Noguchi: Artist without a country has a place in Seattle

Seattle Art Museum : Isamu Noguchi - Sculptural Design
Jun 9, 2005–Sep 5, 2005
SAM Special Exhibition Gallery

Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) created groundbreaking works of fine art and
decorative art, expanding the modern definition of sculpture,
furniture and landscape architecture, and challenging ideas about the
unique art object and the possibilities of mass-produced design. In
this exhibition Noguchi's achievements are refracted through the
unique design of the renowned director and installation artist Robert
Wilson (b. 1941), creating an aesthetic, intellectual, and sensory
experience that both explicates and enriches the creations of Noguchi.

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Noguchi: Artist without a country has a place in Seattle

The late artist Isamu Noguchi saw himself as a man without a country.
With a Japanese father and an American mother, Noguchi was born in Los
Angeles in 1904 and raised in both nations, but he never fit
completely into the culture of either place. Until his death in 1988,
he remained a restless world traveler, obsessive creator, meticulous
craftsman and renowned womanizer, who once got chased from Frida
Kahlo's bed at gunpoint by her enraged husband, Mexican muralist Diego
Rivera (no slouch himself when it came to seduction).

Noguchi took risks as an artist, too. Known primarily as a stone
sculptor, he also applied his skills to landscape and furniture
design, functional ceramics, dance sets and photography.

The particular blend of classical Japanese aesthetics and Modernism
that characterizes Noguchi's art has always struck a chord here in the
Northwest, perhaps because of our long-standing affinity with Asian
art and design. Seattle boasts two outdoor sculptures by Noguchi:
"Black Sun" at Volunteer Park and "Landscape of Time" at the Federal
Building at Second Avenue and Marion Street downtown. Another major
Noguchi, the looming black steel "Skyviewing Sculpture" stands on the
campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham.

Yet oddly, until now, no Seattle museum has hosted a Noguchi
exhibition. Organized to honor the centennial of the artist's birth,
"Isamu Noguchi — Sculptural Design" opens Thursday at the Seattle Art
Museum, a welcome addition to SAM's lineup as it heads into the final
months before closing for expansion in January.

The show debuted last year at Vitra Design Museum in Germany in
collaboration with the Isamu Noguchi Foundation of New York. The
exhibition should play well in Seattle, given the region's admiration
for Noguchi as well as the current raging popularity for mid-20th
century design.

The show holds another attraction, too: The presentation was conceived
and designed by renowned multimedia artist and theatrical designer
Robert Wilson, known for such groundbreaking productions as "Einstein
at the Beach," a collaboration with composer Philip Glass.

The apprenticeship

Early in Noguchi's career, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and
traveled to Paris, where he apprenticed with renowned sculptor
Constantin Brancusi. Brancusi's distilled abstractions were so
mesmerizing to the younger artist that he modeled his Paris studio
after Brancusi's and for many years much of his sculpture ended up
resembling the older artist's as well.

Seattle art dealer Bryan Ohno, who assembled two Noguchi exhibits at
his Pioneer Square gallery, recounts a telling story about how, as a
young art student he tracked down Noguchi and begged to be taken on as
an apprentice. Noguchi refused.

"I said you apprenticed with Brancusi, so you should take me," Ohno
recalls. "He said it took him 20 years to break free of Brancusi and
do his own work." Noguchi told Ohno it was more important for young
artists to work with master craftsmen and absorb technique, as he
himself had done, learning woodworking, ceramics and stone-cutting
from artisans in Japan.

Noguchi started out by sculpting portraits of famous people and
wealthy art collectors. In the 1920s, Martha Graham commissioned a
portrait bust of herself from the young Noguchi. In 1935, she asked
him to design a stage set for her dance "Frontier." Noguchi saw the
commission as a challenge, a way to expand his ideas about sculpture
to include the broader space of the theater and the way the audience
interacts with it. "I used a rope, nothing else," the artist is quoted
in his biography by Masayo Duus. "It's not the rope that is the
sculpture, but it is the space which it creates that is the
sculpture."

