Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) is renowned for his stone and bronze sculpture, his gardenlike installations in public spaces, and his furniture designs. Far less familiar, but no less important, is Noguchi's work in clay, which he executed in three intensive sessions in 1931, 1950, and 1952, all during visits to Japan. The pieces included in this elegant volume and the accompanying exhibition comprise the first major museum presentation of Isamu Noguchi's ceramics and the introduction of the work of major postwar Japanese ceramic artists with whom Noguchi collaborated or interacted. Supported by four linked essays and opulently illustrated in full color and black and white, Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics highlights the sculptor's struggles with cultural identity and his experimentation with the conflicts between modernity and tradition.



Noguchi's sculptures in the medium of clay reveal informal, spontaneous, and humorous aspects not visible in less flexible media such as bronze or stone. Through clay, Noguchi probed unresolved personal issues surrounding his ambiguous cultural identity as the son of a Japanese father and American mother. Because Noguchi made his ceramics in Japan, his work also creates links to a diversity of approaches within the ceramic world of Japan. These range from traditionalists such as Kitaoji Rosanjin and the Living National Treasure designates, to primitivists exemplified by Okamoto Taro and Tsuji Shindo, to avant-garde experimentalists led by the Sodeisha group. An understanding of the nature and scope of the concerns Noguchi expressed through clay is crucial to understanding his work as a whole, and consideration of Japanese ceramic artists in the 1950s reveals a largely unknown genre of modern Japanese art.



Copublished with the Smithsonian Institution

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

It is a rare pleasure to find a thoughtful, readable book that opens a new perspective on a major artist by revealing a hitherto little-known facet of his career. This beautifully illustrated catalog to an exhibition at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery covers Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi's (1904-88) struggle to resolve his bicultural background by working in clay during his periods of residence in Japan in the 1930s and 1950s. Noguchi felt that clay was a telluric connection to the Japanese side of his identity and an immediate entr?e into the artistic spirit of a country where ceramics have been valued for millennia. Working with groundbreaking potters such as Kitaoji Rosanjin and Kaneshige Toyo, Noguchi delved into both Japanese tradition and contemporary Western surrealism to create an exciting body of ceramic sculpture. Two major essays, by cocurators Cort and Winther-Tamaki, trace Noguchi's early life and work in Japan, while shorter essays by Niimi Ryu and Bruce Altshuler examine the artworks' relation to the art scene in Japan and America, respectively. The exhibition and catalog cover not only Noguchi but also several Japanese potters he influenced. Essential for ceramic and sculpture collections, this would also be useful in academic and larger public libraries.-David McClelland, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Noguchi's little-known ceramics, created in 1930, 1951, and 1952, and their relationship to the work of Japanese potters of the same period is the subject of this book by Cort (curator of ceramics, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery) and Winther-Tamaki (art history, Univ. of California, Irvine). Four eminent scholars explore in their essays the question of Noguchi's cultural identity and artistic goals and how these issues received inspiration from his involvement with leading postwar Japanese ceramicists engaged with surrealism and other aspects of the international art world. The first essay illuminates Noguchi's "embrace" of Japanese earth as clay and how he considered it a medium for sculpture and design. The next chapter offers a broader view of Japanese ceramics in the postwar period and of the position of the artists with whom Noguchi interacted. The third essay discusses the varied attitudes of these artists and their search for meaning. The last chapter reviews the presentation and reception of Noguchi's ceramics in US and Japanese exhibitions. A catalog listing for his exhibitions, selected bibliography, and chronology complete this unusual book, beautifully produced with many excellent color plates and other photographic documentation. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. General readers; graduate students through professionals. L. G. Kavaljian California State University, Sacramento

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Louise Allison Cort is Curator of Ceramics at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. She has published widely on the subject of ceramics. Bert Winther-Tamak i is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (2001).