This past Friday, after years of intending to get there,
Nancy and I finally
got ourselves to the Noguchi
Museum in
MUSEUM
ENTRANCE:
Hours: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: 10:00am-5:00pm
Saturday & Sunday: 11:00am-6:00pm
Monday & Tuesday: CLOSED
I first became acquainted with the work of Isamu Noguchi when I 
was
an undergraduate at Yale. In 1963, the
year before I arrived there,
Yale’s Beinecke Rare Books 
and Manuscripts Library (by SOM’s Gordon Bunshaft) was completed.. The main volume of this astounding building is
a windowless rectangular solid, whose shell—supported only on its four external
corners—is composed of gray granite-framed panes of white Vermont marble, so
thin (1¼“) that light shines through them, bathing the interior in a warm,
golden, luminous glow (which is actually helpful in preserving the rare volumes
housed in the museum). One of the
exterior’s most humanizing features, however, was the sunken sculpture garden
in the plaza in front of the museum’s entrance.
This white marble sunken garden was created by Noguchi and was populated
by three of his sculptures. As Joan Pachner
has noted, it “combined influences from Japanese temple sand mounds, Indian
astronomical gardens and paved Italian plazas with Noguchi’s own artistic vocabulary:
the circular sun; the cube on its point, a symbol of chance; and the pyramid, his
sign for Earth.” (Oxford 
University
Press; here quoted from MoMA’s website) Despite the fact that it was made from rather
cold, white material, it had a warmth and symbolic richness in its quiet but
powerful timelessness. From the first
time I saw them, I loved these sculptures and the world created to contain them.
Later, when I spent time looking at Medieval
illuminated manuscripts in the luscious, comfortable reading rooms that ringed
the garden on the level below the plaza, I came to enjoy gazing at the timelessness
of the garden as a kind of beautiful grounding in the modern world outside of
the more ancient one I was exploring inside. But, most of all, the experience made me aware
of this fabulous artist, and I began to see examples of his works elsewhere—including
in the 1968 retrospective at the Whitney.
Born in
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important and critically acclaimed sculptors. Through a lifetime of artistic experimentation, he created sculptures, gardens, furniture and lighting designs, ceramics, architecture, and set designs. His work, at once subtle and bold, traditional and modern, set a new standard for the reintegration of the arts.
In
1961, Noguchi moved his studio and residence to an industrial
building in
Opened in 1985, the Museum is housed in a converted industrial building… Noguchi designed the Museum complex as an open-air sculpture garden ensconced within a building that houses ten galleries. As a whole, the Museum provides an intimate, reflective space in which to experience Noguchi’s sculpture and design, fulfilling a vision that the artist deemed essential to his life’s work. Visitors enter the two-story, approximately 27,000-square-foot Museum through the celebrated sculpture garden. While the ground-floor galleries and garden contain a permanent presentation of work by the artist, selected from his own collection, since 2004, the Museum regularly presents temporary exhibitions that offer a rich, contextualized view of Noguchi’s work in the upper galleries.
