George Nakashima

George Katsutoshi Nakashima was born on May 24, 1905, in Spokane, Washington, to Japanese immigrant parents. He studied forestry and then architecture at the University of Washington, and in 1929 won a fellowship to the Ecole Americaine des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau, France, where he took the Prix Fontainebleau at the end of his year of study. He briefly enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master's degree in architecture in 1930.

Nakashima worked internationally as an architect before returning to the United States. During the Second World War he and his family were incarcerated at the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho, where he learned traditional Japanese woodworking techniques from a fellow internee. After his release in 1943, he settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and established the studio and workshop that would define his career, working primarily in walnut and other solid hardwoods, leaving natural edges and cracks in the wood and joining them with rosewood butterfly inlays rather than concealing them.

His craftsmanship earned wide institutional recognition, including the AIA Gold Medal for Craftsmanship in 1952, the Architectural League of New York's Silver Medal of Honor in 1960, and, in 1983, the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class, awarded by the Government of Japan. He suffered a stroke in October 1989 and had been in poor health in the months that followed. He died on June 15, 1990, at his home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, at the age of 85. He was survived by his wife, Marion Okajima Nakashima, his son, Kevin Katsuya Nakashima, and his daughter, Mira Nakashima, who has led the studio, George Nakashima Woodworkers, in New Hope ever since.

Nakashima is consistently described in museum and craft literature as a central figure of the American craft movement, valued for treating wood grain, knots, and natural edges as the subject of the work rather than flaws to be hidden. His furniture has been shown or held at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a major traveling retrospective, George Nakashima: Nature, Form and Spirit, was presented at the Japanese American National Museum in 2004 and 2005. In 1989, the year before his death, the American Craft Museum in New York presented Full Circle, a retrospective devoted to his work.

Nakashima's furniture trades regularly at design and Americana auctions, with results that typically run from the low five figures for chairs and smaller case pieces to the low six figures for major slab tables. The best documented auction high with a confirmed exact sale date is the Important and Rare Minguren Coffee Table (1977), which sold for USD 161,000 at Heritage Auctions on November 17, 2016, a figure Heritage's own artist index continues to identify as its recorded high for the artist. Other design houses, including Christie's, Phillips, Rago, and Wright, sell his work regularly, and the studio he founded continues to produce new pieces under his daughter Mira Nakashima, so collectors should always confirm whether a given work dates to the artist's lifetime or to the studio's later production.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Nakashima, so provenance, documentation from the family studio archive, and the specific piece's manufacture history carry significant weight in both authentication and pricing. Because the George Nakashima Woodworkers studio has continued to build pieces to his designs since his death, collectors should distinguish work made during the artist's lifetime from later studio production when evaluating a piece, and treat any single auction result with the understanding that his market is comparatively thin and spread across several design houses rather than concentrated in one venue.