Noguchi’s late basalt and granite monoliths stand like ancient markers of the time’s passage. They could be seen as concretizations of mindfulness. We look at them and they seem to look back and take our measure. “I think of them as emanations, as potential of the earth,” Noguchi said.1
Perhaps these solemn stones have their origin in Euripedes from 1966, where Noguchi took a chunk of marble whose surface was rough and cut it only slightly in order to “understand its being.” Poised between being a rock and being a sculpture, Deepening Knowledge (1969) was one of the first of Noguchi’s large upright basalt sculptures in which his intervention was minimal and in which he gave the stone its particular character by hollowing out and polishing only certain parts so that those parts turn dark gray and shiny in contrast to the matte velvety ochre-brown of the stone’s untouched surface. Of this sculpture, Noguchi wrote: “I had come to think that the deeper meaning of sculpture had to be sought in the working of hard stone. Through this might be revealed its quality of enduring. The evidence of geologic time was its link to our world’s creation.”2 Like Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars, these late works serve as testimonials to some future form of life that human beings once inhabited the earth. Talking with Katharine Kuh during her 1973 visit to Mure, Noguchi called basalt and granite “rocky rocks—male rocks, not pliable or feminine. They are terrific challenges.”3 Kuh felt that in Mure, Noguchi’s work had “resolved itself.” Many people would agree that these late raw stones are Noguchi’s finest sculptures. Kuh observed that they are “inscrutably quiet,” and “never contrived, never strained.” Watching the ferocious focus with which Noguchi approached basalt boulders in the stone circle, she thought that he was “literally pitting himself against the hard stone.” Perhaps as he approached his eighth decade, battling with obdurate mineral was a way of defying time. He was proud of the strength of his slender, well-formed body, and determined never to let its physical energy diminish. Cutting into stone, Noguchi could resist age and escape anomie. The process made him feel connected with the earth and this link was perhaps more important to him than his bond with human beings. He never completely trusted people. His deepest engagement was with everlasting stone.
Working in stone was, Noguchi said, a dialogue between himself and the “primary matter of the universe.” His friend the architect Arata Isozaki remembered Noguchi muttering as he walked among his late stone sculptures at Mure: “When I face natural stones, they start talking to me. Once I hear their voices, I give them just a bit of a hand. Recently I don’t have to carve or polish that much.”4 Isozaki compared Noguchi’s approach to stone to that of a twelfth-century Japanese writer about garden design who had said, “Erect a stone the way it wants.” But Noguchi also liked to dominate the stone. The dialogue with stone was, he said, a confrontation. “It’s like a wild horse … I would like to attack it to make it mine. Before I was more subject to the quality of the stone. Now I do not do what the stone tells me. Instead of it telling me, I tell the stone.”5 But of course he listened to the stone before imposing his will upon it.
Noguchi’s sculptural process could be swift. Sometimes it went on for years. In 1957, after splitting a large block of Kurama granite, he found he was not sure how to continue, so he left it unfinished. When he broke the stone in two it seemed “an act of blasphemy.”6 Nine years later he returned to it and called it Myo. “Eventually I was able to make it mine, a ‘sculpture’ of my time and forever.”7 Standing sixty-five inches high, Myo is both rugged and magisterial. It has a subtle anthropomorphism and, with its inward-hugging energy, can be seen as two bodies kissing.
Noguchi saw uncertainty as part of his creative process: “There are long periods when I don’t know what I’m doing. But then it goes clickity-clack down the tracks … I’ve been looking at certain stones I have, pondering what to do with them—especially one heavy one. It has completely baffled me. I’m in a state of not knowing which way I’m going. But I value these times also, these incubation periods. It’s very important to be quite empty sometimes. If you’re always producing, you’re like a machine. It’s when you don’t know, that you find something new.”8 In speaking of his creative process, he emphasized intuition. As with Abstract Expressionism, much of his work’s meaning came through the process of its making. “Many ideas come to my mind while I am working … It is not easy for me to develop an idea while I am not actually working.”9 Instinct, surprise, and mistakes were all an important part of his invention. “I think of myself as being led by unexpected forces. If it isn’t a surprise there is something wrong … Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doing … It is approaching the Zen term Satori. You become aware … I discover art. I don’t create it.”10 Another time he described his creative process this way: “One imagines possibilities; much later one begins to know what to make of them … In working stone, the primary gesture, the original discovery, the first revelation, can never be repeated or imitated. It is the stroke that breaks and is immutable … There is a sequence to stone working. First, the rear half is removed with drill holes and wedges. Afterward comes the carving, splitting with the ‘genno,’ the sledge hammer used for knocking off large hunks … no second thoughts are possible.”11
Myo, 1957–66. Kurama granite, 65 × 35 × 15½ in.
