Objects that Move You

In today’s world of mega-museums—where acres of exhibition spaces offer seemingly endless varieties to visitors—the single-artist experience provides an alternative to this (intentionally or not) shopping-mall-esque model. Small and intimate, yet deep in its focus, this type of museum space is more akin to a one-on-one omakase meal with a master chef than an elaborate, multicourse dinner. No other institution exemplifies this approach better than the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York.

Housed in a former photography supply warehouse across the street from where he once lived and worked, the 31,000-square-foot main building was purchased in 1974 and renovated by Isamu Noguchi. Its adjacent concrete pavilion and sculpture garden were designed by the designer and architect in the decade before the museum opened to the public in 1985. His sculptures in the garden and first-floor galleries largely still remain where he placed them back then, and in this way, Noguchi carefully calibrated the way visitors encounter his body of work. Through the thoughtful sequencing of movement and interweaving of exterior and interior space, the overall structure can be considered Noguchi’s largest and most durable artwork.

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Born in Los Angeles in 1904 to a Japanese poet father and an American writer mother, Noguchi was raised between Japan and America. He attended Columbia University as a medical student but soon dropped out to take night sculpture classes. At 23, he moved to Paris for a seven-month apprenticeship with the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși as part of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In the next several years, the peripatetic Noguchi traveled between Paris and New York, as well as to Russia and China, also spending time in Mexico City to produce a commissioned mural at one of the city’s largest markets, Mercado Abelardo L. Rodríguez.

During these trips, Noguchi was introduced to a number of designers and artists, some of whom he would start collaborations with, including Buckminster Fuller, Frida Kahlo, and Martha Graham, for whom Noguchi designed stage sets and costumes over the following few decades. While he continued to make artwork during this time, he began generating more income through commissions for portrait busts as well as industrial products. One of Noguchi’s best-known and important designs from this period is the first electronic baby monitor, known as Radio Nurse, which was produced with Zenith Radio Corporation in the ultra-modern material of Bakelite plastic and hit the market in the late 1930s.

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After World War II, Noguchi continued his involvement with manufacturers, and, in 1947, began a working relationship with Herman Miller, then one of the leading purveyors of modern furniture. Made from two identical, interlocking wooden parts and a glass top, Noguchi’s coffee table for the brand is still one of the most recognizable designs of the 20th century. As his career as a sculptor took off with numerous commissions and, later, museum exhibitions, Noguchi continued to produce works that did not strictly qualify as “art.” In the early ’80s, he produced a series of editioned pieces with printmaking workshop Gemini Graphic Editions Limited (Gemini G.E.L.) in Los Angeles; although many of these galvanized objects are strictly sculpture, some are explicitly functional, including a chair and a table.

But perhaps Noguchi’s most famous functional designs are his Akari Light Sculptures. In 1951, while in Japan to work on a garden for the new Reader’s Digest Building, Noguchi was invited by the mayor of the small town of Gifu to visit and give advice on how to revive the traditional lantern-making craft of the region. Inspired by the simplicity of the lanterns’ materials of washi paper and bamboo, Noguchi wanted to modernize them with light bulbs. His first designs became commercially available in 1952, and, over the next three decades, he would continue to refine and add to the Akari collection. The Akaris were an immediate success due to their reasonable price point, light and collapsible construction, and overnight adoption by the design-scene cognoscenti.

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The elemental forms of the Akari—simple folded or gently curving geometries—resonate with Noguchi’s work in stone as well as his more temporary stage sets and other industrial designs. But they also have connections with a lesser-known body of objects: artifacts from Noguchi’s personal collection. Among the Noguchi Museum’s cataloged sculptures and artworks are what are informally called “Noguchi’s collectables” by the curatorial staff—namely, objects that Noguchi collected over his years of travels and through friends. Most are of undocumented origins—meaning that there is no record of where and when they were acquired—and range from 12th-century BCE Chinese bronzes to 20th-century Javanese shadow puppets. What these objects have in common, as the Noguchi Museum assistant curator Kate Wiener explains in a text for the museum, “defies neat temporal classification, upending conceptions of the modern and archaic, the ephemeral and eternal.” Noguchi was drawn to timelessness, objects in their most essential form and material.

Expanding upon the collection, Wiener states that, for Noguchi, “looking to the distant past, and to the oldest examples of artistic expression, was an effort to tap into what he understood as a broader cosmic interrelatedness—something fundamental shared across time and culture. His collection includes numerous ancient artifacts, which likely held certain material and technological significance for him.” One object in the collection, in particular, stands out: a small, unidentified fetish object in stone. Barely three inches tall, it has a monumental presence vaguely reminiscent of Mayan or Polynesian statuary. It is easy to imagine these are the qualities that Noguchi strived for in his own sculptures.

Still, literal as well as poetic parallels exist between these objects and Noguchi’s works. Among a small number of vernacular furniture pieces in his collectibles is a wooden stool from Lega (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that had previously belonged to his friend Eliot Elisofon, a LIFE magazine photographer. Roughly carved in typical West African wood, the stool’s form has inspired fellow artists, from his mentor Brâncuși to Ray Eames, who designed three similar stools in walnut for Herman Miller. But in typical (and apparently fidgety) Noguchi fashion, the African piece inspired the now-collectible Knoll Rocking Stool in Wire Form, which allows the sitter to move to various positions. Another stool in the collection is the Danish designer Mogens Koch’s Paver’s Stool, which only works when there’s an active sitter on its single pedestal base.

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Not everything in Noguchi’s personal collection is of ancient or unknown origins. Some of the most notable objects are ceramic sculptures by the Japanese-American Toshiko Takaezu. Born in Hawaii of Okinawan heritage, Takaezu studied ceramics with Maija Grotell at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the early 1950s. Noguchi often stopped in Hawaii when he traveled between the U.S. and Japan, and it’s likely this was where he met Takaezu and developed a friendship with the fellow Japanese-American. Takaezu’s mature works take the iconic form of pots with a “closed” top, rendering them non-functional. It is this pushing of everyday objects into the realm of sculpture—“an embrace of hybridity,” according to Wiener—that must have resonated with Noguchi. There are a handful of pieces by Takaezu in Noguchi’s collection, and coincidentally the museum will inaugurate an extensive survey of Takaezu’s career this spring, curated by Wiener and the craft historian Glenn Adamson.

In 1986, two years before his death at 84 years old, Noguchi was honored as the sole representative of the U.S. at the Venice Biennale with a presentation entitled “Isamu Noguchi: What Is Sculpture?” The designer made the decision to set aside a room of the pavilion for his Akari lights. Critics praised the more traditional stone works on display but disparaged his inclusion of the Akaris, calling the designs commercial. They seemed to have missed the point of Noguchi’s career, where he expanded the definition of what he called “sculptural practices” to encompass all things, functionally and spiritually. As Wiener says, “Noguchi had a disregard for artistic categories and little interest in the difference between design, landscape design, a stage set, or sculpture. He thought everything he made fit under the larger umbrella of sculpture, and he radically expanded what that meant through his work.” Noguchi, for his part, was unrepentant. In the inaugural monograph on the Noguchi Museum, which was published in 1987, Noguchi simply stated: “Call it sculpture when it moves you so.”