From the almost mystical design of that first set, Noguchi went on the
create the set for Graham's masterpiece "Appalachian Spring" — a
design he described as "like Shaker furniture" — as well as a number
of others.

Part of Noguchi's motivation to work in the field of design was
financial. With no other means of support except his sculpture and
occasional grants, Noguchi was glad to try his hand at more commercial
projects. He designed a coffee table for furniture designer Robsjohn
Gibbings but never heard back on the project, his biography states.
When he discovered that the table was being marketed without his
approval, Noguchi was miffed. He promptly designed another table for
the Herman Miller Furniture Company that sold well and helped relieve
the artist's concerns about money.

Art, war and love

Oddly, it was World War II and the conflict between Noguchi's two
homelands — not to mention a love affair with the beautiful young
niece of Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru — that finally brought him
into his own as a sculptor. In the early days of the war, Noguchi won
a competition to create a bas-relief sculpture at the entrance to the
Associated Press building in Rockefeller Center that brought him some
long-sought critical acclaim. "News," Noguchi's nine-ton stainless
steel casting of simplified figures working with typewriter, camera,
telephone and notepad, won praise in The New York Times when it was
unveiled in 1940.

For a while, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Noguchi put aside his
own work. Inspired by a desire to support the United States and show
solidarity with his fellow Japanese Americans, Noguchi voluntarily
entered the internment camp at Poston, Ariz., where he hoped to start
an arts and crafts cooperative. He was quickly disillusioned. The
sophisticated artist soon learned he was an outsider among the
Japanese Americans interned at Poston, too. In the midst of mostly
farmers with little interest in art or politics, Noguchi despaired.
When he finally was able to gain his release, he returned to his New
York studio. He was stunned when the FBI, convinced that Noguchi was a
spy, ordered him deported. The American Civil Liberties Union stepped
in to defend him and the deportation order was eventually reversed.

Meanwhile, Noguchi met and fell for the young beauty Nayantara Pandit,
in New York as a student. Noguchi, truly smitten, was in the midst of
his affair with her during the creation of his pink marble sculpture
"Kouros" (Greek for young man) assembled of carved and notched pieces
of stone. The new style he was trying out was based in part on Asian
calligraphy, he said. Its title referenced the classical Greek kouros
sculptural form, but was informed by contemporary abstractions by
émigré artists, including his friend Arshile Gorky.

Symbol of freedom

In 1946, the 9-foot-tall sculpture was included in the Museum of
Modern Art exhibition "Fourteen Americans," along with works by Mark
Tobey, Gorky, Robert Motherwell and David Hare, among others. A
breakthrough for Noguchi, "Kouros" was the hit of the show and an
eight-page feature in Art News described him as "one of America's most
distinguished yet least-known artists." Noguchi explained to one
critic that cold abstraction in art didn't interest him. "It has to
recall something which moves a person — a recollection, a recognition
of his loneliness, or tragedy, whatever it is at the root of his
recollection." In the sculpture portion of the SAM exhibition, you
will see examples of Noguchi's stone-work, melding organic and
geometric forms, smooth and rough surfaces, classical Japanese and
Modernist principles. That's what characterizes Noguchi's style, Ohno
said. "I think the duality issue was constant in his work."

Noguchi quickly became a celebrity in Japan, too. "He had a great
impact on a lot of artists right after World War II," Ohno said. "He
almost has more of a cult figure stature in Japan than in this
country. When those young artists after the war were trying to find a
voice, Noguchi gave them a lot of confidence. Noguchi lived the free
lifestyle that every Japanese artist wanted but couldn't attain. They
were trapped by rules, trapped by tradition. He was the symbol of
freedom in that regard. The roots of his influence really began at
that time and continue to this day.

--
Regards,
Sanjeev Narang

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