Splitting stone was both an act of violence and an act of love. That it was an intrusion he acknowledged when he titled a 1971 sculpture To Intrude on Nature’s Way. In trying to define the differences between his and Brancusi’s work, Noguchi said: “You might say that when Brancusi took a bronze casting and started filing, he eventually got to the inside. I go about it in a different way: I actually split it. I break it. I cut. I go to the jugular. Then I come out again, and it all becomes one.”12 In describing how he made Brilliance in 1983, Noguchi explained: “I attack the stone with violence. Is this to tame it or to awaken myself?… Destruction is then the road to creation.”13 For Noguchi anger, despair, and conflict propelled his creative process. “I sometimes think that my particular advantage, whatever it is, has been this factor of disturbance and conflict, that I live between two worlds and that I am constantly having conflicts of East and West, past and present.”14 But Noguchi also saw carving stone as an “act of reconciliation … The work and nature eventually settle down again in harmony.”15
Besides the basalt dolmens, several other types of sculpture occupied Noguchi in the first half of the 1970s. He continued to make landscape sculptures in which rounded forms, resembling mountains or breasts, seem to grow from the surface of the rock. His theme was emergence. He also kept on creating sculptures in which a stone was broken and then put back together. In the early 1970s he also explored the joining of different-colored stones to form precise polished shapes, quite different from his rough, boulderlike sculptures. Using the “post-tensioning” technique he adapted from Buckminster Fuller, he united sections of differently colored marble by running a stainless steel wire through a channel in each section’s core and then tightening the ends of the wire to give the sculpture its “compressive strength.”16 “Post-tensioning of discrete elements,” he said, “became an obsession in the conception as well as in the rationale of structure and execution.”17 Because Noguchi began making these two-toned sculptures in 1968 in Querceta, many people thought that they were influenced by the patterns of different-colored marbles seen in Tuscan churches. Noguchi denied the connection. He said that he was interested in the “structuring of stone,” not in the decorative effects of contrasting color.18 One of his most beautiful post-tensioned sculptures is the nearly six-foot Sun at Noon (1969), in which two different colors of orangey-red marble were assembled to form a ring. Because of the color contrast, the ring seems to pulsate and radiate heat. According to Noguchi, this sculpture’s astonishing energy comes from “the inherent tensile unity of shape.” It is also the conflict between the unity of the circular form and the separateness of the marble segments in contrasting colors that gives this sculpture its tension. One feels the circle’s compressed segments might burst apart at any moment.
Several of these two-colored, post-tensioned marble sculptures have a humorous and lighthearted eroticism. Ding Dong Bat (1968), for example, is clearly phallic, and the two versions of She (1970–71) are clearly vulvar. Copulation is suggested in To Love, of the same date, but with Noguchi sexual reference is always discreet, witty, and gentle. He took the idea of sexual pleasure and distilled it to a pure essence. It’s as though he were creating an abstract version of the calm yet ecstatic images of sexual union seen in Indian art. Of To Love, perhaps his most graphic image of sexual intercourse, Noguchi wrote, “A hieratic depiction of the act of love—motionless.”19 Several of Noguchi’s carvings are emphatically priapic. Noguchi’s friend Anne d’Harnoncourt remembered taking Noguchi in 1980 to see an exhibition of Indian sculpture titled Manifestations of Shiva at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she was director. In one of the rooms, numerous lingams stood on a low table. “Noguchi was fascinated by the show … when we got to the last gallery with the lingams, he said, ‘Oh my God! I have to go home! I have to go back to the studio.’”20
Sun at Noon, 1969. French red marble and Spanish Alicante marble, 61 × 61 × 8¼ in.
