Isamu Noguchi
American, 1904-1988
Ceremony, 1982
granite, jasper, wood
73 1/2 x 35 3/4 x 17 1/2 in.
SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Mary and Leigh Block Fund
1983.40
RESEARCH PAPER
Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles In 1904. His mother was an American writer and his father a Japanese poet. He was raised in Japan and sent to the United States for High School. After high school, he went to NY where he studied sculpture and honed his artistic sensibilities through the friendship of Alfred Stieglitz.
When he was 22 years old he earned a Guggenheim fellowship and lived in Paris. While in Paris he worked as an assistant to Brancusi. After the Guggenheim stipend he returned to the United States via China and Japan, living in Beijing for eight months studying calligraphy, and then in Japan for six months studying pottery and architecture. He moved to New York in 1928, making that his home. At that time his work touched all the arts, architecture, landscape, interior design, lighting, stage sets, playgrounds and public gardens.
After WWII he returned to Japan for an extended visit. He felt at home in Japan and many commissions came his way. By 1950 he was commuting between Japan and NY. Eventually he bought a house in Japan at Mure, on the island of Shikoku. This 200-year-old home became for him an on going work of art. Here he surrounded himself with the Zen principles of harmony, reverence, and silence. These principles informed all his art. His garden with its stone sculpture and water was the ultimate expression of his artistic philosophy and an expression of his spiritual strength. His sculpture was never an imitation of nature. It was a reflection of his own inner vision, where stillness was as important as movement and the small in the universe as significant as the large.
In 1985, he opened the Noguchi garden museum in his studio in Long Island City, NY. This was the culmination of his life's dream, achieving a balance between earth, stone and water. As he put it, the garden and its sculpture was "born of the earth, moving out of the energies of the environment." The idea behind this garden, his ultimate achievement, grew out of the inspiration and the restraint found in Japanese art.
In Noh theater, an important influence in his life, realism is avoided in favor of symbolism. Masks are used and the imagination of the viewer is expected and encouraged. Transferring this concept to his sculpture, Noguchi made his symbolic allusions with open and closed space, polished and rough textures, and with rhythms that depend on light and shadow.
Ceremony - 1982 - Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Ceremony was purchased by this museum in 1983, through the Mary and Leigh Block fund. It is a combination of granite, wood, and the semi-precious stone, jasper. In this work we see a juxtaposition of rough and polished textures, of open and closed spaces. It is balanced between horizontals and verticals and diagonals. The base is wood, which looks too fragile to support the weight of the granite. At the same time the base makes the granite seem light and almost weightless.
As the viewer moves around the sculpture, straight lines appear curved, and right angles seem to become diagonals. Ceremony has the look of calligraphic brushwork in stone. The slightest turn on the part of the viewer animates the work, as if by magic. The artist said, "This work is close to the essential sculpture I strive for."
In Ceremony, Noguchi is recalling the importance of the Shinto monument, built nearly two thousand years ago, located at Ise on the coast southwest of Tokyo. It is made entirely of wood, and has ritually been rebuilt every twenty years in exactly the same ancient Japanese style, using no nails. ALike Japanese culture itself, it is both ancient and endlessly new.@ In a Shinto temple nature is venerated rather than the shrine. A wooden gateway is an important sign of such a temple. Noguchi seems to recall in this sculpture the ancient beliefs of Shinto and its strict ceremonies.
As in the Ise shrine, the wooden base is our entry into our celebration of this work. As we observe the base from all sides and angles, we discern how old the wood appears. Why did the artist choose old wood for a new sculpture? We see how the wood grain has a variety of textures and the base is cut and cunningly assembled without nails or screws. Walking around the sculpture, and looking at the opening in the base, we see how changing light alters the appearance of that open space.
Ceremony portrays a restful serene feeling of natural simplicity. Noguchi sought respect for natural materials, simply used for each of his works. Ceremony is one of Noguchi=s finest sculptures. It looks perfectly balanced on its open wooden base, giving his sculpture a harmony to the parts and a feeling of calm serenity. It captivates the mind and the eye.
Bibliography
Dore Ashton, Noguchi East and West, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992
Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, Harper and Row, New York, 1968
Michael Brenson, Obituary, New York Times, December 31, 1988
SBMA, Discover Art, page 10, 1991
Isamu Noguchi, The Retrospective, Existential Stones, Nature VI, 1992
New Sculpture, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, 1983
Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by, Mary Alice Barnhouse, March, 2004
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Noguchi’s peripatetic travels were an inspiration for this exhibition. Born in Los Angeles to an American mother and Japanese father, he spent his childhood in Japan, then moved to New York for medical school, then to Paris to work as Constantin Brancusi’s assistant for a few years. He returned to New York and established himself as a sculptor, and along with other Japanese-Americans, lived in a concentration camp during World War II.
Though he worked in many mediums, including paper, wire, concrete, and steel, Noguchi apprenticed with a stone carver in the 1930s and at times traveled to Peru, Japan, and Italy to source the perfect marble, basalt, granite, or jasper. For his Zen garden projects, he often took rocks straight from nature unchanged and merely placed them. This sculpture is chiseled. Like the other sculptures shown here, there is a delicate balancing act. Noguchi sets up a symmetry but then elegantly undoes it. Notice that the cedar wood seems like a perfect H, but a careful look reveals that the two sides differ. Similarly, the hefty stone sticks out a bit to the right.
- Going Global, 2022