Wright Auction

This radical mobility gives the Akari an air of magic, with each new form a singular act of prestidigitation. The sorcery is compounded by the fact that they can be “packed knocked down,” as period advertisements put it – that is, collapsed flat for storage and shipping.[5]  This is extremely practical, while also enhancing the metaphor that Noguchi was after: “They do not encumber our space as mass or as possession, if they hardly exist in use, when not in use they fold away in an envelope.”[6]  As he never failed to point out, the Japanese word akari is a direct equivalent of the English light; it means both illumination and weightlessness. In a sense – and this is why he insisted on presenting them in Venice – they are the purest sculptures he ever made, insofar as he thought of sculptures as “energy concentrations, irrational but meaningful… impalpable voids and pressures, the punctuations of spaces.”[7]

Yet even this lofty understanding of the Akari, as conjoined presence and absence, containment and emanation, doesn’t fully do them justice. To understand why, we have to return to the Akari origin story and see it in context. We can begin in May of 1950, when, following an extensive tour of Asia, Noguchi set foot in Japan for the first time in almost twenty years. It was a triumphant return. His reputation preceded him, and the country’s progressive architects, artists, and designers were eager to collaborate with him, among them Kenzo Tange, who was developing a synthesis of European-style modernism and traditional Japanese building styles. Tange was the overall planner for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, and began discussions about involving Noguchi in designs for the site. 

“They do not encumber our space as mass or as possession, if they hardly exist in use, when not in use they fold away in an envelope.” —Isamu Noguchi

After a trip back to New York City – during which he met film actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi, whom he would marry the following year – Noguchi was back in Japan again, arriving in the spring of 1951. It was in June of that year that he encountered the paper chochin (lanterns) of Gifu for the first time. In an early account, he described the moment in picturesque terms, focusing on the cormorant fishing festival held at night: “fires dance upon the waters which, fast approaching, are seen to blaze from the prows of long slender fishing boats… It is like a chariot race of birds in which we take part, caught in the excitement, drifting along beside the busy fishing in our lantern-bedecked boat.”[8]

The spectacle doubtless did make an impression, but more consequential was a pragmatic request from the mayor of Gifu. Like so many Japanese craft industries, the city’s lantern-making enterprise had been devastated by the war. An introduction was made to Tameshiro Ozeki, whose family had been making lamps since 1891, using traditional materials: paper made from the inner bark of kozo (a type of mulberry tree), a bentwood rim, and a continuous spiraling rib of bamboo to provide structure. Fascinated by the process, Noguchi began thinking about how he might adapt it. By October he had developed all the key innovations that distinguished the Akari from their historic precedents: the use of electric lighting, in place of a candle; stands in metal wire; and the elimination of the rigid rim, enabling the creation of varied freeform shapes.[9]

The real genius of the Akari, however, was not in their construction. Rather, it was the way they symbolized a new way forward for Japan, both artistically and economically. During the initial phase of postwar reconstruction, the country’s economy had necessarily re-oriented itself toward exports. Cheap goods marked “Made in Japan,” often mass-manufactured in imitation of higher-quality handmade products, flooded the American market. Domestically, these export goods were referred to as kurafto, a transliteration of the English word “craft,” as opposed to the indigenous term, kogei.[10]

With the end of the US Occupation – announced on September 8, 1951, even as Noguchi was designing his first Akari – questions of economic development became even more pressing. There was a strong impetus to rebuild the country’s industrial base, but also a fear that this would endanger the continuity of its traditions. What emerged was a bifurcated situation, with investment in craft and consumer electronics occurring simultaneously: the Living National Treasure program had its inception in 1955, the same year that the first Sony transistor radio was introduced. 

Yet, if the Akari embodied modernization, they communicated respect for the past just as strongly.

The Akari floated free of this apparently contradictory situation. While early examples shipped to the USA are stamped “Japan” – underneath the sun and moon logo that Noguchi devised – the lights themselves did not fit into any existing export categories. Instead, they bring the opposing forces acting on postwar Japan into a harmonious union, symbolized by the combination of washi paper, subtle, tough, and translucent, with electric light, an American invention. This “deflection of an old tradition,” as Noguchi put it, was closely paralleled in other arts at the time in Japan.[11] The sosaku hanga (“creative prints”) movement, for example, created modernist compositions using ukiyo-e woodblock techniques which dated back to the Edo period.[12] Filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa (whose great Rashomon was released in 1950) reinvented Japanese mythology with the pacing and style of a contemporary western, or film noir. Noguchi himself was a key protagonist in the radicalization of ceramics, then little regarded in the USA, but in Japan, a hallowed art form. The experiments in clay that he created in 1952, right in parallel with his Akari, were presented in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura, providing key inspiration for such avant garde potters as Yagi Kazuo and his colleagues in the groundbreaking Sodeisha group.[13]

Yet, if the Akari embodied modernization, they communicated respect for the past just as strongly. Their transmutation of the harsh glare of an electric lightbulb into a soft glow is comparable to the effect of shoji screens, which lend the Japanese interior such nuance. During his first postwar visit, in 1950, Noguchi wrote of his conversations with the Japanese: “I suggested that to be modern did not mean to copy us but to be themselves, looking to their own roots for strength and inspiration… I told them that many Americans were not at all sure about progress being such a good thing.”[14] He himself needed no reminder that technology could be a destructive force: in the same months that he was working on his first Akari, he was developing proposals for Tange’s Hiroshima project, including sculptural handrails for two bridges (which were realized) and an imposing arch-shaped cenotaph (which was not), which he described as “a mass of black granite, glowing at the base from a light beyond and below.”[15]

