| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders. By Masayo Duus, trans. Peter Duus. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 439 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-12096-X.)
Isamu Noguchi is regarded by most historians of modern art as an important twentieth-century artist but not as one of its great innovators, as a leading exponent of between-wars semifigurative sculpture, and as an intriguing blender of Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions, not least in his many widely known "gardens" in downtown architectural settings. We might call this the conservative modernist consensus on artists such as he. But is it a fair assessment of an artist who consciously worked against the categories that inform such judgments? Like his mentor Constantin Brancusi and his contemporary Henry Moore, he was a stone carver who never accepted the presumption that the shift to abstraction, to machine-manufactured materials, and to up-to-the-minute subjects was irreversible. More than Moore, he was open to the practice of suspending his carved shapes and found objects in space, thus provoking the viewer to unconscious, often sensual, associations.	1
In these multiculturalist and postcolonialist days, mobility between media as characteristic of artistic practice is identity shuffling. While Noguchi is celebrated (mostly) in Japan, in the West his artistic standing has remained ambiguous.	. . .

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