Noguchi's multiform modernism

Masayo Duus. The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders. Trans. Peter Duus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 440 pp., 36 b/w ills. $29.95, $18.95 paper.

Because much of the literature on the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi seems content to define Noguchi's work largely in terms of his Japanese American identity, Masayo Duus's recent biography of the artist is a refreshing change of pace. Duus highlights the diversity of Noguchi's life and artistic experience while refraining, for the most part, from pigeonholing him as an artist whose work reflects an essentially Japanese aesthetic. This approach is most welcome because an urge to define his work as inherently Japanese, or as an ideal synthesis of "East and West," has permeated the writing on Noguchi for years. As Bert Winther-Tamaki points out, this approach demands that Noguchi's work be viewed and understood primarily in terms of race. (1) Why should he and his work be analyzed via the concept of race, and does such an approach make sense today when scholars and popular audiences are so much more conscious of the complexity and ambiguity of ideas about race and ethnicity within US culture?

This scholarly trend toward analyzing Noguchi's work through the lens of his racial identity dates to the early 1930s, although Thomas Hess's important review of Noguchi's work on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946 may exemplify, and likely cemented, the importance of Noguchi's Japaneseness to his artistic reputation. For Hess, Noguchi's monumental marble Kouros, a work that overtly aligns itself with the great tradition of Western figurative sculpture, reflected a "calligraphic" style that in turn revealed within the artist an intrinsic Asian sensibility. (2)

Unlike Hess, who saw a "fusion" of two apparently different cultural temperaments in Noguchi's work, Duus recognizes that Noguchi struggled throughout his life to negotiate multiple subject positions while never settling on a singular, unified persona. Noguchi, she proposes, showed "a different face to everyone ... to each he revealed a different side of his character.... He was a man bursting with contradictory impulses" (7). Although Duus's narrative thus avoids transmitting a fixed image of Noguchi and his work, she still relics on certain conventions of biographical writing in order to link him--if less overtly than many other commentators--to his Japanese origins. She tells her readers that when Noguchi changed his surname in the early 1920s--from Gilmour (his mother's name) to Noguchi (his father's name)--he claimed a new identity as an artist that depended on a public association with his estranged Japanese father for cultural cachet. Just as his father Yonejiro Noguchi wanted to link the United States and Japan through his English-language poetry, Duus suggests, Isamu Noguchi claimed (unwittingly or not) the task of synthesizing Japan and America when he took his father's surname. By emphasizing this appropriation of his father's Japanese identity, Duus implies, Noguchi selectively emphasized his cultural otherness (with respect to a Eurocentric America) to create a unique position for himself in the art world. Thus, Duus subtly reaffirms a racialized reading of Noguchi's identity as an artist, even as she tries to complicate understanding of his relationships to Japan and the US art world by shedding light on relatively unknown aspects of his life.

Duus tries not to limit Noguchi to a single cultural position, although her story depends on several common approaches to biographical writing about artists, among them, that his sculptures were like a "diary" of his life. In Noguchi's case, his Japaneseness "grows" the more time he spends in Japan, with the result that both he and his work appear to become more authentically Japanese with the passage of time (192). Such assertions ask readers to understand his work as a window onto his personal life in ways that Noguchi's abstract sculpture, I have argued elsewhere, aimed to evade. (3) The sheer range of sculptural work he produced contradicts the viability of using such blanket statements about the ties between biography and artwork, and the effort to register Japaneseness in the latter part of Noguchi's career seems uncomfortably tied to this biographical emphasis.

This well-researched biography doesn't set out to reevaluate Noguchi's work in relation to an art-historical legacy Instead, it sheds light on some of the hidden corners of Noguchi's life that are not very well documented. By unearthing new materials from private archives, personal correspondence, and recent interviews and combing through Japanese-language publications, Duus has complicated our understanding of some key aspects of Noguchi's life: his powerful, yet complex connection to his mother, Leonie Gilmour; his relationships with the artists Eitaro and Ayako Ishigaki, close friends throughout the 1930s and 1940s who were deported to Japan in 1951 because of their association with communist groups and causes in the United States; and his short, tempestuous marriage to the actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi. The chapter that most vividly explores the complexity of Noguchi's position in the art world, however, focuses on his solo exhibition at the American pavilion of the 1986 Venice Biennale.