As an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, Noguchi developed a deep intuition for the essence of materials and for the surfaces of wood and stone. Throughout his life, he traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, as well as India and Mexico—spending years on the road. He studied brush drawing in China, and experimented with pottery and landscape gardening in Japan. Appropriation and renewal, in the sense of building global networks and a universal perspective, were impulses that shaped his artistic work.

The retrospective begins with portraits—heads and figures, abstract and realistic, like a panorama composed of a wide variety of media, social contacts around the world, and artistic views. Featured are a rare self-portrait as a boy with blue eyes, along with heads of Martha Graham and Buckminster Fuller—both of whom were artistic partners for decades—Noguchi’s uncle Takagi, the writer Tara Pandit, the dancer Michio Ito, the painter José Clemente Orozco, the musician Kyoko Kawamura, and Noguchi’s wife of five years in the 1950s, the actress Yoshiko (“Shirley”) Yamaguchi.

The focal point of the exhibition are Noguchi’s Surrealist interlocking sculptures from the 1940s. Some of these works recall human bodies with elements like limp limbs or bones. They combine playful composition and painful fragmentation.

The foundation of his life and work was his engagement with the social and political questions of his time. His opposition to racism and violence as well as questions of identity and belonging are reflected in many of Noguchi’s artworks. In others, the memories of pain and oppression become almost invisible. 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were imprisoned after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1942, Noguchi entered one of the camps in the Arizona desert. Still decades later, his sculptures continued to bear the memory of the discrimination he experienced as a Japanese American.

The rich facets of his work include his public and political art projects from the 1930s, dance collaborations, ceramics, as well as public works and plans for cities from Jerusalem and Hiroshima, to Munich, Bologna, Paris, and Delhi.

The last room of the exhibition shows Noguchi’s design for Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars (Memorial to Man). The work was conceived in 1947, two years after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it was never realized. Since his early playground designs, Noguchi viewed the earth as an artistic material. In Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars (Memorial to Man) he presents an extraterrestrial perspective on our planet Earth. A human face appears on the surface of the planet, a reminder of the fact that humanity shaped the earth with culture but also destroyed it.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated book published by Prestel and designed by Tino Graß. The book provides rich and insightful essays by Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Florence Ostende, Rita Kersting with Nana Tazuke, Dakin Hart, alongside a conversation with Karen Ishizuka, Katy Siegel, and Danh Vo orchestrated by Devika Singh, while a fully illustrated chronology details the entirety of Noguchi’s career.

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