Of the many chess set designs made by major 20th century Modern artists few were both as innovative and deeply rooted in tradition as the Chess Set and Table ensemble created by Japanese – American sculptor Isamu Noguchi for the 1944 Imagery of Chess exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery in New York, organized by Levy and artists Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst.

The wartime scarcity of quality materials both limited and inspired Noguchi. In his chess set design, which became prototypes for his other sculptures of that era, Noguchi devised a simple but ingenious system of notching together thin contoured planes of material to create fully 3-D objects, but using a minimum of materials. Scarcity also led him to fashion these pieces from a new experimental wartime material developed to mass produce clear aircraft canopies and gun turrets – Plexiglas.

The Noguchi Museum and IC Design have been conducting materials research for some time and are excited to produce a new edition of the 1944 Noguchi Chess Set accompanied by an attractive Perspex black folding board with red and translucent white circular inlays, modelled after the artist’s original tabletop design.