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  Sori Yanagi / Tendo Co. Ltd. / Japanese Crafts “Butterfly” Stool c.1956

  Sori Yanagi (1915-2012), Japan
  Tendo Co. Ltd., Japan

  Butterfly stool, 1956.

  Bleached rosewood veneer on plywood with brass.

  H: 15” x W: 16 ½” x D: 12”

  Price: $4,900

  This model can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

  The Japanese designer Sori Yanagi is best known for his 1956 Butterfly Stool. It is both elegant and utterly simple: two curved pieces of molded plywood are held together through compression and tension by a single brass rod. The stool’s graceful shape recalls a butterfly’s wings, and has also been compared to the form of torii, the traditional Shinto shrine gates. He loved traditional Japanese crafts and was dedicated to the modernist principles of simplicity, practicality and tactility that are associated with Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray Eames, and Le Corbusier.”

  Yanagi, who studied architecture and art at Tokyo’s Academy of Fine Art, was inspired by the work of Le Corbusier and by the designer Charlotte Perriand, with whom he worked in the early 1940s, while she was in Tokyo as the arts and crafts adviser to the Japanese Board of Trade. But perhaps the most indelible influence on Yanagi was that of his father, Soetsu Yanagi, who led the “mingei” movement, which celebrated Japanese folk craft and the beauty of everyday objects, and who founded the Nihon Mingeikan (or Japanese Folk Crafts Museum) in Tokyo. Yanagi fils, who was named director of the museum in 1977, succinctly described his design aesthetic in a 2002 interview in The Japan Times: “I try to create things that we human beings feel are useful in our daily lives. During the process, beauty is born naturally.” Throughout his life, Sori Yanagi was inspired by what he called “anonymous design” — he cited the Jeep and a baseball glove as two examples — and he in turn inspired younger designers, like Naoto Fukasawa, Tom Dixon and Jasper Morrison.

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  Benin Bronze Head of King Oba, African, Nigeria 20th Century

  NIGERIA

  Benin Head of King Oba,  c. early to mid-20th Century

  Lost wax cast bronze with a rich brown and black patina with light desert sand patina in some of the recessed areas.

  The art of Benin is the product of an urban royal court, and is meant to symbolize and to extol the power, mystique, grandeur, continuity, and endurance of the ruling dynasty and its governing institutions. From the 14th century until its fall in 1897, Benin was ruled by the Oba, a divine ruler at the head of the political system of titled chiefs. Under royal support, a number of craftsman’s guilds produced bronze, brass, and wood sculptures and embroidered cloth, all of which have become prized by museums and collectors.

  These heads were typically placed on altars dedicated to each of the past Oba’s of Benin. The altars are semicircular mud platforms that have been packed hard and rubbed smooth and are located in open courtyards of the palace. The royal altars are the settings for one of the two most important rites of divine kingship in Benin, Ugie Erha Oba, when the Oba honors the spirit of his late father and performs sacrifices to the royal ancestors and to the earth in which they are buried. Acknowledging his role as his fathers’ successor, the chiefs pay homage to the king and greet him in order of seniority. The rite expresses the continuity of divine kingship, and the altar before which it takes place provides the means by which the connection between the living king and his predecessors was established and made.

  H: 14 1/2″ x D: 7 1/2″ x W: 8 1/2″

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  Aaron Bohrod / F. Carlton Ball, Monumental, Hand Thrown Pottery Eve Vase 1952-56

  AARON BOHROD  (1907-1997)  USA
  F. CARLTON BALL  (1911- 1992)  USA

  “Eve” vase 1952-56

  Monumental glazed stoneware vase with a brown and cream beige glaze with sgraffito decoration of four stylized nudes.

  Signed: A. Bohrod  F.C. Ball (inscribed)

  Illustrated: Aaron Bohrod: Figure Sketches, Edwin E. Elliott and Howard E. Wooden (Dodge City, Kansas:  Gall and Shaull, 1990) p. 17, fig. 32. A Decade of Still Life: Aaron Bohrod (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966) p. 41.

