Word: nakashima
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Just days after their Princeton, N.J., house burned down, physician Arthur Krosnick and his wife Evelyn visited their friend George Nakashima. Over three decades, the Krosnicks had collected 114 pieces of furniture created by Nakashima, who lives in Bucks County, Pa. Now they asked the 84-year-old craftsman if he could re-create the collection, nearly all of which was lost in the fire. Any other octogenarian might have hesitated, but not Nakashima. With the same kind of powerful understatement that characterizes his furniture, he agreed, remarking, "You've been loyal, and I'd like to help...
...nearly half a century, Nakashima has been producing unique furniture for loyal clients. In the process, he has also built a distinguished reputation. Fellow furniture maker Sam Maloof calls him the "elder statesman" of the postwar American crafts movement; Anne d'Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, proclaims him "a national treasure." To further polish his renown, a warm and witty retrospective show of his work is now on view at the American Crafts Museum in New York City. "Full Circle" presents 43 of Nakashima's best pieces, from a battered 1944 teak coffee table to a masterly...
...work that has emerged from his small monastic enclave is the opposite of modern metal or glossy wood furniture. Nakashima involves himself totally, from the selection and first rough cutting of the logs to the final caress of the sandpaper. "There are a thousand intricacies and a thousand decisions," he says. "An old tree is unpredictable. It is a stirring moment when out of an inert mass drawn from nature, we set out to produce an object never before seen, an object that is useful, but with a lyric quality...
...Nakashima's forms follow nature. His famous coffee tables are made of planks sliced from the trunk or root systems of such trees as the redwood or Eng lish walnut. Their natural configuration remains unchanged. So do natural breaks in the wood, which Nakashima holds to gether with small pieces of wood shaped like butterflies...
...contrast, the work of former Painter Peter Danko, 33, of Alexandria, Va., is an advance along the simple path cut by Nakashima. Danko's furniture represents an intriguing blend of the sculptural and the functional, with a healthy respect for the natural qualities of the wood. More over, pieces like the Danko Chair are light in weight and appearance and thus well suited to small apartments. With delight ful ingenuity, Danko is experimenting with folding chairs of molded plywood. One of the plies is a bendable, plastic material, so the chair folds without metal hinges...