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拍品专文
When in 1926 Isamu Noguchi visited a Brâncuşi exhibition at the Brummer Gallery in New York, the young sculptor was “transfixed” by the master’s vision. A year later, Noguchi was privileged to begin work as Brâncuşi’s studio assistant and his own early production speaks to Brâncuşi’s influence. It can be sensed in the striking singularity of his forms, where a sense of unity or totality derives from the graceful yet powerful interlocking of relational parts. Noguchi arrives at his forms through a process of composing, of the perspicuous placement of elements that paradoxically form a whole. His lucent entities create internal relationships, yet are perceived as entire. Thanatos is among Noguchi’s most sensitively fashioned works from a period in which the artist explored the challenges of industrial material. Thin sheets of aluminum are placed in almost anthropomorphic alignment to resonate with, if not recreate, a schematic twinning between the fourth-century BC depiction of the winged Greek god of death, Thanatos, and the shaped elements of Noguchi’s beautiful forms. Could it be that that two curved vertically situated rectangular elements mimic the thrust of the wing and the seeming melancholy figure sighing into a graceful contraposto in its archaic early rendering of this mythological god?
The lessons from Brâncuşi concerning the natural properties of sculptural material extended to Noguchi’s own impulses. So, too, did Brâncuşi’s organic shapes, which informed Noguchi’s later production. Caryatid II, a single form, a vertical rendering of a Greek female figure that substituted for columns in Greek architecture, was in Brâncuşi’s studio when Noguchi assisted him there. Assembled from disparate carved pieces of wood, its arched back suggests its anthropomorphic attributes. As Noguchi would state, “The natural mediums of wood and stone, alive before man was, have the greater capacity to conform to with the reality of our being…. I for one return recurrently to the earth in my search for the meaning of sculpture – to escape fragmentation with a new synthesis, within the sculpture and related to spaces… Sculpture is the definition of form in space, visible to the mobile spectator as participant. Sculptures move because we move” (I. Noguchi in J. Gordon, Isamo Noguchi, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1968, p. 14). And so it may appear surprising that in 1958 Noguchi turned to aluminum.
But in that year, Noguchi returned to New York City after creating gardens from natural materials for the UNESCO Building in Paris. New York renewed and enlivened his art practice. As if to celebrate the industrial culture around him, he turned to works in aluminum, which he found more appropriate to the environment of New York, to the “other reality of the evanescent new – that truth born of the moment” (I. Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, New York, 1968, p. 35). Thanatos is among the group of sculptures created in aluminum that obsessed the artist. Yet they resonate somewhere between modernity and ancient thought. A trip taken to Greece in 1957 may have inspired him, as had his mentor Brâncuşi’s own sculptural inspiration, Caryatid II, taken from ancient architectural forms. An artist such as David Smith was also at work in industrial materials at that time, creating multipart work of conjoined totemic-like flat planes that are inflected with anthropomorphic associations. Smith’s History of LeRoy Borton, on view at the Museum of Modern Art by 1957, was perhaps known to Noguchi at the time. Yet Noguchi’s characteristic curvilinear contours—which relate as much to the European modernist Hans Arp, perhaps, as to the American sharp-edged virility of Smith—nonetheless share an aesthetic of engagement with the spatial emptiness around their materials.
For Thanatos, a work modeled on the winged, sword-carrying Greek personification of death, expresses an exquisitely tuned force and energy. The sculpture’s graceful forms and rounded and curved cappings at their lower extremities manifest a formal tension between a curvilinear structure and their conjoined continuous flat sheets of metal. Anticipating the thematic line that would lead to Noguchi’s evocative Mortality, conceived a year after the present work, with its shaft-like form to which several attenuated vertical forms are attached, Thanatos’ distilled, almost weightless balanced elements created from interlocking vertical planes, evoke a lyrical quality and buoyancy attuned to the volumetric shapes of the early Greek depiction. That Noguchi chose to render his forms in one of the “new materials [that] remake the world … my world, the real America,” should come as no surprise. Through the manufacturer Edison Price, Noguchi obtained the tools for manipulating these new light materials. Assisted by Buckminster Fuller’s assistant, Shoji Sadao, the artist created a series of sculptures out of sheet-aluminum during this productive period from which Thanatos derives. “By way of self-imposed limitation, I insisted on deriving each sculpture from a single sheet of metal—a unity, I thought, was achieved thereby. We impose our rules of value. I wanted to deny weight and substance” (I. Noguchi, in D. Ashton, Noguchi East and West, Berkeley, 1993, p. 154). Thanatos, then, represents that rare moment in an artist’s life where new materials engender new forms, where an artist invents a new expressive visual language out of a feeling for his time and place in the world, not the welded steel of his contemporaries, but rather the delicate cutouts of an aesthetic temperament attuned to his specific history, both East and West.