  H: 20 3/4 x Dia: 12 1/2″

  Price: $29,000

  ***Aaron Bohrod himself considered this vase his most important work in ceramic. This exact vase is illustrated in “A Decade of Still Life: Aaron Bohrod” in a bisque state. There is a stable firing crack that is visible on the base (see photo) near the Bohrod signature which happened in the firing, but in no way affects the structure of the piece. A letter from Aaron Bohrod himself describing this piece and the history surrounding it also accompanies the vase.

  For more information see: The Potter’s Art in California: 1885-1955, Hazel V. Bray (Oakland: Oakland Museum Art Department, 1980) pp. 56-57.

  A painter of cityscapes, landscapes and trompe l’oeil paintings, Aaron Bohrod lived in Chicago from birth until 1948, when he moved to Madison, Wisconsin. There he was a member of the University of Wisconsin’s art faculty. Bohrod was a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he also attended the Arts Students League in New York.

  Aaron Bohrod was an American artist who was nationally known in his lifetime. He was the subject of frequent exhibitions and gallery shows in various locations, generally focusing on a particular chronological period of his artistic production. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards (including two Guggenheims and the purchase prize at the “Artists for Victory” exhibition of 1942-43 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York), he was both proficient and prolific as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and as an illustrator. In addition, he was the author of several books on art and an autobiography. Although he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York with a number of well-known and influential teachers, the one who exerted the most profound influence on him was John Sloan, who taught him to value both the Old Masters and the visual reality of the urban American scene. Bohrod returned to Chicago after studying with Sloan in New York “determined to do in my own way with my own city what Sloan had done with New York.” (Bohrod’s stylistic development has been typically characterized in terms of his early relationship to the gritty urban realism of the Ashcan School with which Sloan was associated and his later magic realism style with its virtuoso and meticulous technique and witty visual repartee, almost as if they were two separate and unrelated developments. Although his own description of the origins of his unique still life approach in his autobiographical book, A Decade of Still Life, may have guided critics to look at his oeuvre in this way, a closer assessment reveals clear connections between the earlier and alter periods. Before 1940, for example, he had created a prototype of the still lifes that were to become his hallmark. By the mid 1950s, he began to dedicate himself to the creation of paintings that are by turns resonant, mysterious, evocative and humorous. The studied and careful detail of the bricks on the buildings foreshadow the care that Bohrod will lavish on each of the carefully observed and realized objects in his later still lifes, while the anecdotal detail predicts the accumulation of objects on which his later work depends. The polished and masterful technique of this later work also suggests the Old Masters to whom he was introduced by Sloan.

  F. Carlton Ball (1911-1992)
  F. Carlton Ball was born in Sutter Creek, California, He studied art at Sacramento Junior College before enrolling at USC. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1933. He later did graduate studies under Glen Lukens at USC. He taught at several colleges/universities, such as the CCAC (his first position in 1935), Mills College, University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale, USC University of Puget Sound and etc. From our research, we believe his last teaching position was in Tacoma, Washington, at the Tacoma Community College. Primarily known for his throwing, he did combine his pots with the decorative artistry of his first wife Kathryn Uhl Ball and most importantly, the Wisconsin artist, Aaron Bohrod. He exhibited at the Association of San Francisco Potters, 1952 Los Angeles County Fair’s 6000 Years Art in Clay and the Crocker-Kingsley of Sacramento, California, to mention a few locations. Exhibited at the Nationals in 1941-1949, 1951-1960 and 1966.

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  Chinese Hilltribe / Dong or Miao People Drum table mid 20th Century

  CHINESE HILLTRIBE / DONG OR MIAO PEOPLE Southern China

  Drum table mid 20th Century

  Exotic wood with vellum drum top and button, decorative iron ring
  mounts and patinated brass decorative nails.

  H: 22 ½ x Dia top: 18” x Body Dia: 20”