Sense and Subtlety in Stone

By ROBERT HUGHES

At 75, Isamu Noguchi remains the top U.S. sculptor

Isamu Noguchi is the pre-eminent American sculptor. This fine-boned and unaged man, with a grip as tough as an old Maine lobster's, has expanded his work over an extraordinary range of images, media and purposes in the course of a 50-year career. Whether he is engaged with ballet and theater sets or monumental fountains, pieces for giant plazas or intimate playgrounds, huge sun discs fabricated from carved stone or diminutive wood sculptures and paper lamps, Noguchi's touch has never ceased to be subtle, precise and informed. He is entitled to be seen, in a time characterized by minor and peripheral talent, as one of the very few surviving masters of the modernist tradition: the chief living heir, not only to his teacher Brancusi but also to the classical Japanese feeling for material and nature.

Noguchi's work, in its appeal to ancient and immutable archetypes of experience projected through an extremely refined (but never precious) taste, has always possessed a bracing clarity, a power to rid the mind of its daily rubbish and replace the clutter with a strictness of feeling released by apparently simple objects. Noguchi is 75, and at present three exhibitions in Manhattan celebrate his anniversary: a show of his theater and public-space designs at the Whitney Museum, a group of "landscape tables" at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and a number of smaller stone pieces at the Pace Gallery.

In a sense, Noguchi's tables are like Japanese gardens. As the raked sand of the garden provides an oceanic "world surface" from which the chosen rocks protrude like continents, so the polished surfaces of his table-top sculpture conjure an imagined plain whose sudden rearings and swellings can be seen as mountains or waves. The protrusions seem to heave themselves up, violently, out of the serene surface--an effect emphasized by a sudden change of texture from polished to roughly pecked stone. That, too, is a metaphor of larger geological events: in some real landscapes the mountain does not rise; the softer plain around it is removed inch by inch, by erosion, a process mimicked in sculpture by the action of Noguchi's chisel and grinder.

Thus, again and again, the landscape tables refer to something other than landscape. Knife in the Rock, 1970, for example, suggests the pointed blade of a Japanese tanto (short sword) impressed in the stone, as though the granite were wax. But, in general, landscape is the sole image, and its core is the stone itself, with its obdurate beauty, dark crystalline structure and archaic associations with ritual and shelter. As a result, a piece like Double Red Mountain, 1969, functions both as a highly stylized image of Zen landscape and as a more Western object, tinged with surrealist fantasy, and mixing, in similar proportions, body, altar and stone.

The smaller works at the Pace Gallery are somewhat different in feeling. They represent the "chancy" as opposed to the deliberating Noguchi. Immobilized by a back injury two years ago, and no longer able to work with big stones, he turned to little ones that were lying around his studio in Shikoku, Japan (he has another in New York City). Many of them were lumps of gray Aji granite on which his assistants had been practicing their pointing technique; others were basalt pebbles, dusty brown outside, dense black within. Some of the granite stones he grouped in twos and threes, nesting them into one another so that they seem to have flowed together. With the basalt, he split some stones by a single cut; in others, he opened up the merest chip of polished black "flesh" against the stone's rough, mat "skin," or bored into the surface with a coring saw. The result is more like interference than sculptural transformation, an attempt to see how little one needs to do to a piece of material to turn it convincingly into sculpture.

Some pieces are so lightly touched that they are almost objets trouves. But in all of them, the same intense sensibility is at work, making a mere saw cut register as drawing against the dull cortex of the rock, hollowing out a shadow, drawing a surface tight, making the eye aware of what mass and density lie beneath the surface. It is not a spectacular performance, but its mastery in playful thought, and collaboration with material, is close to absolute.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.