The lessons from Brâncuşi concerning the natural properties of sculptural material extended to Noguchi’s own impulses. So, too, did Brâncuşi’s organic shapes, which informed Noguchi’s later production. Caryatid II, a single form, a vertical rendering of a Greek female figure that substituted for columns in Greek architecture, was in Brâncuşi’s studio when Noguchi assisted him there. Assembled from disparate carved pieces of wood, its arched back suggests its anthropomorphic attributes. As Noguchi would state, “The natural mediums of wood and stone, alive before man was, have the greater capacity to conform to with the reality of our being…. I for one return recurrently to the earth in my search for the meaning of sculpture – to escape fragmentation with a new synthesis, within the sculpture and related to spaces… Sculpture is the definition of form in space, visible to the mobile spectator as participant. Sculptures move because we move” (I. Noguchi in J. Gordon, Isamo Noguchi, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1968, p. 14). And so it may appear surprising that in 1958 Noguchi turned to aluminum.
But in that year, Noguchi returned to New York City after creating gardens from natural materials for the UNESCO Building in Paris. New York renewed and enlivened his art practice. As if to celebrate the industrial culture around him, he turned to works in aluminum, which he found more appropriate to the environment of New York, to the “other reality of the evanescent new – that truth born of the moment” (I. Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, New York, 1968, p. 35). Thanatos is among the group of sculptures created in aluminum that obsessed the artist. Yet they resonate somewhere between modernity and ancient thought. A trip taken to Greece in 1957 may have inspired him, as had his mentor Brâncuşi’s own sculptural inspiration, Caryatid II, taken from ancient architectural forms. An artist such as David Smith was also at work in industrial materials at that time, creating multipart work of conjoined totemic-like flat planes that are inflected with anthropomorphic associations. Smith’s History of LeRoy Borton, on view at the Museum of Modern Art by 1957, was perhaps known to Noguchi at the time. Yet Noguchi’s characteristic curvilinear contours—which relate as much to the European modernist Hans Arp, perhaps, as to the American sharp-edged virility of Smith—nonetheless share an aesthetic of engagement with the spatial emptiness around their materials.
For Thanatos, a work modeled on the winged, sword-carrying Greek personification of death, expresses an exquisitely tuned force and energy. The sculpture’s graceful forms and rounded and curved cappings at their lower extremities manifest a formal tension between a curvilinear structure and their conjoined continuous flat sheets of metal. Anticipating the thematic line that would lead to Noguchi’s evocative Mortality, conceived a year after the present work, with its shaft-like form to which several attenuated vertical forms are attached, Thanatos’ distilled, almost weightless balanced elements created from interlocking vertical planes, evoke a lyrical quality and buoyancy attuned to the volumetric shapes of the early Greek depiction. That Noguchi chose to render his forms in one of the “new materials [that] remake the world … my world, the real America,” should come as no surprise. Through the manufacturer Edison Price, Noguchi obtained the tools for manipulating these new light materials. Assisted by Buckminster Fuller’s assistant, Shoji Sadao, the artist created a series of sculptures out of sheet-aluminum during this productive period from which Thanatos derives. “By way of self-imposed limitation, I insisted on deriving each sculpture from a single sheet of metal—a unity, I thought, was achieved thereby. We impose our rules of value. I wanted to deny weight and substance” (I. Noguchi, in D. Ashton, Noguchi East and West, Berkeley, 1993, p. 154). Thanatos, then, represents that rare moment in an artist’s life where new materials engender new forms, where an artist invents a new expressive visual language out of a feeling for his time and place in the world, not the welded steel of his contemporaries, but rather the delicate cutouts of an aesthetic temperament attuned to his specific history, both East and West.