Another very American thing about the Akari is that they are recognizably “modern design.” Their spidery stands have a family resemblance to the metal legs of an Eames DCM (designed in 1946), while the overall conception is similar to George Nelson’s contemporaneous Bubble lamps (designed in 1952, and inspired not by the Akari but by a Scandinavian hanging fixture that Nelson liked, with a silk shade; his version used plastic). Noguchi had already had considerable success in this field, of course, with his biomorphic IN-50 coffee table (1944) one of the signature designs of the era. 

Yet he never saw himself as a purveyor of commodities. The Akari did sell well through various outlets – including Bonniers, the premier showcase for Scandinavian design in New York City – but Noguchi always prioritized his creative energies over his commercial interests. Unlike the Eameses and Nelson, he constantly changed the product line, constantly introducing new shapes and structural variants. The forms cross an extraordinary range: spheres and ellipses, articulated totems, torqued pillars, even an allusion to the Endless Column of Constantin Brancusi, in whose studio Noguchi had apprenticed at the beginning of his career. Even the numbering system for the Akari is sufficiently complex as to baffle the uninitiated (for example, A designates regular and closely spaced ribbing, D a more open and meandering pattern, and F a narrow but irregular spacing). Matters are complicated further by a longstanding tendency to mix and match shades and bases, which Noguchi actively encouraged, viewing the system as modular. 

Bonniers tried to impose order, informing its customers in 1964 that Noguchi had progressed from “rounded shapes, then sculptured lights, now the squares, and he has given the bamboo strips an elusive random wind.”[16] In fact, the development of Akari was never so linear. It was an ongoing improvisation, made possible by artisan production methods. The fact that the Akari were so widely knocked-off in inferior versions made him all the more defiant: “I’m always fleeing them by going on and on to seek new forms.”[17]

Of course, people did want them; they were prepared to follow Noguchi on his path of restless invention, wherever it led. The resulting diversity makes the Akari a unique phenomenon in design history, at once elusive and pervasive. Eventually, Noguchi came to recognize that the omnipresence of his creation had itself become part of its meaning: “It may be said that an art that has gained such status of familiarity must influence the way of life. For poor or rich they are a mark of sensibility, not of status, but as an accent of quality, giving light to whatever may be our world.”[18]

And if, as Noguchi also liked to say, all one really needs to start a home is a room, a futon, and a single Akari hanging above, they are that much more powerful when installed en masse. This is certainly the case with the present gathering, a rare opportunity to see and compare a wide range of pristine early examples. And here we arrive at one last intriguing duality, in a story filled with them: objects originally intended to gesture toward the immaterial have themselves become relics, of a kind. Each light is a fragile monument to a whole way of thinking. Akari stands as luminous proof that seemingly intractable oppositions can indeed be transcended. Noguchi was often expected to choose between old and new, east and west, art and design. His answer was always yes. 

[1] John Russell Taylor, “Slipping So Easily into the Surreal,” The Times [London] (July 1, 1986).

[2] See Glenn Adamson, “Representing America: Isamu Noguchi at the 1986 Venice Biennale,” online feature, 2020, The Noguchi Museum.

[3] See Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020).

[4] Noguchi, “Sculpture as Invention,” 1952. Isamu Noguchi Foundation Archive, MS_WRI_017_001.

[5] Bonniers advertisement for Akari Jr., ca. 1956.  Isamu Noguchi Foundation Archive, B_AD_2000_1956.

[6] Isamu Noguchi, “On Washi,” in Sukey Hughes, Washi: The World of Japanese Paper, (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1975).

[7] “From an Interview with Isamu Noguchi,” 1949; in Diane Apostolos-Cappadonna and Bruce Altschuler, eds, Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).

[8] Isamu Noguchi, “Japanese Akari Lamps,” Craft Horizons 14/5 (Sept./Oct. 1954), 17-18: 17.

[9] Hayden Herrera, Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 283.

[10] Yuko Kikuchi, “Russel Wright and Design: Bridging Japonisme and Good Design Through Craft,” Journal of Modern Craft 1/3 (Nov. 2008), 357-382.

[11] Noguchi, “Japanese Akari Lamps,” 18.

[12] Alicia Volk, Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press/Milwaukee Art Museum, 1995).

[13] Louise Cort, Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

[14] Isamu Noguchi, “Recent Work Exhibited in Japan” (1950), in Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, 95.

[15] Isamu Noguchi, “Project: Hiroshima Memorial to the Dead,” Arts & Architecture 70/4 (April 1953), 16-17. See Dakin Hart, “Noguchi’s Memorials to the Atomic Dead,” online feature, 2021, The Noguchi Museum

[16] Bonniers newsletter, April 1964. Isamu Noguchi Foundation Archive, B_CLI_2000_1964.

[17] Tamotsu Ogata, “Isamu Noguchi: The Wandering Artist,” Japan Illustrated (Sumer 1974), 2-7: 5.

[18] Isamu Noguchi, “The Meaning of Akari,” in Space of Akari and Stone (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1986), 94.