In 1970 Noguchi began to create open-form, gatelike sculptures that could be seen as elongated and gently squared-off versions of his ring or sun sculptures. The difference is that in the gate sculptures, the empty space inside the framing stone is as expressive as the stone shape itself. Several works in this new sculptural group are called Void—a concept with which Noguchi was familiar not only through his knowledge of Buddhism, but also from his familiarity with existentialism, so popular in the 1950s. His 1950 Mu and several of his clay sculptures made in Japan also approached the theme of emptiness, perhaps even referring to the Buddhist concept of no-mind, which I take to mean emptying the mind so that it is more receptive to enlightenment. Noguchi’s sculptures on the theme of the void may also refer to the nothingness of death or to the endless space of the universe. Of this new form Noguchi wrote: “I have carried the concept of the void like a weight on my shoulders … It is like some inevitable question that I cannot answer.”21 The void sculptures, while peaceful, are like portals to nonbeing. Perhaps the idea of emptiness offered Noguchi the possibility of clarity and calm. The gatelike sculptures also recall torii—the gateways that lead up to Shinto shrines. Passage through a Noguchi gate could be a form of purification on the threshold of a more spiritual world. Indeed, the twelve-foot-high Energy Void in Noguchi’s museum in Mure is also known as the Gate of Heaven. When the painter Sam Francis visited Noguchi at Mure, he dreamed about Noguchi’s monumental gate as a gate to paradise, and when he told Noguchi about his dream, Noguchi did not correct him.22 Energy Void was originally commissioned for Pepsico’s sculpture garden, but when it was finished, Noguchi thought it was possibly the best sculpture he had ever made; always loath to sell the sculptures that he liked most, he decided to make another version for Pepsico.23 He never told Pepsico that theirs was the second Energy Void.
She, 1970–71. Austrian black Porticoi marble and Portuguese rose Aurora marble, 24 × 14¾ × 51 in.
To Love, 1970–71. Austrian black Porticoi marble and Portuguese rose Aurora marble, 147⁄8 × 111⁄8 × 223⁄8 in.
Noguchi with Energy Void, in the stone circle at Mure, Shikoku, 1971. Black Swedish granite, ht. 10 ft.
* * *
When Noguchi was working in Japan or Italy, Priscilla Morgan took care of his affairs in New York. She sorted and forwarded his mail. She reorganized his filing system, and, with his accountant Bernie Bergstein, dealt with his bills. She made sure that his studio was clean, his plants were watered, his alarm system was working, his car was functioning. She took potential patrons to see his sculptures, either at the warehouse where some of his work was stored or at his studio. Storage, transportation, and insurance issues were in her hands. She also handled a number of loans and sales. She had frequent exchanges with dealers who might be interested in showing Noguchi’s work. She gave the sculptor astute advice about how to deal with commissions—she was a far more diplomatic negotiator than he. She helped him strategize his finances. Most important, she provided him with a social context. Priscilla gave frequent dinner parties—and she did this with great sophistication. Beyond the delicious food and stimulating talk, these dinners put Noguchi in contact with people who might further his career. She was, in fact, the perfect artist’s wife.
At Henraux during the summer of 1972, Noguchi was stricken with back pain. In New York that September he underwent spinal surgery. Priscilla recalls that when they arrived at the hospital they were met at the entrance by an African-American nurse with a wheelchair. Noguchi turned to Priscilla and said, “I’ve always wondered what kind of angel would welcome me to heaven.” Back in Japan in October, Noguchi wrote to Priscilla: “I can not begin to tell you how grateful I am for all the attention you gave me in my illness. ‘A friend in need’ as they say.”24 Nine days later Noguchi wrote Priscilla from Shikoku: “My memories of my last trying times is brightened by all the real kindness you gave me. How I can ever be worthy I don’t know.”
Half a year later, Noguchi’s spinal problems persisted. According to Priscilla, he tended to revere doctors and took their advice seriously, but he was not pleased with his medical treatment during the autumn of 1973 in New York. He complained to Priscilla that his doctor was always away when he needed him, and when he had an appointment the doctor kept him waiting for two hours, only to be told that his ailment was “nothing.” Priscilla wrote to Noguchi’s doctor on November 12 asking him to be patient and kind when Noguchi came to see him. Noguchi, she told the doctor, was in “one of his despondent moments.” He had no energy, she said, and he “feels he is lost.” What Priscilla described was surely one of Noguchi’s episodes of depression.
