THERE ARE many ghosts in Hiroshima. One is the ghost of a sculpture that was never built. A black granite arch was designed to rise above the city’s peace park, recalling the roofs of haniwa, the clay funerary objects of ancient Japan. The form of the arch would continue underground, filling a womb-like cenotaph alongside a granite box containing the names of those killed by America’s atomic bomb.
Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese-American artist, considered the unrealised monument one of his greatest works. He reckoned one reason the arch was never built, despite being invited to create it by the architect in charge of the park, was that he was, in Japanese eyes, ultimately American, just as in American eyes he was ultimately Japanese. As a new exhibition of Noguchi’s sculptures at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum demonstrates, the work he did bring to life during his illustrious career grapples in beautiful and profound ways with his split identity, or what his father, Noguchi Yonejiro, a poet, once called “the tragedy of being neither the one nor the other”. Scheduled to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics, the exhibition was intended to tap into the global attention the games were supposed to bring. Though the pandemic has kept the crowds away, Noguchi stands as a welcome reminder of the internationalist spirit.
The elder Noguchi left Japan for America during the Meiji era in the late 19th century. He made a name for himself writing as “Yone” in a broken English that gave him both an “exotic” charm and a modernist style. He fathered a child with Léonie Gilmour, his editor, but returned to Japan before she gave birth. Gilmour soon followed, though she had few illusions about her lover. Rather, as she wrote to a friend at the time, she wanted to “make a little Japanese boy out of my son,” and reckoned that doing so in America would be difficult. In the early 1900s, anti-Asian sentiment swept California, where lawmakers made marriage between “whites” and “Mongolians” illegal. Yet in Japan, young Noguchi found that he stuck out too, like “an irregular verb”, as he later put it.
Gilmour sent Noguchi back to America for high school, where an encounter with Rodin’s work inspired him to pursue sculpture. A Guggenheim Fellowship took him to Paris in 1927, where he became an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, an influential Romanian artist. Noguchi’s early sculptures bear Brancusi’s stamp, as polished planes and rounded shapes come together in abstract yet evocative forms. Sheets of aluminium, folded and warped, confuse the boundaries between inner and outer. These works can also be read as an attempt, in metal, to bring the disparate pieces of himself into contact.
After leaving Paris, Noguchi travelled to China, where he studied ink painting with a master, Qi Baishi, and Japan, where he reconnected with his absent father. In the ensuing decades he became an international superstar: he designed sculptures, gardens and buildings around the world; he created sets for Martha Graham’s ballet and furniture for the Herman Miller company; he painted murals with Diego Rivera in Mexico, where he also had an affair with Frida Kahlo. (Noguchi once disappeared out of a window when the pair learned that Rivera was on his way.) Yet he could never escape awkward questions about his identity. As he wondered in an autobiography published in 1968: “With my double nationality and double upbringing, where was my home? Where were my affections? Where my identity? Japan or America, either, both—or the world?”
Noguchi may never have satisfied his yearning to belong to a national community. But in retrospect, he helped define a different kind of identity, one determined not by blood and soil, but by shared sensibilities and values. He was the archetype of the global citizen so disdained by today’s nationalists. It is but one of many ways that Noguchi was an artist ahead of his time. As he wrote in an unpublished essay in 1942, with America and Japan at war, “To be hybrid anticipates the future.”
Around the same time, he voluntarily entered a detention camp for Japanese-Americans in Arizona, seeking to raise awareness of their plight. He returned to Japan again after the war ended, and found a country chastened and chasing Western fashions. Noguchi offered some unexpected advice: “I suggested that to be modern did not mean to copy us but to be themselves, looking to their own roots for strength and inspiration.” His appreciation for Japanese aesthetics influenced the generation of Japanese artists that followed. The designer Miyake Issey once told the architect Tadao Ando that Noguchi was “the man I most respect”.
Noguchi also found his own new inspirations in Japanese traditions. He turned the paper lamps of the Gifu region into a series of “light sculptures” that he called “Akari”. He entered into a decades-long collaboration with a young stonecutter, Izumi Masatoshi, on the island of Shikoku. He worked for the rest of his life on a final body of sculptures: mesmerising columns of rough stone with smooth planes carved into their sides; rocks split and polished into mirror-like surfaces; boulders fractured and reassembled into perfect forms. The exhibition in Tokyo displays some of these pieces from his Shikoku studio, which has been preserved as a posthumous museum.
It makes for an illuminating contrast with his earlier, Brancusi-inspired work. In Western sculpture, the concept of the self is central, says Nakahara Atsuyuki, the show’s curator. Sculptures articulate the voice of the artist, who sees forms inside the marble. In Japanese art, there is “the absence of the self,” Mr Nakahara argues. The sculptor instead gives form to the voice of the material. The approach echoes artistic traditions going back to the Sakuteiki, an 11th-century treatise that instructs readers to “obey the request of the stone”. Or as Noguchi, perhaps tired of searching for a self of his own, once put it, “I tried to look into a rock and find a rock.” ■