Reciprocal debts: a traveling exhibition examines the ceramic sculpture Noguchi made during visits to Japan, where the spark of his interest inflamed a group of young potters

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Janet Koplos

Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), born in Los Angeles to an American mother and a Japanese father and raised (from age 2 to 13) in Japan, has typically been seen in the U.S. and Europe as expressing a Japanese sensibility in his work. The Japanese, however, have identified him with New York.

In the '30s, with the aid of a Guggenheim fellowship, Noguchi made his first visit to Japan as an adult. On that short stay, he began to use clay as a final rather than a preparatory material: he modeled some portrait heads and figurines in plaster and then cast them in terra-cotta in the workshop of a traditional potter in Kyoto. After the war, in 1950, he again visited Japan (on a round-the-world trip funded by the Bollingen Foundation) and again worked hl clay, this time primarily at a ceramic institute in Seto, an ancient pottery center. He hand-built many works from slabs, and also had forms thrown to his specifications on the potter's wheel. Returning hl 1952 for a longer stay, he had an even more extensive involvement, fraternizing with both senior figures in traditional pottery and a number of young avant-garde ceramic artists. That was essentially his last engagement with the material. Altogether he produced about 200 ceramic objects.

"Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics," an exhibition that originated at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., and is now at the Japan Society Gallery in New York, has two questions at its center. One is the nature of Noguchi's ceramic work and its kinship to his better-known stone sculpture, public art, and lamp and furniture design. The other is his relationship with--and effect upon--the young Japanese ceramists he encountered.

At the Sackler, the importance of the latter question was set out in the entrance to the show, which featured both a Noguchi sculpture and one by a Japanese ceramist; the slightly smaller version of the show at the Japan Society confines the young artists to the second half of the installation. Noguchi's opening piece, War (1952), is a bell-like form about 28 inches tall that recalls a warrior's helmet but has various notches, slits, cutouts and added bars, so that it becomes as well a kind of visual playground for the viewer's imagination. While the basic form is simple, the alternations of protruding and recessed, perforated and closed are spatially enticing. The same could be said of the work by Yagi Kazuo (1918-1979; the names here, other than Noguchi's, are in Japanese order, family name first). Yagi could be considered the pivotal person in the effort to take Japanese pottery into the realm of modernist sculpture. His piece at the entry, to the Sackler installation, Work No. 51 Memory of Clouds (1959), is a vertical, slightly concave box about 20 inches tall with an "eye"--a carefully defined depression--at an upper corner and four spikes or fangs, two at the top and two at the bottom. It has a subtly pitted, unglazed surface with fine combing lines that crisscross. This work relates to traditional ceramics in its volume, but it cannot be used. It is a "being" of sorts, its hollowness hinting at a voracious hunger, its surface abrasive but also sensual.

The exhibition is a complex gathering of works by many artists, telling a story and requiring the v ewer's constant awareness and comparative observations. Fortunately, however, the objects do not depend on the catalogue to make visual sense. Curators Louise Cort of the Sackler and Bert Winther-Tamaki, an art historian at the University of California, Irvine, begin by chronicling Noguchi's life and work with photos, drawings and ceramic works, including heads of his mother and a Japanese uncle (1932 and '31, respectively) that recall the many portrait heads from which be made a living during the Depression. These and a small sumo wrestler show his hands-on approach to shaping; the details of the plaster modeling carry over into the clay. Noguchi chose to retain the raised lines of the mold seams as evidence of his process.

A more abstract approach to form is seen in The Queen (1931), a chess piece-like structure almost 46 inches tall. Again retaining casting seams, this work suggests character through posture. The Queen strikingly relates to ancient haniwa tomb figures, evocatively fashioned from clay cylinders, although it differs in being faceless and in lacking garment details. It also recalls some of Brancusi's works; Noguchi had, in fact, briefly apprenticed with him in Paris in 1927. At the same time, as Winther-Tamaki points out, The Queen relates to functional vessel forms. He regards this work as an indication that the cross-pollination between Noguchi's sculptures and utilitarian designs--much noted later--was already under way in 1931.

Noguchi's next ceramic phase is represented by the 13 1/2-inch-tall My Mu (1950), a modernist squared cylinder featuring precisely cut holes. The cylinder is attached horizontally to three legs that have different tapers, one of which concludes in an amusingly cartoonish little foot. Another work of the same year, The Policeman, is a vertical box 14 inches tall that narrows from its open front to its open back, the sides and top perforated with "fingers," knobs and, seemingly, a billy club. Both works recall the sculpture of Mir6 and presage the later work of Okamoto Taro, a friend of Noguchi's and a major figure in postwar Japanese art. They have no precedent in Japanese ceramics. In these and other objects of the time, Noguchi used simple shapes with surfaces interrupted by additions or deletions that are geometric or nearly so. (Perforated enclosures appear in many materials throughout his career.) He tended to use the clay architecturally more than organically.