* * *
The tone of Noguchi’s letters to Priscilla is that of someone writing to a good old friend or perhaps to a wife of many years. When Priscilla hadn’t written for a while, Noguchi’s letters to her sound uneasy. In spite of his attachment—or because of it—he liked to keep her at arm’s length. With the possible exceptions of Frida Kahlo, Ann Matta Clark, and Tara Pandit—none of whom was completely available to him—Noguchi never really gave himself to anyone. If he felt that someone was trying to possess or control him, he became skittish, rude, and mean. He once told Shoji Sadao, “I’m nice to women who are bad for me and bad to women who are good for me.”25
An expert seducer, Noguchi had a steady stream of beautiful young women moving in and out of his life. Most of the time Priscilla was not jealous, or she was too disciplined to show it. Though one young Japanese woman named Nobu irritated Priscilla with her kittenish flirting. “I’d be cooking in the kitchen and Nobu would be giving Noguchi a massage. Isamu loved it. It was like being a king with a court.” One time they were all together in Venice riding in a gondola. “I had differed with Noguchi about something and he got mad and argued back. Nobu took his side. I told her, ‘If you keep this up I just might push you into the water.’ Noguchi enjoyed this kind of attention.”
Noguchi would introduce his girlfriends to Priscilla in part so that they would realize that he already had a permanent partner. As Shoji Sadao recalls, Noguchi was adept at carrying on several relationships at once. “He was very secretive. He was a loner. He compartmentalized, kept different parts of his life separate. All his girlfriends have fond memories of him.” About Noguchi’s philandering, Priscilla says: “He’d make love and leave them. A couple of times I’d say, ‘That’s it,’ and end it. It was sometimes very trying and hard. I could spot when another woman came into his life. He’d lead women on and then they would get possessive. Although I was not possessive or clinging, it was hard because I was not married. He preferred married women because no commitment was possible. He had to be free. He needed space. I understood that and that is the reason I lasted so long.”
Nonetheless, Priscilla did not hesitate to tell Noguchi how much she loved him. On New Year’s Eve 1960, for example, she wrote: “Dearest Isamu. How grateful I am for you, my love is with you tonight and always. So hope all is well. Once again I miss you beyond words Priscilla.” It was probably on February 29, 1968, that she wrote: “But it is Leap Year and I will hold my breath and say that I love you deeply. Did it ever occur to you that I might have been born just for you?” On his birthday that year she wrote, but did not send, a note saying: “If you would marry me you’d feel younger every year. Happy birthday—Priscilla.” She closed a letter dated January 17, 1971, with: “Isamu, I miss you and love you so much. Please don’t settle for just Japan. You belong to the world and are so valuable and important at this most extraordinary time. Come back soon.”
Noguchi’s letters to Priscilla from the year after they met come the closest to being intimate and sometimes even romantic: “But you are like a fountain of enthusiasm—I would soon become so dependent that I would dry up without its constant flow.” A postcard written on a flight to Honolulu en route to Japan and postmarked August 15, 1960, said: “A perfect trip & perfect beginning, with you looking so lovely—Thank you—bless you—Love Isamu.” Except to sign off, Noguchi rarely used the word “love,” but it is clear that he did love Priscilla. Sometimes his attachment seemed that of an adolescent boy fighting to be free of dependency on his mother. On social occasions he would often disparage her, especially if she was the hostess. He would needle and tease, and at times Priscilla would just go into another room and wait until his storm was over. Arnold Glimcher, Noguchi’s good friend and dealer starting in 1975, does not think that Noguchi was just teasing. “He had a mean streak,” Glimcher recalls. “Perhaps it was because of his dual culture, the conflict between east and west. It was embarrassing for guests when he turned on Priscilla. I don’t know how she put up with it.”26
Priscilla was strong enough not to be overly hurt by Noguchi’s nastiness. At least she did not let her hurt feelings show. “He liked to put me on,” she says. “He was always testing me to find flaws.” At the bottom she felt loved and she believes that Noguchi was secretly proud of her. He liked, for example, her long WASP lineage. Uncertain of his own pedigree, it comforted him to be lionized by people who felt secure about class. And, when they first met, he was impressed by her high-powered job at William Morris (which she gave up in order to devote herself to Spoleto and Noguchi). He surely loved Priscilla’s great sense of style: she dressed simply but beautifully. Her apartment was exquisitely appointed, and when she set a table everything on it was aesthetically pleasing, especially the flowers.
