sculp­tor, Isamu Noguchi (b. 1904, d. 1988). By se­lect­ing forms from the vi­sual vo­cab­u­lary of Noguchi, I hope to draw view­ers’ at­ten­tion to his work and the era he lived in.

Isamu Noguchi was born in Japan but lived most of his life in the United States. His early artis­tic ed­u­ca­tion was spo­radic, but then started in earnest when he moved to Paris in 1927 and worked as an ap­pren­tice to Con­stan­tin Bran­cusi. When Noguchi re­turned to the US in the 1930s, he came un­der the in­flu­ence of New Deal and Mex­i­can so­cial re­al­ism. Many artists in this pe­riod were try­ing to bring more so­cial en­gage­ment to their prac­tices by cre­at­ing mu­rals, sculp­tures, and re­liefs for pub­lic sites. In the spirit

of the times, Noguchi went to Mex­ico City and re­al­ized a large wall re­lief for a pub­lic mar­ket, still well-pre­served to­day.

In the 1940s Noguchi re­turned to ab­strac­tion. He de­vel­oped a reper­tory of flat graphic forms—an ab­stract vo­cab­u­lary ex­trap­o­lated from na­ture—and carved them in flat ma­te­ri­als such as slate and thin mar­ble slabs (im­ported from Eu­rope for coun­ter­tops and eas­ily avail­able from New York stone sup­pli­ers.) By slot­ting to­gether these flat, fin-like forms at right an­gles he was able to con­struct free-stand­ing sculp­tures.

But even as Noguchi was mov­ing into pure ab­strac­tion, he con­tin­ued to

search for mod­els of so­cial en­gage­ment. His an­swer was to in­tro­duce util­ity into the art ob­ject, cre­at­ing a se­ries of func­tional works that blurred the bound­aries be­tween art and de­sign. His Akiri pa­per lamp se­ries and his fa­mous cof­fee table, fab­ri­cated by Her­man Miller (1945) are two ex­am­ples.

Noguchi plot­ted his reper­tory of flat shapes on sheets of graph pa­per as if de­sign­ing an al­pha­bet or de­vel­op­ing a new mu­si­cal no­ta­tion. These forms, put to use in his fur­ni­ture, sculp­ture, and his first play­ground de­signs, in­flu­enced Amer­i­can de­sign in the fol­low­ing decades. They were part of the source code for post-war bio­mor­phic mod­ernism. His early for­mal vo­cab­u­lary was so of its era

that it still evokes the spirit of the im­me­di­ate post-war pe­riod.

This is the his­tor­i­cal pe­riod I have been study­ing for the past ten years. It is a pe­riod of mas­sive con­tra­dic­tions: large quasi-so­cial­ist pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture and build­ing pro­jects were car­ried out against the back­drop of the Cold War and rise of Mc­Carthy­ism. I’m in­ter­ested in the pro­gres­sive as­pects of this pe­riod, a kind of golden age for US pub­lic ar­chi­tec­ture: hous­ing, schools, cul­tural and diplo­matic build­ings. Post­war op­ti­mism com­bined with what I like to call the post-war New Deal “hang­over” to fuel a pe­riod of am­bi­tious pub­lic works (in­clud­ing an ex­panded New York City school con­struc­tion pro­gram.) Noguchi Galaxy is de­signed in homage to this era.

On the artis­tic front, the post-war pe­riod was a time when artists placed ab­stract works in di­a­logue with the ab­stract forms of ar­chi­tec­ture. A good ex­am­ple is Bar­bara Hep­worth’s 20-foot bronze, Sin­gle Form, in­stalled in front of the UN build­ing. Hep­worth be­lieved that ab­stract forms, rather than pic­to­r­ial or rep­re­sen­ta­tional forms, are the ideal tools for the ex­pres­sion of ab­stract ideas. She viewed ab­stract art as po­ten­tially the most po­lit­i­cal art, and rec­og­nized the com­plex con­ver­sa­tion that could re­sult from the jux­ta­po­si­tion of ab­stract sculp­ture and ar­chi­tec­ture.

I am evok­ing Noguchi’s forms be­cause for me they rep­re­sent this mo­ment of post-war ex­per­i­men­ta­tion