Ways of Nature
Isamu Noguchi is celebrated at the Portland Museum of Art
Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese father who was a poet and an American mother who was a writer. In 1906 they moved to Japan where he spent his childhood and became “knowledgeable in the ways of nature.” He was sent to the U.S. in 1918 for schooling and in 1922 apprenticed for Gutzon Borglum who is best known for his Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Borglum told him he would never be a sculptor.
In 1927 he apprenticed to Constantin Brancusi in Paris and recalled, “brancusi made me realize that what I had learned previously—the quick ways of doing things—was all wrong .... It is not the quick solutions. It is not something you learn and apply. After all, it is a search you have to enter into yourself.”
At another time, he said, “you can find out how to do something and then do it or do something and then find out what you did.” One of the great pleasures of visiting his home and studio in Takamatsu, Japan, is discovering stones he had worked on and walked away from, either intending to return or abandoning them after experimenting on them. He explained, “it is said that stone is the affection of old men. that may be so. It is the most challenging to work. a dialogue ensues—of chance, no chance, mistakes, no mistakes. No erasing or reproduction is possible, at least in the way I work, leaving nature’s mark. It is unique and final.” For the last 20 years of his 60 year career, he had both the studio on the island of Shikoku and his studio in Long Island City, Queens, now The Noguchi Museum. On Shikoku he worked in stone, but his oeuvre comprises work in many media including paper as in the paper lamps still manufactured by hand by craftspeople in Japan. He also designed gardens, and his friendship with Martha Graham occasioned his designing stage sets.
The breadth of Noguchi’s work will be celebrated in the exhibition, Beyond the Pedestal: Isamu Noguchi and the Borders of Sculpture, at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. Organized by Andrew Eschelbacher, curator at the PMA, in conjunction with The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, the exhibition
continues through January 6. Eschelbacher notes, “this exhibition of approximately 40 sculptures and 10 works on paper examines the ways Noguchi reimagined the possibilities of sculpture over the course of his 60-year career, bringing together varied aspects of Noguchi’s expansive production— which included traditional sculpture, landscape architecture, memorials, stage sets, interior designs, furniture and more—and highlighting the artist’s belief that the sculptor’s role was ‘to order and animate space.’”
In 1986, two years before his death, Noguchi was the American representative at the venice Biennale. He titled his exhibition, Isamu Noguchi: What is Sculpture?
Eschelbacher has taken this theme and explores three aspects of the artist’s output: Play and Movement, Memorials and Social Justice and Domestic Landscapes.
The museum notes,“noguchi’s interest in movement surfaced in his art in various forms. with works such as Play Sculpture, individuals can understand their own space and relation to art by moving around the undulating, serpentine forms. In considering additional relationships of sculpture and movement, Noguchi collaborated with architects, inventors, and performers.” Play Sculpture will enter the PMA collection in 2019 in the recently opened David E. Shaw and Family Sculpture Park in the Joan B. Burns Garden.
The museum explains, “In the
1940s, Noguchi voluntarily entered the Poston War Relocation Center—a federal detention center for Japaneseamerican citizens during the Second World War—where he stayed for seven months. though he had hoped to humanize the environment through art, his sculptures from this time reveal his pain and disillusionment as he confronted American xenophobia.” Noguchi’s furniture and functional objects have become icons of modern design but, in their time, were earth shaking in their departure from norms.