Priscilla became a master at dismissing Noguchi’s insistence on detachment. He acted aloof when she visited him in Japan and she knew he had other girlfriends there. Despite her insistence that this “didn’t bother me,” in Priscilla’s archive are handwritten drafts of two notes to Noguchi written in the summer of 1971 at a moment when he must have been pulling away. One of them had to do with his behavior or attitude when he would join her in Spoleto. She said that in the “compressed atmosphere” of Spoleto and in the company of people like Buckminster Fuller and Ezra Pound, she, too, needed to keep face.
I know you need many people in your life but surely you can visit me for a few days a year in Spoleto—or devote time to me with other people around. If not I don’t think we have much of a real friendship in the large sense & I think my judgment about loving you must not have been very good. I know a letter like this irritates you but then it is not very easy for me to write. Spoleto is an atmosphere in which I have worked very hard for many years. No one assumes you and I are getting married—which you seem to worry so much about—which seems foolish to me in 1971 what anyone thinks about that (at our ages except always the principals [sic] involved) but people do know that I don’t view you as just a casual or very good friend. Of course people know I love you very much—but my god, how many people can claim to be so loved in this seemingly loveless world.
She ended this letter (which she may never have sent) saying: “Communication is always so difficult—strange I so seldom really say what I really feel to you.” The second note told Noguchi that she loved and admired him “in the most beautiful sense,” and that she only wanted to contribute to his “happiness and peace of mind.” She begged him to “try to feel some joy in our knowing each other. It has been a long time and I couldn’t bear to live without your friendship.”
“Handling Noguchi” Priscilla says, “was like taming a lion. The minute I saw his eyelids partly close I would change the subject and avoid his anger attack.” She loved his wit, his “purity,” and the “deep sadness about him. He had a lonesome quality, which was very appealing to me.” Noguchi’s sense of not belonging and of being ostracized because of his mixed heritage appealed to her nurturing instinct. More than once, Manhattan doormen directed him to the servants’ entrance. “Once we came home and Isamu said, ‘I’m nothing. I don’t belong any place.’ He was flat against the wall, very disturbed by the attitude of prejudice … he was full of self-doubt. This was part of our bond. I believed in him … I smothered him with love. He needed unconditional non-stop love.”
In 1980 Noguchi and Priscilla had a fight bitter enough to keep them apart for half a year. Priscilla remembers it as the most painful time of her life. It happened during a period when Noguchi was working hard to get ready for his Sculpture of Spaces show at the Whitney Museum. Just before the show opened, the two were at dinner together and she suggested that he was not paying enough to the people running Akari Associates. Noguchi blew up and dropped her at home. “Two days later the exhibition opened at the Whitney. Laurance Rockefeller gave a party after the opening and Isamu wouldn’t even look at me.” They didn’t speak until Noguchi finally called to apologize.
* * *
In November 1970 and in May 1972 Noguchi exhibited at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery. The 1970 show, featuring his post-tensioned marble sculptures made in Italy, received good reviews. Arts magazine said, “His figures are highly refined abstractions synthesizing aspects of man and nature that are universal and timeless. A haunting, Oriental mysticism exists simultaneously with mathematically calculated forms, marking Noguchi as one of the most original contributors to modern sculpture.”27 John Canaday wrote in The New York Times that the sculptures “inspire an awareness of forces allied with nature, which, as the structure of the world, has always been at the core of Noguchi’s art.”28 For the 1972 show Ekstrom suggested showing a number of replicas of the same sculpture. The interlocking slab sculpture called Strange Bird (1945) was chosen; the show included six bronze and two aluminum versions. This time Canaday wrote that Noguchi was an artist upon whom “all the superlatives have already been applied, and are still deserved.”29
In spite of the critical success, Noguchi was unhappy with being handled by Arne Ekstrom. According to Varujan Boghosian, a fellow sculptor in the Cordier & Ekstrom stable, Noguchi was dissatisfied especially because Ekstrom had definite ideas about how his gallery space should be used, and, like Noguchi, wanted control. Noguchi would complain that it was Ekstrom’s show, not his.30 He was feeling negative about art dealers in general and he doubted the value of gallery exhibitions. His disgruntlement was, no doubt, exacerbated by back problems and depression. Moreover, his work was not selling well. Neither were his Akari. In this unhappy state of mind he wrote to Anne Rotzler of Gimpel Hanover Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland, on December 16, 1971. He sent her photographs of some works that she might consider putting in a show. Noguchi told Rotzler that he wanted to get the sculptures that he had shown at Ekstrom “away from this country where nothing has happened, even after the prices were lowered by one-third.”31 In a subsequent letter to Rotzler he ventured that perhaps a museum would be a better venue for his work than a gallery and that a dealer could function as an intermediary. He was beginning to think about creating an exhibition space in Long Island City, a notion that would in the mid-1980s bear fruit in the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum.
