Isamu Noguchi: Everything is Sculpture

"Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture."

— Isamu Noguchi
(Isamu Noguchi: Everything is Sculpture - dans le gris)

Noguchi working on the plaster original of “Mu,” 1950

Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was a Japanese-American artist, sculptor-designer and landscape architect with an artistic career spanning six decades, beginning in the 1920s. Through a lifetime of artistic experimentation, he created sculptures, gardens, furniture and lighting designs, ceramics, architecture, landscapes, and set designs. Isamu Noguchi’s work, at once subtle and bold, traditional and modern, sets a new standard for the reintegration of the arts. His organic sensibilities, infused with his travels and experiences through the cultures of the world, have made Noguchi a central figure of organic abstract forms in 20th-century American sculpture.

"Brancusi made me realize that what I had learned previously — the quick ways of doing things — was all wrong... It is not the quick solutions. It is not something you learn and apply. After all, it is a search you have to enter into yourself."

— Isamu Noguchi

In 1926, Isamu Noguchi saw an exhibition in New York of the work of Constantin Brancusi that profoundly changed his artistic direction. He was determined to pursue a deeper understanding of modernism and abstraction. With a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Noguchi went to Paris, and in 1927 worked in Brancusi’s studio. In the meantime, he became friendly with Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, R. Buckminster Fuller, Martha Graham and Jules Pascin. Inspired by the older artist’s forms and philosophy, Noguchi turned to modernism and abstraction, infusing his highly finished pieces with a lyrical and emotional expressiveness, and with an aura of mystery. It was also at this time that Noguchi gained experience in stone sculpture. From lamps to playgrounds, Noguchi believed sculpture should be everywhere, everything is sculpture.

(Isamu Noguchi: Everything is Sculpture - dans le gris)

Isamu Noguchi thought that limiting himself to a particular style may make him an expert of that particular viewpoint or school, but he did not wish to belong to any school. Noguchi once said, "I am always learning, always discovering." As an artist, Noguchi used any medium he could get his hands on: stone, metal, wood, clay, bone, paper or a mixture of any or all – carving, casting, cutting, pounding, chiselling or dynamiting away as each form took shape. Noguchi believed the sculptor’s task was to shape space, to give it order and meaning, and that art should “disappear”, or be as one with its surroundings.

(Isamu Noguchi: Everything is Sculpture - dans le gris)

Isamu Noguchi's Drawing

Isamu Noguchi: Everything is Sculpture - dans le gris
Paris Abstraction, 1928