Market Recap | The Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi
On the occasion of the opening of Noguchi’s New York at the Noguchi Museum in Queens last night (February 3, 2026), I want to briefly share some notes on recent auction sales of the work of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). Of course many different design objects by Noguchi, especially Akari lights and myriad tables, are always percolating in the secondary market, but for this post I thought I’d focus on the area of his practice that I am most familiar and connected to; his sculpture.
In doing this I realized that recapping Noguchi’s market from late 2025 alone would give readers a solid overall sense of the wide variety of his sculptural output. The diversity of styles, techniques, textures, and materials used by Noguchi over the course of his long career to create his “fine art,” let alone his design, is dizzying. This limited approach will also leave open the future prospect of independently addressing the market for his design (a task that we here at Artifactual History Appraisal welcome with open arms).
The most recent sale I want to look at is Mountains Forming, a galvanized steel construction produced in the early 1980s. The work sold at Christie’s in December as part of a design sale (a noteworthy marketing decision). The five foot work straddles the influence of both industrial design and a wide array of Minimalist-adjacent objects from roughly Caro through Serra, for which the earlier work of Noguchi had been arguably foundational. The work sold for $88,900, including the buyer’s premium. This was an encouraging result because the artist’s galvanized steel works can sometimes be a difficult sell. For example, earlier in the season, in late September, a different galvanized steel work by the artist had gone unsold at Freeman’s while carrying the same estimate as the Christie’s work, $50,000-70,000.
Mountains Forming
Going a few weeks further back in time, Bonham’s offered items from the tasteful collection of the late Gene Hackman (rest in peace, Royal Tenenbaum!). Among these was an early Noguchi plaster bust, circa 1930, which sold for $17,920, including fees to the buyer. Noguchi’s portrait busts were made in the period after he had returned from “interning” with Constantin Brancusi in Paris in the late 1920s. A lot of his portraits depict well known or influential people and the artist’s focus on them makes sense in light of his deeply rich social life, although the vestigial Greenbergianism in me has always perceived them as representing somewhat of a retreat from the vanguard formalist tendencies he had nursed under Brancusi’s tutelage.
Francise Clow Braggiotti
Next, despite its grimace-inducing title, Sharpshooter (Homage to Martin Luther King) sold for $23,750 at Heritage Auctions on November 19. The work, more or less an abstracted gun, was created a year prior to the civil rights leader’s assassination. It only gained an explicit association with King when Noguchi donated it to a MoMA auction benefitting King’s Southern Christian Leadership Coalition in 1969. Coincidentally, a version of this work is included in Noguchi’s New York and its wall text states that despite its poorly aged title, Noguchi was aiming to be deliberately provocative in the face of the ongoing Vietnam War, which both he and King strongly opposed. PS: there’s also an “appraisal” on file in the Museum’s digital archives from Noguchi’s dealer at this time that more or less reads in its entirety, “I say this is worth $1,000,” on nice crisp letterhead. Oh, the unspoilt innocence of the pre-USPAP era!
Sharpshooter (An Homage to Martin Luther King, Jr.)
In the public imagination Noguchi’s interlocking sculptures are arguably his most widely known, likely due to their presence within the majority of college textbooks surveying modern art. In terms of Noguchi’s market, this recognition can frequently tip into desirability, and along with it higher prices, or at least in this instance it does. The result achieved at Sotheby’s for Fishface, a six-piece slate construction from the mid-1940s, a fertile period for American art in general and a charged one for Noguchi in particular, illustrates this point well. That the lot was guaranteed by Sotheby’s certainly didn’t hurt. It sold for $2.6 million, over three times the amount of its initial high estimate of $800,000.
Fishface
And last but far from least, the crown jewel of the Noguchis appearing at auction late last year is the granite Myo, once owned by John D. Rockefeller III. This six foot stone sold for $7.6 million at Christie's on November 17. It’s an earlier representative of one of the richest veins of Noguchi’s career (at least in my opinion), his late granites and basalts. Artifactual History recorded some reflections on the creation and sale of this particular work back in November for anyone seeking more detail on this particular work.
Myo