In 1972 Noguchi exhibited his post-tensioned marble sculptures at Gimpel Fils at 30 Davies Street in London. In May of the following year the Minami Gallery in Tokyo gave him a show—his first in Japan in eleven years. “In exhibiting again in Japan,” Noguchi wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue, “I am reminded of how time and places here have formed me, and of my own roots here in childhood.”32 He said that Japan had enabled him to transform reality with his imagination: “It is in this sense that I may be said to have Japan within me.” As always he was preoccupied with time’s passing: “We are no longer so sure that time flows in one direction only … My aim has been to seek this common denominator which transcends race and finally time—the shallow linear time that is synonymous with progress and the new as an end in itself. To me a work of art escapes time when it remains fresh and new and retains forever a wonder.”
Noguchi continued to receive inquiries for major sculptural projects. Some never came to fruition, others, thanks to his perseverance, did. Among those that did were Intetra, a mist fountain for the Society of Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida; an aluminum sculpture titled Shinto for the Bank of Tokyo’s Manhattan branch; Playscapes, a playground for Piedmont Park in Atlanta; and Landscape of Time, a grouping of rocks for the General Services Administration in Seattle, which a congressman compared to five $100,000 “pet rocks.”33 Perhaps the most successful project of this period was the group of fountains for the new Supreme Court building in Tokyo. Installed in a double inner courtyard between the courtroom and the judges’ meeting room are six black granite tsukubai, which Noguchi called “overflowing wells.” The mood is meditative, almost sacramental. Water emerging from the top of these squarish chunks of granite creates a surface that shines like a mirror, and mirrors, being associated with Japan’s mythic origins, had great significance in Japanese culture. The water then flows gently down over the partly rough and partly smooth sides of the stone and into a basin. The ground of one of the courtyards is paved with stone. In the other court the tsukubai are set in a bed of white sea pebbles. At one point Noguchi wanted to call these “Illuminating Wells.” Since the public does not have access to them, the almost inaudible sound of flowing water, the dark luminosity of wet granite, and the stillness of the stone itself are designed to give spiritual uplift to those in the legal profession. He hoped that his fountains would communicate ideas of “purity and balance” and would prompt insights about justice being done.34
On May 10, 1975, Noguchi’s exhibition titled Steel Sculptures opened at the Pace Gallery at 32 East Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. For over a year Noguchi had been corresponding with Arnold B. Glimcher, the gallery’s founder and chairman, about his wish to find an outlet for Akari. Glimcher wrote to Noguchi on April 1, 1974, saying that he hoped Noguchi would think positively about joining Pace. “You already know how much we care about your work and want to show it. There is no obstacle too great (taking out windows, knocking down walls) for us to overcome in providing the best environment for your works.”35 Glimcher told Noguchi that he felt a special affinity for Noguchi’s stainless steel sculptures and he wanted to purchase some of them immediately. “Isamu, please believe me that it is only our conviction that you are one of the great artists of the Twentieth Century that keeps us trying to convince you of our merit to show your works.”
