seated circa 1960s production in black walnut by George Nakashima with original seagrass seats. Also priced individually in other listings. Price is for the two chairs and stool. These were purchased from the family who owned them originally. Purchased from the grandson whose grandparents ordered them from new from George Nakashima. These chairs are very special in that they were handmade by one of the leading lights of the American studio craft movement. They look simple but have small details that photography can't always show. Each spindle that supports the backrest is not perfectly round, rather they have flat faces because they where hand carved with a hand planer. Japanese style joinery locks the spindle in place. Dimensions: 18" width x 18" depth x 26.5" height; 17" seat height Stool: 18W x 16 Dx 12.5 H About the Designer: George Nakashima stands as a titan in the world of furniture design, a visionary whose influence resonates through American Modernism and changed American furniture making and its philosophy forever. He was born in Washington, he studied Forestry and Architecture at the University of Washington, attended the Ecole Americaine des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau. When he returned to Paris years later, he commented that he "could not help feeling that Paris lived in the past in spite of the powerful inspiration of modern art and architecture". He attended MIT and studied architecture. The next destination was his ancestral land, Japan. In 1934, Nakashima was introduced to Antonin Raymond, who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. in 1941, he got married in L.A. and moved up to Seattle. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the incarceration of all West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry brought Nakashima's new life and endeavors to a halt. Nakashima, his wife, and their newborn daughter were removed to the Minidoka War relocation camp in Hunt, Idaho. Because he had skills as an architect, he was assigned to design and plan rooms and housing for the social betterment of the camp. Nakashima utilized scrap lumber left over from building the barracks and additional materials that he collected out in the desert to make a model apartment. He tried to give his and fellow Japanese Americans' incarcerated lives some level of comfort and dignity. He was paid $19 per month and continued that job until he left the camp in May 1943. One of the camp residents was an experienced Issei carpenter, Gentaro Kenneth Hikogawa , who collaborated with Nakashima on his job building rooms for display. Through their collaborative work, the carpenter trained Nakashima to refine skills as a woodworker. Hikogawa taught Nakashima how to use and take care of Japanese hand tools that were to become essential in Nakashima's postwar production. In later years, Nakashima's knowledge of Japanese wood joinery, which he owed to Hikogawa, surprised Japanese artisans who assumed that no Americans would know about it. Although the incarceration restricted the freedom of the up-and-coming woodworker, it could not contain his passion for work and knowledge. Looking back, Nakashima expressed his bitter feeling about the incarceration in his autobiography: "[The incarceration] I felt at the time was a stupid, insensitive act, one by which my country could only hurt itself. It was a policy of unthinking racism." The days that he spent in the desert of Idaho were harsh, yet the intimate environment of the camp provided Nakashima with an opportunity to reconnect with the Japanese American community. He believed strongly in creating objects that were real and utilitarian. 'Style' was not a concern. Nakashima believed that creating furniture was only a mere vehicle to express the spirit of the tree. Once he was released from the camps, he settled in Pensylvania. In his book, Soul of the Tree he called himself a "rag picker", he would go to the lumber yard and discovered that there were off-cuts. Back then, they quarter sawed most of the lumber so there were pieces they trimmed off that didn’t make good lumber. He was able to scavenge or purchase those and was able to start making furniture out of them. Mira Nakashima said: It’s a very Japanese thing. You find beauty in imperfection. You celebrate it. In the beginning the lumber was full of flaws, there were knot holes and cracks and wormholes and all kinds of things that ordinary furniture makers would have thrown away. But he learned how to do the butterflies, probably from the carpenter in the camp. So he joined pieces with butterflies. He said in the beginning people didn’t understand what he was doing but after a while they paid extra for them.

Creator:
George Nakashima Studio (Maker),George Nakashima (Designer)
Dimensions:
Height: 26.5 in (67.31 cm)Width: 18 in (45.72 cm)Depth: 18 in (45.72 cm)Seat Height: 17 in (43.18 cm)
Sold As:
Set of 3
Style:
Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Seagrass,Walnut,Hand-Carved,Hand-Woven
Place of Origin:
United States
Period:
1950-1959
Date of Manufacture:
Circa 1950's
Condition:
Wear consistent with age and use. We have cleaned all the pieces in this collection. Oiled with Sutherland Welles Tung Oil as per George Nakashimas' preference.
Seller Location:
San Diego, CA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU6417240286022

Shop All George Nakashima

George Nakashima

A master woodworker and M.I.T.-trained architect, George Nakashima was the leading light of the American Studio furniture movement. Along with Wharton Esherick, Sam Maloof and Wendell Castle, Nakashima was an artisan who disdained industrial methods and materials in favor of a personal, craft-based approach to the design of chairs, coffee tables and other pieces. What sets Nakashima apart is the poetic style of his work, his reverence for wood and the belief that his furniture could evince — as he put it in the title of his 1981 memoir — The Soul of a Tree.

Born in Spokane, Washington, to Japanese immigrants, Nakashima traveled widely after college, working and studying in Paris, Japan and India, and at every stop he absorbed both modernist and traditional design influences.

The turning point in Nakashima’s career development came in the United States in 1942, when he was placed in an internment camp for Asian-Americans in Idaho. There, Nakashima met a master woodcarver who tutored him in Japanese crafting techniques. A former employer won Nakashima’s release and brought him to bucolic New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Nakashima set up a studio and worked for the rest of his life. (Master craftsperson Mira Nakashima keeps her father’s legacy alive at the George Nakashima Studio in New Hope today. She has been the artistic director of George Nakashima Woodworkers since her father's death, in 1990.)

Nakashima’s singular aesthetic is best captured in his custom-made tables and benches — pieces that show off the grain, burls and whorls in a plank of wood. He left the “free edge,” or natural contour, of the slab un-planed, and reinforced fissures in the wood with “butterfly” joints.

Almost all Nakashima seating pieces have smooth, milled edges. Nakashima also contracted with large-scale manufacturers to produce carefully supervised editions of his designs. Knoll has offered his Straight chair — a modern take on the spindle-backed Windsor chair — since 1946; the now-defunct firm Widdicomb-Mueller, the result of a merger between Widdicomb and Mueller Furniture, issued the Shaker-inspired Origins collection in the 1950s.

Nelson Rockefeller in 1973 gave Nakashima his single largest commission: a 200-piece suite for his suburban New York estate. Today, Nakashima furniture is collected by both the staid and the fashionable: his work sits in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as in the homes of Steven Spielberg, Brad Pitt, Diane von Furstenberg and the late Steve Jobs.

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