The Museum is an incredible experience. After paying one’s admission, one enters into the first, huge gallery—a vast space that opens out at some of its corners to the outside world. This space is filled with the beautiful abstract forms of his sculptures from the 1980s:
Many of the sculptures have shapes
that evoke that of natural rocks—and especially the marvelous “river rocks” that
are so highly-prized in Japanese garden design; but all are carefully shaped
and formed by the artist, and then "colored" by his texturing and
polishing—creating an interplay between the form and the color (texture),
between nature and the clearly artist-created, e.g., his 1982 The Stone Within (basalt):
Noguchi highlights this interplay by placing an actual river rock in the room juxtaposed with these sculptures: Spin-off #3, from the
There is something almost human in the monumental,
vertical presences of these sculptures (not unlike the looming, Druid presences
of the monumental rocks of Stonehenge) This next piece, Brilliance (1982), basalt, is
particularly satisfying-and I show two images of it, so you can get some
appreciation of its three-dimensional splendor:
Toward the end of the first
gallery, there is Noguchi’s 1984 Mountain Breaking Theater, basalt, a
large natural stone, cloven in two, with obviously artist-created carvings and
polished area contrasting with the hulking natural bulk of the original rock:
From here one exits into the splendid outside garden
which Noguchi has created. It is
contemplative, a quiet, filled with grasses, shrubs, bamboo, and trees—feeling ever
so much like a Japanese temple garden, right down to some of the carefully
manicured pines, yet also unmistakably existing in a western environment. At the entrance is another of the natural
stones that Noguchi has included by way of stating his theme, in this case Spin-off
#1, from the
Another
particularly satisfying piece in his 1982-3 Practice Rocks in Placement,
Aji granite:
Next, Core (Cored Sculpture), 1978,
basalt, is a pieced that has been bored down through its center from above, and
is penetrated into its central core by two borings, one from the front and a
lower one from behind:
An absolutely lovely piece, The
Well (variation on a Tsukubai), 1982, basalt, has water that flows up
out of a semi-spherical depression in its top surface and spreads out across
the top and evenly down over every side of the sculpture, covering every
surface with a glistening sense of subtle movement and life. (Seeing it for the first time, I was reminded
of Maya Lin’s wonderful 1993 sculpture, The
Women’s Table, in front of the Sterling Library at Yale: it similarly has
water flowing up from a well, over the flat top surface, and down over all of
its sides. I do not know that Lin
acknowledges Noguchi as one of her major influence—but it is clear from this comparison
that he must have been.)
Back inside in galleries 3 & 6, there are numerous
other magnificent works. The huge The
Roar, 1966, white Arni marble, is fabulous from every angle:
There are whole sections of these galleries that have a kind of Noguchi sculpture I do not like: mostly from the early 1970s, these highly polished, extreme, often “Arp-like” shapes are far too stylized and “slick” for my taste—heavily hearkening back to the era in which Noguchi did rather Surrealist sculptures. The Bow, 1970-73, yellow Sienna marble, black Petit Granit marble, is one such example (which I include only for illustration):
There are a few from this period I actually did enjoy, like his The Spirit’s Flight, 1969, green and pink serpentine, Carrara marble, a thin, slightly twisting rectangular column of alternating colored marble:
Toward the end of the first floor exhibits, there was one piece from this same period, but that was far more like the ones we loved from the next decade. To Intrude on Nature’s Way, 1971, basalt, was a gorgeous, raw, powerful, monumental vertical piece—less worked over than his similar pieces from the 80s, but similar in aesthetic, and beautiful in its natural coloration:
There are galleries on the second floor which are
used for temporary exhibitions, but they were closed the day of our visit, as a
new installation is currently being mounted. The Museum only charged half because of the
closure; but there was no need for the reduction—the true value and glory of
this place lies in its regular collection on the first floor and in the garden.
The
And just a couple of blocks from the
The current show,
Curated by Alyson Baker, with Lars Fisk
and Elissa Goldstone, the show will explore the interplay between methods of
viewing and the interpretation of the physical world.
Our favorite
piece was a 36’ long work by Blane De St. Croix, Mountain Views, 2011,
Fabricated from recycled foam from the World Trade Center site initial
foundation construction for Freedom Tower in 2003, as well as steel, wood, paint,
dirt, concrete, stucco, and other materials (13’ x 36’ x 6’). “From selected vantage points, Mountain Views
obstructs the skyline and reclaims the city with a conglomerate of transported
extinct mountains. The mountains act as
memorials to their own destruction from out of state coal mining and mountain
top removal, -the destructive method which provides much of the energy for
Socrates is open 365 days a year from 10am until sunset
Click here for sunset times: www.timeanddate.com
Admission is FREE.
SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK
Tel: 718-956-1819
From there, we
strolled back into Astoria, stopping at an Italian bakery to have a more than
passably good espresso, and then climbed up to the elevated platform of the 30th
Avenue Station of the N & Q train (once upon a time I should have called it
the “BMT Astoria Line”…). The view of
the tracks of the “El” looking northward was quite entrancingly beautiful, so I
close with an image we took of it:
