Isamu Noguchi.

Barry Schwabsky

An artist as famous as Isamu Noguchi would not usually be thought of as underrated, yet that is the case. He rests easily in no existing canon, and for now art history has marginalized him. Noguchi's writings and interviews will be of interest mainly to those with a special interest in him, unlike Willem de Kooning's writings or Francis Bacon's interviews, which are illuminating even for those skeptical of their painting. The tone of Noguchi's writing is often of a vague loftiness, yet at moments it can become surprisingly pointed, as in the evocation of "disturbing and unbeautiful gardens to awaken us to a new awareness of our solitude. Can it be that nature is no longer real for us or, in any case, out of scale?"

Bruce Altshuler, director of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, cannily sets up his monograph as an exploration of the tension between two ways of viewing Noguchi, perhaps corresponding to two ways the artist viewed himself: the Noguchi who translated the hieratic formalism of his teacher Brancusi into the terms of everyday life, though often, as Altshuler admits, merely "serv[ing] institutional prestige and embellishment," and the ethnically mixed Noguchi (known to his Indiana high school class as Sam Gilmour) in search of cultural identity, and whose view of the artist as "a continuously expatriated person" would no doubt be easily recognized by Salman Rushdie. In short, Altshuler gives us Noguchi Modern and Noguchi post-Modern. However pat that may sound, it works perfectly, especially when Noguchi's eclectic yet often visionary work of the '30s and '40s is taken into consideration. The earthworks of Robert Smithson, the modular yet biomorphic sculpture of Eva Hesse, the space-and-light work of Robert Irwin, the public art of Scott Burton, the orientalizing Minimalism of James Lee Byars, all find precedents here. This Tortured Earth, 1943, for instance, is the model for an earthwork to have been executed by military bombardment; as a wall relief, it looks surprisingly like some of Ti Shan Hsu's work of the '80s.

Altshuler's brisk treatment, emphasizing biography over criticism, is as good an introduction as one could hope for, but it is tantalizing rather than satisfying. It tells just enough to show that a full-scale biography of Noguchi would be fascinating, but also that the effort to formulate a genuinely critical approach to this far-reaching work is a precondition for any overall understanding of 20th-century American art. In other words, there may be a canon to which Noguchi is central, but only when the artistic issues that crystallize around him are articulated--and when there is some sense of the criteria for distinguishing successful from unsuccessful work, something Altshuler barely attempts. Noguchi certainly produced his share of weak or derivative work. In a 1979 interview with Paul Cummings, he even went so far as to admit that, in a sense, "I don't think I like sculpture very much. . . . I don't have much faith in myself as a kind of object maker with a sure audience." In fact, on the evidence of such works as the biomorphic carvings from thin stone sheets of the '40s, a sense of the arbitrariness of the individual, freestanding object often led to a degree of overrefinement and finicky composition. Only to the extent that he could work on the idea of a total space environment, or when he was disciplined by an idea of use--whether quotidian, as with his Akari lamps, or dramatic, as with his stage sets for Martha Graham--did Noguchi consistently overcome his own facility.

Barry Schwabsky is an art critic and poet who lives in New York.