Steel Sculptures included fifteen pieces, some polished and some sandblasted. Reprises of the aluminum sculptures Noguchi made in 1959, the steel pieces were, as Bryan Robertson’s catalogue essay pointed out, developed from models consisting of a single sheet of paper cut, folded, and slit. The sculptures’ “loaded silence” and “energetic repose” were qualities that could describe most of Noguchi’s work.36 The exhibition was well received. John Russell wrote in The New York Times that it was “the major exhibition of New York on 57th Street.” Noguchi, he said, “comes up with echoes and ambiguities that keep us by turns amused, stirred, provoked and faintly disconcerted.”37 Hilton Kramer, also in the Times, wrote: “No artist of our time has brought a greater sense of delicacy to his sculptural task—or a greater sense of refinement, both sensuous and spiritual in its effect on the viewer—than Isamu Noguchi.”38
The guest list for the Pace show’s opening, which Priscilla surely had a hand in, reads like a who’s who of the Manhattan art world. It included everyone from Arthur Penn to Willem de Kooning, from Saul Steinberg to the critic Barbara Rose, from I. M. Pei to Jerome Robbins. New York’s wealthy and well connected were included as well, among them Ann Rockefeller Costa, Mary T. Rockefeller, Mary McFadden, Ambassador and Mrs. Angier Biddle Duke, Alice Tully, Louis Auchincloss, Dorothy Norman, Patrick Lannan, and Christophe de Menil. Others whose lives had touched Noguchi’s over the years were Ann Alpert (Ann Matta Clark), John Lennon, and Yoko Ono.
* * *
From the first half of the 1970s come a number of rounded granite sculptures, many of which have a partially pitted surface that catches light with a soft dazzle. Arne Glimcher, who once watched Noguchi draw the lines where he wanted a stone to be cut, was surprised that Noguchi also made marks where he wanted the chisel to pit. All of these rounded, pitted, granite sculptures are a continuation of Noguchi’s theme of emergence seen in The Mountain (1964) and in Origin (1968), which is like a mountain or an island or a baby coming into being. One of the most beautiful of the pitted pieces is the red travertine Double Red Mountain (1969), a pair of hills rising from a smooth, forty-inch-long rectangular ground. The hills’ lower halves are rough and their summits are highly polished. Although the sculpture brings to mind the steep reddish slopes of New Mexico, the mountains are also like breasts—once again Noguchi merged landscape and the human body. In his museum’s catalogue Noguchi wrote that Double Red Mountain was, like his other landscape tables, “a landscape of the mind.”39
Origin, 1968. African granite, 23 × 30 × 32 in.
Double Red Mountain, 1969. Persian travertine, 11½ × 40 × 30¼ in.
Young Mountain (1970) and Emergent (1971) are cut in sections and put back together so that the pitted surface is also articulated by fine cracks. Some of Noguchi’s partly pitted and partly polished granite sculptures are recognizably anthropomorphic. Feminine (1970) and Uruguayan (1974) both suggest pregnant women’s torsos. Seeking (1974) brings to mind a male torso moving forward on a Greek pediment. Childhood (1970) and Emanation (1971) appear to be abstractions of a human head.
Compared to the refinement and tactile allure of the partly pitted granite pieces, Noguchi’s basalt sculptures during these years are raw. To Intrude on Nature’s Way (1971) stands like an ancient grave marker. Noguchi wrote that because it was partly carved, it differed from the artfully placed stones in Japanese gardens, which are left in their natural state. “But,” he said, “I am also a sculptor of the West. I place my mark and do not hide. The crosscurrents eddy around me. In To Intrude on Nature’s Way, the contradictions between the Eastern and Western approaches are resolved with a minimum of contrivance.”40 The Inner Stone (1973) is a chunk of basalt with several cuts in its surface. Only these cut areas are polished. Noguchi credited the availability of a power tool with this sculpture’s conception: “Sometimes a new tool, with familiarity of use, will suddenly take hold, and the artist then serves its direction unerringly in the stone’s transformation, when the core bit becomes a carving tool.”41
In these years, in part because his back hurt, Noguchi made groups of smaller sculptures out of pieces of stone left over from the stonecutting process. He took, for example, two cylindrical pieces of granite that had been removed with the core bit from The Inner Stone and with them created Core Piece # 1 and Core Piece # 2 (both 1974). About his creative process in carving these, he wrote: “The making of sculpture becomes a ritual when the sculptor becomes as one with it and the parts fall into its whole as if in a trance. The residue returns to the earth, or on occasion reappears clothed in new identity.”42 In End Pieces (1974), Noguchi took four discarded slabs of Swedish granite that had been removed from a block of stone and created a hollow boxlike form. “There is mystery to a cube,” he wrote, “especially a black cube—when does it become a sculpture?”43