![]() ![]() He was “high on freedom”, says another who knew him, of the time when he lived and worked in rural postwar Japan with his young actress wife. As the artist Jeanne-Claude put it, in a film clip that can be seen in the show, his were “objects created by a human being who was obviously having fun”. He could hack and hew basalt, and polish and mottle it, such that it ran the gamut of rough and smooth and geological and crafted. They enabled him to make, for example, his Prismatic Tables of 1957, in which he plays with the ability of thin aluminium sheet (when folded) to imply substance, and then has them painted with a not-obvious but flawless choice of colours. His pleasure in shape and surface wonĪs the Barbican Art Gallery’s current Noguchi exhibition reveals, his greatest gifts were his eye and touch. He found it hard to translate anger and fear into his objects. The light certainly explores his fascination with weight and lightness. There’s a hint of the weird versions of nature that Noguchi and other artists found in a universe reconceived by Albert Einstein. There might be something of a Giacometti standing figure in its precarious skinniness. So you get pieces such as the Akari BB3-33S light of 1952-4, whose paper and bamboo shade recalls the horns of a Picasso minotaur, and is fixed on top of a slender metal pole that rises from a dense metal base. The shapes of these domestic objects would have been less convincing and more arbitrary if he hadn’t explored them first in sculpture. Noguchi lights at the Barbican Art Gallery. Also a coffee table that became (through no fault of its own) an interior design cliche – a three-edged sheet of glass, curved at the corners, that rests almost casually on a wooden support that looks like a scaled-down monumental sculpture. His most famous pieces were lampshades, in which traditional Japanese crafts were adapted to make both perfect spheres and the freeform shapes of mid-century western abstract art. He wasn’t a pioneer of new production techniques in the ways that Charles and Ray Eames were, nor did he grapple with the challenges of mass manufacture. If he hadn’t been a sculptor, Noguchi’s work as a designer would be less interesting. ![]() They don’t make you think that they were a matter of life or death to their creator. It shows both a beautiful sensitivity to materials and an informed awareness of other artists of his time – Brancusi (for whom Noguchi briefly worked), Picasso, Duchamp, Calder, Max Ernst. I f Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) hadn’t been a designer, his work as a sculptor would mostly be forgettable. ![]()
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