After a quick analysis of the 417 lots by such stalwarts as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, Norman Cherner, Florence Knoll, George Nakashima, Edward Wormley, Hans Wegner, Milo Baughman, Jean Prouve and others, here's how the results broke down:

    117 lots sold within their projected ranges (28%)

    157 lots did not meet their reserve (37%)

    49 lots sold below their ranges (12%)

    94 lots sold above their projected ranges (23%)

Of the 157 lots that did not sell, many were assorted tables and chairs by George Nelson, George Nakashima, Vladimir Kagan, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Florence Knoll, Finn Juhl, Gio Ponti and, surprisingly, various pairs of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chairs reasonably priced between $5,000 and $7,000.

A Swan Chair by Arne Jacobsen estimated between $4,000 and $6,000 sold for a conservative $4,800 - considerably less than prices as high as $7,200 I've seen in recent years.

Of the 94 that sold above their projected ranges, there were a few notable pieces that hit it way out of the ballpark:

A chair by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen for the MoMA Organic Design Competition which was expected to get between $15,000 and $20,000 sold for a whopping $50,400.

An Eames DAR shell chair on an ""Eiffel" base that was expected to get between $500 and $700 got a remarkable $5,400.

A pair of Eames DKR wire chairs with "bikini" slip covers that were projected to get $500 to $700 roped-in $3,000.

An Arredoluce 3-arm floor lamp in all-white that was estimated at $5-7,000 got $15,600 (while a nearly identical Arredoluce lamp with blue, red and yellow shades got a mere $8,400.)

An Eames ETR "surfboard" coffee table that was projected to get $3-5,000 sold for $24,000!  Kowabunga, dude!

And the surprise of the evening was a 1937 bakelite radio by Isamu Noguchi for Zenith that was expected to get $3-5,000 and instead sold for an eye-popping $22,800!  (And it doesn't even play FM!  What's that about?!?)

Readers of my posts on the Eames Lounge 670 and Ottoman 671 will be interested to know that a vintage rosewood model by Herman Miller sold for $3,120 - within its projected range of $3,000-$4,000 but way below its historic high of $7,000.  And an early Noguchi coffee table in ebony with a rare green-glass top was a bargain at $1,920, a bit shy of it's projected range of $2,000-$3,000 and far less than the $6,600 the same table got at the same auction last year - perhaps a sign of the times.

So how does this compare to years past?  There are too many variables to make a definitive apples-to-apples comparison but Wright's October 2007 Modern auction raked in $3.9 million (an average of $7,876 per lot) to this year's $2.1 million ($5,155 per lot) - a stunning 45% drop.  And whereas 37% of the lots sold for above the projected range in 2007, only 23% did so in 2008.  Unsold lots increased from 21% to 37%.

Of special note, Barcelona chairs that sold above estimates for $7,200 a pair in 2007 had no takers at all in 2008 despite a minimum reserve of only $5,000.  An Edward Wormley 6329 sofa that sold for three times its estimate for $14,400 in 2007 got only $4,800 in 2008.  And a Comprehensive Storage System by George Nelson that sold for a whopping $36,750 in 2007 (estimated at $5-7,000) got a mere $8,400 in 2008.  Ouch!  On the other hand, anything Eames such as assorted DCW, LCW and RAR chairs all increased in value by up to 450% from last year's prices.

A logical conclusion one could draw from these results is that with so many of the lots by Charles and Ray Eames selling for far above estimates this year and for far higher prices than a year ago, anything by Eames has been a stellar investment for those lucky sellers.  Nakashima, Nelson and Kagan collectors?  Not so much.  But times change and tastes shift so better luck next time.  To see the entire results for yourself, visit the Wright20 site here.

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Last week I spent a considerable amount of time making Power Point resources for Applied Art GCSE Woodcarving scheme of work. The artists listed were: Andy Goldsworth; Georgia O'Keefe; Henry Moore; Barbara Hepworth; Isamu Noguchi and Antony Gormley.

I tried to keep the presentations brief (about 8 pages) with a basic chronology of their working practice from the start of their professional training to their current practice or death.

There is a page outlining some of their key artistic influences. These influences can be relating to:

A theme (Thematic) e.g. the body and Antony Gormley

A place (Environmental) e.g. Mexico and Georgia O'Keefe

World events (contextual) e.g. Henry Moore and WWII

People/Movements e.g. Barbara Hepworth and the British modernists

Cultural/Religious e.g. Isamu Noguchi and Buddhism.

