At 84, woodworker George Nakashima can look back on his life and say, "I guess, in a way, it doesn't make any sense." After all, how does an architect become a furniture maker? How does a world traveler settle down in rural Pennsylvania? How does a craftsman design furniture that combines early American and Japanese sensibilities? How does a production shop turn out furniture highly prized enough to become the subject of a major exhibition at the American Craft Museum, the flagship institution of the American craft movement?
Trained as an architect with degrees from prestigious schools here and abroad, Nakashima practiced his profession in the 1930s and 1940s in New York, Tokyo, Pondicherry, India, and Seattle before deciding to become a woodworker, his preferred "title." He has lived on the Left Bank in Paris, in his ancestral home outside Tokyo, in an ashram in India, and in an internment camp in the desert of Idaho during the Second World War before settling down outside the quaint, artistic, and now touristic, community of New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Nakashima utilizes the traditional tools and methods of his Japanese forebears but does not disdain power machinery. His work has an oriental sensibility but it also alludes to early American furniture and shares the simplicity of Shaker work. Nakashima's writings on wood and craft are frequently poetic ("There must be a union between the spirit in wood and the spirit in man"), but he has a hardheaded businessman's approach to his work ("Craft, small production, products with personal responsibility, seemed exploitable"). He says, "I don't think craft has to be great art," yet his works, while supremely functional, are also sculptural. He protests that he is a simple man but clearly is not.
To call Nakashima paradoxical is too limiting. His own heritage perhaps can offer a more accurate description: the Eastern concept of yin and yang, where opposites are embraced equally, crating not conflict but harmony.
Samurai Family
A closer look at his biography reveals Nakashima's complexity. Although born in Spokane in 1905, Nakashima descends from a samurai family. He first worked with wood as a grade school youngster in Seattle. As an Eagle Scout, Nakashima spent many hours hiking in the Cascade and Olympic mountains of Washington State. He labored on the railroads and in salmon canneries to help earn money for his education (Diploma and Prix Fontainebleau in Architecture, Ecole Americaine des Beaux Arts, Fontainebleau, 1928; Bachelor of Architecture, University of Washington, 1929; and Master of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1930).
After painting murals in Richard Brooks' studio in New York in 1930-31, he was an architectural designer for the Long Island State Park Commission until 1933. When the Depression curtailed those projects, Nakashima decided to see the world: "I thought the only thing for me to do was to find out who I was and what I was doing. So I decided to travel and I decided to travel without any funds. I traveled for seven years, starting out with about two hundred dollars." He went first to England and then to Paris, intending to stay a year. "I enjoyed Paris then. It was a time of all the great artists, writers: Matisse and Picasso, Hemingway. All you had to do was sit in the cafes and imbibe it all." Toward the end of his stay,
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