“Throughout his 60-year career, Isamu Noguchi refused to be pigeonholed, and in doing so he really was an early avatar of today’s contemporary art practice,” says Dakin Hart, senior curator of the Japanese-American artist’s namesake museum in Long Island City, New York. “He really prefigured artists such as Bruce Nauman, who would later contend that anything he did was art just by nature of the fact that it was done by a person calling himself an artist in a place called an artist’s studio.”Given the multiplicity of Noguchi’s output — which ranges from sculptures and sculpted furniture to paper lanterns and stage sets — the artist’s work has transcended category on the secondary market, selling under the rubrics of design, postwar and contemporary art, and even, for his earliest pieces, Impressionist/modern art at the major auction houses.“Because he defies categorization, there’s actually quite a lot of confusion in the market, and it’s conversation-worthy,” says Alexander Heminway, director of design at Phillips in New York. Noguchi’s current record at auction was set at that house in December 2014, when a 1939 glass-topped, stack-laminated rosewood table designed for the Old Westbury, Long Island, home of A. Conger Goodyear, a founder and the first president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, sold for $4,450,500 on a $2 million-to-$3 million estimate. (In 1948, Noguchi would design a simplified version of the table for the Herman Miller company; it remains in production and is available for $1,800 from Design Within Reach.)The Goodyear table, says Heminway, was one of three important, unique tables the artist made at the time. The others were commissioned by Philip Goodwin, an architect of MoMA, and William and Margaret Burden of Northeast Harbor, Maine.“The Goodyear table was really the beginning of Noguchi’s pivot into abstraction at the end of the 1930s,” Heminway explains. “It begot a whole series of sculptures in the 1940s — the interlocking pieces and the doughnut-shaped suns.” Acquired by Walmart heiress and Crystal Bridges Museum founder Alice Walton, the Goodyear table had been in the collection of Ronald Lauder for more than a decade before being consigned to Christie’s. It is among nine works that have cracked the $1 million mark since November 2006, when the artist first crossed that threshold at auction with the sale of “Sky, ” a 1964 sculpture that was hammered in at $1.1 million at Sotheby’s New York. (Almost all of Noguchi’s top lots have been sold under the postwar and contemporary banner.)While the market may seem confused, the artist clearly was not, going so far as to assert, “Everything is sculpture . . . Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.” That Noguchi offered the world such a broad range of work was merely a natural byproduct of his biography. The son of noted Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and his American editor, Léonie Gilmour, Isamu was born in Los Angeles in 1904. Although his parents never married, Noguchi spent much of his youth in Japan, his mother choosing to live there, fearful of raising her son in an environment of growing anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. He was sent back to the States for school at age 14, enrolling at the craft-centric Interlaken School in La Porte, Indiana, where he matriculated under the name Sam Gilmour.By the time he graduated from high school, Noguchi had begun to pursue a career as a sculptor. In 1926 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which afforded him an opportunity to travel to Paris, where he apprenticed with Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whose work he had long admired. By the late 1920s, he had gained a reputation for his portrait busts of such notable acquaintances as architect Buckminster Fuller and choreographer Martha Graham (the artist’s younger half-sister, Ailes Gilmour, was among the first dancers Graham accepted into her company).By 1930, Noguchi had earned enough money from the sale of his portrait busts and other commissions to afford an extended foray to Asia after an absence of more than a decade. His first stop was Beijing, where he spent six months studying ink-and-brush painting with Qi Baishi. He then traveled to Japan, reconnecting with his estranged father in Tokyo before heading to Kyoto to study clay craft under master potter Uno Jinmatsu. It was during his time in Japan that Noguchi began working in terra-cotta, creating Queen, 1931, a sculpture evocative of primal forms of the Jomon period, made over the course of more than 10,000 years, and more recent haniwa tomb figures of the Kofun era.In time Noguchi returned to New York, where his multifaceted interests began to take shape in the boundary-blurring works in wood and stone for which he is best known today. Among the most important of these is a 1948 coffee table commissioned by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel C. Dretzin, composed of three separate pieces of fossil marble held together by gravity. In June 2012, the table sold for $2,882,500 