There is also a section which suggest "Key Words" and "Materials, Techniques and Technology" to help us understand the Power Point introduction to the artist.

Shortly before the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, in 1904, his father, a poet, abandoned his mother and returned to Japan (Noguchi later confessed a “moral loathing” for him). Two years later, his American mother, also a writer, decided to emigrate and raise her son in Tokyo. But when he turned 13 she sent him back, alone, to an American high school. He never forgave her.

If his parents treated him badly, his adopted country wasn’t much better. Noguchi trained with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who incised the faces of the presidents into Mount Rushmore. Borglum concluded that his pupil had no talent. Noguchi also worked as the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio assistant in Paris in the late 1920s. Yet he wasn’t chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale until 1986. And when an American museum first honoured him with a significant show, in 1942, Noguchi was cooling his heels in an internment camp for enemy aliens, albeit voluntarily. “I find myself a wanderer in the world,” he once said, “belonging everywhere and nowhere.”

Noguchi died in 1988, and today his memory is kept alive by the museum that he founded on the site of his old studio in New York. But next week his spirit descends on the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, in what will be, remarkably, the first major show of his work in Europe. The venue is apt, for one associates Henry Moore’s figures with the park’s rolling landscape, and in many respects Noguchi is America’s Moore.

His early style, exemplified in works such as Leda, from 1928, and 1000 Horsepower Heart (1939), was Constructivist and Futurist in inspiration. But later, like Moore, he would transform into a more versatile sculptor of abstract form. During the war his style would take on an anguished, Surrealist mood in works such as Figure, a piece he made in marble in 1944, and then cast in bronze. Later, he would become a sculptor of polished monoliths and strange ancient stones such as Woman, from 1984.

Like Moore, Noguchi also loved public projects. Unlike Moore, however, he had no talent for practicalities, and most of his early proposals were quickly rejected. In 1933 his proposal for a vast playground in New York was snubbed. Then he proposed building a pyramidal mound a mile wide on the prairies and installing on it a giant steel sculpture of a plough. That also failed. In 1947 he came up with an idea for a Sculpture to be Seen from Mars: a vast face made from mounds of sand, with a nose a mile high, located “in some desert, some unwanted area”. Again nobody wanted it.

Amid these disappointments, Noguchi struggled, and in his early years he supported himself as a sculptor of portrait busts to America’s creative elite. But his moment would come. Finally, in 1951, he was commissioned to create his first garden, for the offices of Reader’s Digest in Tokyo. He built a sculpture garden for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He even managed to persuade authorities in Atlanta to let him build a playground (though arguments over the safety of his equipment simmered on).

He also built two bridges in a Peace Park in Hiroshima. As a schoolboy, the fashion designer Issey Miyake would cycle over them every day. Later, the two would become friends, and Noguchi would become an inspiration for Miyake, who saw in him a model of the successful Japanese creator – true to his roots, yet understood across the world. “I am living with a sense of having been passed a baton,” Miyake once said.

Noguchi also created an eerie white marble garden for the library of Yale University. It contains some of his favourite motifs: a circular sun symbol, a pyramid to represent the earth, and a cube standing on one of its corners. The latter was a symbol, for Noguchi, of chance, and if you thought that only sage institutions such as Yale would favour such things, take a stroll down Broadway on your next visit to New York and you’ll find a massive red cube balancing in front of the black tombstone edifice of the Marine Midland Bank, looking as if it had fallen off the roof.

Many of the public projects that Noguchi undertook after the war still survive, though many look dated. So it is perhaps odd that Noguchi continues to fascinate critics. Some see him as a predecessor of the land artists of the 1960s, figures such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer – creators of massive earth sculptures and enveloping environments. Others see an early example of today’s globe-trotting, culture-swapping artists.

What strikes a bigger chord about Noguchi is the sheer heedlessness with which he crossed boundaries. One important inspiration for him was the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, whom he met in the early 1930s, and for whom he created some 20 set designs. Another model was Buckminster Fuller: Noguchi met the Modernist visionary in the early 1930s, and Fuller would continue to be a great supporter, proving that even if the Modernist future looked very techno-scientific, it could also embrace ancient and mystical accents as well.

But it was undoubtedly also Noguchi’s own Japanese heritage and his own spirited inclinations that led him to be such an artistic gadabout. He tried ceramics – and his sleek cups and saucers are still made by Vitra. He even tried furniture, and had his designs taken up by Knoll and Herman Miller.

