There is an art to friendship, and especially to friendships among artists. In an 1841 essay now seldom read, Ralph Waldo Emerson defined a friend as an apparent contradiction, a “sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency…,” but ultimately important in revealing you to yourself. 

Although, in his 1927 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, Isamu Noguchi proclaimed for his art a “desire to view nature through nature’s eyes and to ignore man as an object of special veneration,” the evidence displayed is here that he was closer to the 19th century writer in fashioning a wide circle of acquaintance where he expected, as Emerson did, to find his own identity confirmed. 

Above: Berenice Abbott, Isamu Noguchi with Glad Day (c. 1930), Gelatin silver print. Photo: © Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics, NYC; Collection The Noguchi Museum fine arts magazine 

This exhibition, with its expansive taxonomy of friendships, raises the question of a particular artist’s community in ways that are alternately poignant and unnerving. The album of biographies which serves as a lesser catalogue to the exhibition invites a negotiation between art and ephemera that does not always spare Noguchi’s works from being taken as simple illustrations to the narrative of his relationships. 

But there are shorter stories within the larger one that leave the art to itself. Miss Expanding Universe, 1932, a figure pitching itself into space with entire confidence, finds its contrast in Death (Lynched Figure) 1934 with its rictus of metal. But biography reasserts itself in Frida Kahlo’s Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939). Kahlo’s relationship with Noguchi brings her here, as does Noguchi’s intimacy with the suicide. Kahlo makes a memorial that evokes some 15th century Sienese painting of a saint’s life, collapsing time and space in a woman’s leap to her death. 

 In Brancusi’s Paris studio in 1927 there is another story, where Noguchi begins his practice of association as well as sculpture. This is a moment well before our current notions of network and contact that turn personal alliances into mechanics. For all that seems obvious about his inheritance from Brancusi, it is Noguchi’s figurative devotions that are full of surprise (and one more betrayal of his Guggenheim oath). 

A bust of Buckminster Fuller in 1929 is a chrome perfection of a portrait all on the surface. 

His rendering of the art dealer Julien Levy in the same year looks as if it has borrowed from Eric Kennington’s bronze memorial to Lawrence of Arabia in the cellar of St. Paul’s Cathedral. And his Uncle Takagi of 1931 finds him in a larger, painful world of age and loss. 

 Noguchi also writes his story on the landscape. Or hopes to. His model for a Play Mountain, in 1933 with its combination of Aztec temple and Roman amphitheater is never built, but one can imagine Maya Lin learning from it how to make a cross section of sorrow. The Riverside Park Playground of 1965 is a final model for another unrealized project . Like some ancient palace recently uncovered, it would have invented a distant past for a city without one. 

But his Garden (Pyramid, Sun and Cube) in the plaza fronting the Beinecke Library at Yale University is constructed in 1963. For anyone familiar with the full scale piece, the model of it here provides the shock of the miniature, especially as it presents contrasting surfaces separating the two standing forms from the low pyramid and the base. At Yale, the work is entirely of marble in a single range of color. Similarly provocative are two earlier proposals Noguchi made for the same sunken space: one, a crater and its inverse; the other, a puddling and bubbling duo of lava forms. 

In red stoneware, The Apartment (1952) is not a model, save as it evokes the miniature towers of Han dynasty tomb ware as well as a Giacometti-style tenement. Noguchi’s furniture has even more to say about city life, with a prismatic table of 1957 with its aluminum shapes to solve the puzzle of a one bedroom studio and a marble top table with metal bowl insert for some domestic liturgy or curious game of chance. 

 The chart on display which details the extended genealogy of Noguchi’s relationships has something of the six degrees of separation mantra attached to it. But the clearer image of what price the artist pays for human connection is a 1939 Bernice Abbot photograph of him, clutching his sculpture Glad Day with one hand, his other arm in a plaster cast. What he makes of others, remakes him. Emerson would have understood. 

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer 

Stephen Vincent Kobasa is a political activist and a contributing writer for Art New England, Big, Red and Shiny, and the New Haven Independent, where he created the series “Object Lessons.” 

On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and His Contemporaries, 1922-1960 

On exhibit through April 24, 2011 

The Noguchi Museum 

9-01 33rd Road, Long Island City, NY 

718-204-7088 

www.noguchi.org