“Designer’s Note”
The Tragedy of King Lear
William Shakespeare
Introduction by Donald Wolfit, designs by Isamu Noguchi
London: The Folio Society, 1956

It is likely that the Royal Shakespeare Company asked Noguchi to provide a note explaining himself after getting a look at what he had in mind for this touring production of King Lear featuring John Gielgud, the last of the great actor’s four stage appearances in the role. Discussing the difficulty of navigating similarly superfluous tendencies to historicize and contemporize setting and costumes, Noguchi writes, “Obviously a vacuum is not the solution, for the simple reason that it cannot exist. Something has to be there which is of so transparent a logic as to clarify every nuance of the play. In a way this something should be more nothing than nothing itself, creating even more of a void than would a bare stage: it should fill space with a certain magic of expectancy.” Life’s gleeful article covering not the play but the controversy surrounding Noguchi’s design, “A Weird Kind of Lear,” carries the lede “London boggles at bizarre production” and begins with this summary: “The costumes were compared to waffle irons; King Lear’s throne to a ham bone; his crown to a hatrack and his cloak (p. 68) to a Gruyere cheese. These comments were made by London critics about a new production of King Lear starring Sir John Gielgud as a new kind of Lear.”

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“Hisao Domoto”
Hisao Domoto: Solutions, continuité
New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1967

The extraordinary statement Noguchi wrote for the artist Hisao Domoto on the occasion of his exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York is a perfect dispatch from the bleeding edge of postmodernity.

“Art, that chameleon mirror of the human heart, flashes its changes. Now it shatters in fragments, in specialization and new techniques—it is a time of questioning. Where is art—that great answer giver, that resolver of riddles? One day there will come a seeking after this wider identity, for a whole out of all parts within or distant, from whatever may be saved from the onrush of our technology and conceit.” 

Noguchi goes on to ask, more rhetorically, “Are values ever obsolete or the sensibility of artists?”

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“On the Artist Teshigahara Sofu”
Maboroshi by Sofu Teshigahara
Kenkichi Sugimoto, ed.
Tokyo: Kyuryudo Co., Ltd., 1977

Sofu Teshigahara was the best-known flower arranger in and outside of Japan. He is typical of Noguchi’s Japanese friends and collaborators: a living treasure who channeled his absolute mastery of tradition into forward-looking rebellion. Teshigahara’s school of ikebana, Sogetsu, owns the second-largest collection of Noguchi’s ceramics, and its headquarters in Tokyo is the site of one of Noguchi’s best interiors, Heaven. Of this multifaceted artist, Noguchi said, “There is a bond of sympathy between us like that of two old thieves who do not have to brag to each other about their exploits.”

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“On Washi”
Washi: The World of Japanese Paper
Sukey Hughes
Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1978

This extraordinary book is a complete guide to the history, structure, uses, production, and culture of Japanese paper (washi). For a Western audience, no spokesperson could be more authoritative than Noguchi, creator of Akari light sculptures. From his essay: “How could I have conceived of such possibilities except through a knowledge of the qualities inherent in washi. I hope I may have extended its appreciation through the light and shadows it casts. This is what comes from an old tradition, the use of washi and the making of lanterns, which extends its life into the needs of our time.”

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“New York Mood-o”
Eiko by Eiko
Eiko Ishioka
New York: Callaway Editions, 1983

The Japanese designer and art director Eiko more or less invented the practice of employing non-Japanese subjects and figures to sell modernity and the future in Japan. “It must take a degree of emancipation,” Noguchi wrote with characteristic understatement, “to be able to achieve an art so successfully through the commercial medium.”

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“For Yasuda Kan”
Kan Yasuda
Tokyo: Gyararii Ueda Ueahausu, 1985

This deeply personal note of concern from an older artist to a younger one was truly written “for” Kan Yasuda. As he so often does, Noguchi, in his own unique way, combines a stunning humility (here he implies that his Kouros is a 9-foot-tall example of immature overreach, not a masterpiece) with flinty wisdom. Noguchi counsels Yasuda against giving in to his own facility and pleasure and making any work other than the art that expresses his “difficult conscience.” “It is the artist’s obligation,” he ends, “to change into his ever widening perception. Kan has expressed it with his forked squares where he denies himself and all his skills. I know intimately of what I write.”

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“No Division between Artist and Mask”
Spectacular Helmets of Japan: 16th–19th Century
Alexandra Munroe, ed.
Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1986

Most of Noguchi’s introductions begin with the assertion that he has no business writing on the subject, before he goes on to offer something of crystalline if cryptic value. Here, Noguchi looks back to his childhood when, inspired by Greek mythology, he produced a winged helmet like the one Perseus wore to make himself invisible and invincible facing Medusa. “It may be said,” he wrote, “that all effigy-making offers a similar transcendence of identity,” such as that achieved by the great samurai helmets, in which, through sculpture, “the mask of terror becomes the man himself.”

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“Shigeo Anzai”
Akiyoshi Tokoro, ed.
Anzaï: Rodin, La Porte de l’Enfer
Tokyo: Galerie Tokoro, 1989

The meaningful dissemination of sculpture, to the extent that it is possible at all, depends on inspired photography. Anyone with a camera can produce an adequate reproduction of a painting or drawing. But to capture sculpture, you need a real photographer. The list of the photographers that Noguchi worked with is a who’s who of twentieth-century greats, from Berenice Abbott, Edward Weston, and André Kertész to Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe. A number of lesser-known, but no less talented photographers, including his half-brother Michio Noguchi, were integral to the development of Noguchi’s understanding of sculpture. But it is Shigeo Anzai, who photographed a special series on the opening of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, Noguchi’s studio in Mure, and his participation at the Venice Biennale, for whom Noguchi wrote. Here he likens Anzai’s approach to his own: a devouring, complete inhabitation, and loss of self in the content of the work.

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