on an estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million at Christie’s New York. “As a sculptural piece, the table really combined all of these different elements—his interest in engineering, in balance, and in the Japanese tradition of joinery,” says Carina Villinger, head of design at Christie’s New York, who cites Noguchi’s commentary on such works: “Even the first table I made for Conger Goodyear was not exactly utilitarian. I thought of it as sculpture that was a table. After all, you can say that the earth is a table. We feast upon it. You can also say that it is utilitarian, this earth.”If Noguchi was obsessed with all things archaic—drawing inspiration not only from ancient Japanese works but also from austere 5,000-year-old Cycladic statues from the Aegean, from which Brancusi had taken his cues—he was equally interested in technology and seemingly endless possibilities presented by space exploration. “Within his oeuvre, there are so many interesting dichotomies, such as that between elemental craft and cutting-edge technology,” says Hart, adding that “Noguchi was equally motivated by those two prime sources of energy and ideas.” This dual obsession is evident in a suite of pieces presented in “Isamu Noguchi: Archaic/Modern,” an exhibition of more than 70 of his works that opened last month at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. These include “Model for Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars,” 1947, executed in sand, and “Lunar Table,”1961–65, an undulating crater-pocked slab of hewn granite.“When we were working on the ‘Variations’ show at Pace Gallery in Chelsea in early 2015,” Hart says, “Arne Glimcher, who had represented the artist since 1975 and his estate since 1988, told me that over the years he had tried to some degree to protect Noguchi the sculptor from Noguchi the designer. I found it to be a fascinating statement, given that many of the artist’s most notable and highest-grossing lots have been in the latter category,” including the Dretzin and Goodyear tables.“We know the artist regarded his sculptural furnishings as art,” says Hart, who adds that Noguchi “craved to bring sculpture into a more direct involvement with the common experience of living.” For the “Variations” show, Pace exhibited 54 works in a variety of media, all of which had come from the Noguchi Foundation’s reserve collection, amassed by the artist for the purpose of being sold on an as-needed basis to fund his legacy.“Early on, Noguchi really couldn’t afford the raw materials so he rarely held onto things,” Hart says, explaining that the artist preferred to find patrons who were willing to buy his work in advance, or put up money for the materials and then own a work once it was finished. “By the time of his Whitney retrospective in 1968, Noguchi’s market was on the ascent and the artist realized that it made sense to start holding onto things.”With regard to the “Variations” show, 19 of the works were technically available from the foundation, but only a dozen could be sold. Pace made several strategic placements from the show, including three of six “Paris Abstractions,” gouaches made during the late 1920s, that the gallery had on offer. Similar works, which sell for around $130,000, can be found in the holdings of the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.“In ‘Variations,’ we tried to show the breadth of the artist’s career and different mediums,” says Pace gallerist Susan Dunne, adding that the most highly sought works on the primary market tend to be his “stones” — the suns and more massive sculptural pieces such as those presented in the show — which rarely come up for sale. “When they do come up,” she says, “they command anywhere from $3 million to $15 million.” At press time, Pace had one stonework on offer.According to Dunne, collectors interested in Noguchi might be wise to look for some of the editioned galvanized-steel sculptures the artist did with the Gemini workshop in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. These, she says, tend to come around more frequently and remain a relative bargain, trading at anywhere from $36,000 to $200,000.For those with far shallower pockets who still yearn for a work by Noguchi, there are, of course, the classic pieces commissioned by Herman Miller, which remain in production, as well as a wide range of geometric paper lanterns designed for Akari in the 1950s. The latter are available from the Noguchi Museum and other design-oriented outlets. “In the public’s perception,” says Hart, “there are many Noguchis, and often collectors of his work know only one. Our hope is that the Smithsonian show will help to unite his balkan-ized oeuvre into a single portfolio.”Perhaps more important, he says, the show aims to move beyond the standard art-historical narrative of Noguchi as a bridge between East and West and present the artist’s work for what it is — a complex, layered continuum between a very distant past and our future. The exhibition runs through March 19.
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