After being asked to contribute to a book called How to Make a Table, Noguchi took a form he had been working with, a loop of wood, cut it and swivelled it and crowned it with a glass top to create his 1944 coffee table (Herman Miller still produces it). And, after a trip to Japan in 1951, when he visited the town of Gifu, which was famous for its lantern makers, he designed a series of Akari lamp sculptures made from bamboo and mulberry bark. Today, their bootleg offspring adorn budget interiors the world over.

Noguchi may have been uncertain at times, but by the end of his life he was reaching for a position where a sculpture could be a play object and a feat of product design as well. For his swansong at the Venice Biennale in 1986, he created a coiled Carrera marble sculpture, Slide Mantra, that at first glance looked like pristine and precious Modernism. If you had looked again you would have seen that it functioned as a slide, too.

Morgan Falconer
Times Online

Elmgreen & Dragset's "Drama Queens" onstage at Theater Basel.

BASEL, Switzerland — So far this week, Art Basel 39 has catered to Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes and Brad Pitt. Far less visible was art with a sense of humor -- the only real antidote to infection by its otherwise unrelenting sense of self-importance. That is one reason why it was easy to applaud the arrival of "Drama Queens," a puppet play by collaborating artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, at Theater Basel on Wednesday night. If the jokes were inside-art ones, they were serious enough to be funny. Performed only once by a cast of six radio-controlled robots portraying sculptures by Isamu Noguchi, Joan Miro, Alberto Giacometti, Sol Lewitt, Jeff Koons, Ulrich Ruchriem and Andy Warhol, it had dialogue by Tim Etchells that fell somewhere between Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and Diana Vreeland. "I saw you in Milan at that party at Donatella's!" screeched Koons's upstart "Rabbit" to Giacometti's "Walking Man" at one point. Sniping at each other's figures like small-town gossips, these characters pitted minimalism against modernism and fashion against philosophy, only to be silenced by Pop.

Elmgreen and Dragset, who are based in Berlin (but hail from Norway and Denmark), like to upset social convention with architectural alterations, like the tempting Prada store they created in the Marfa, Tex., desert but sealed off from consumers by neglecting to give it a door entrance. I was still laughing when I arrived at a restaurant called Eoipso for a dinner in honor of "Water in Milk Exists," a graphic and occasionally embarrassing pornographic film of a staged orgy by the conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner. Words are Weiner's usual medium; this time he chose to focus on tits and testicles. Unlike "Drama Queens," the film has no story or characters, only action, in that the men work hard but only the women get off. It's sort of feminist. Said Weiner, "I'm really happy with it." Personally, the dinner itself was what made me happy. In a week of catch-as-catch-can meals, the food here was glorious, while the place itself was a large brick and glass industrial building – apparently a former body shop.

Nicholas Logsdail, who founded Lisson Gallery in London thirty years ago, regaled me with the story of his introduction to art by his uncle, Roald Dahl and introduced me to Paul Myners, a real estate developer and a financial whiz who is also chairman of The Guardian, chairman of the Tate Foundation and still doesn't seem to have enough to do. Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry was also there, along with curators Frances Morris and Ann Gallagher from the Tate, the extremely pleasant, seemingly seven-foot-tall Lucerne collector Michael Ringier, and Los Angeles collector of not just art but several hundred thousand dollars worth of designer shoes and handbags, Rosette DeLug. These are my people now. Like family. Yep, that's how it goes here now. If the art fair itself is less than dramatic, the social science behind it is totally hardcore.

Koutarou Sekiguchi's enormous masking tape and newspaper tower.

Issey Miyake is the conductor of a new multimedia exhibition XX1st Century Man, that is now being shown in Japan. He has assembled works by famed sculptor James Hawkinson and the late great Isamu Noguchi on the topics of the environment, fashion, design, and architecture.

The exhibit runs through July 6, 2008, at 21_21 Design Sight

21_21 designsight.jp

-Ken Marcelle

Sleep where Noguchi Isamu slept in the Hotel des Academies et des Arts Paris arty hotel

The above is a picture of a sculpture called "News" from 1938. It is located in Rockefeller Center in New York City.

If this sculpture was created today, it might well portray someone sitting behind a computer.

Would that person be a blogger or a more traditional journalist?

It might be left up to the viewer of the work to decide.

I'm certain a woman would be in the updated version.

The sculptor was Isamu Noguchi. Click here for details of Noguchi's life.