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Listening to stone : the art and life of Isamu Noguchi / Hayden Herrera.

by Herrera, Hayden.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Noguchi, Isamu, 1904-1988.

Sculptors -- United States -- Biography

Japanese American sculptors -- Biography.

9780374281168 (hc.)

0374281165 (hc.)

Alternate title:

Art and life of Isamu Noguchi.

viii, 575 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Parents -- Dear Baby -- Tokyo -- Chigasaki -- St. Joseph College -- Interlaken -- La Porte -- I became a sculptor -- I will rival the immortals -- Out from the shadow of a big tree -- Head buster -- To find nature's reasons -- A close embrace of the Earth -- Lonely traveler, social lion -- Toward a sculpture of space -- Art with a social purpose -- Mexico -- New York, 1936-39 -- California -- Poston -- MacDougal Alley -- Letters to Ann -- Noguchi and Martha Graham, passionate collaborators -- The rock and the space between -- Tara -- 1946-48 -- Impasse -- Bollingen travels -- Harbinger pigeon -- Shinbanraisha -- Mitsukoshi exhibition -- Yoshiko Yamaguchi -- Kita Kamakura -- My solace has always been sculpture -- UNESCO : a somewhat Japanese garden -- Changed visions -- Priscilla -- Working with Noguchi -- Levitating rocks, wings of prayer -- Toward an autobiography -- A primer of shapes and functions -- The wheat itself -- "Red cube, black sun" -- The stone circle -- "To intrude on nature's way" -- A place for people to go -- Imaginary landscapes -- "California scenario" -- Bayfront Park -- All things worthwhile must end as gifts -- Kyoko -- No beginnings, no endings.

"From interlocking wooden sculptures to massive steel monuments to the elegant Akari lamps, Noguchi became a master of what he called the "sculpturing of space." But his constant struggle-as both an artist and a man-was to embrace his conflicted identity as the son of a single American woman and a famous yet reclusive Japanese father. "It's only in art," he insisted, "that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all." In this biography of the elusive artist, Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchi's creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature. As a boy in Japan, Noguchi would collect wild azaleas and blue mountain flowers for a little garden in front of his home. He also included a rock, "to give a feeling of weight and permanence." It was a sensual appreciation he never abandoned. When looking for stones in remote Japanese quarries for his zen-like Paris garden forty years later, he would spend hours actually listening to the stones, scrambling from one to another until he found one that "spoke to him." Constantly striving to "take the essence of nature and distill it," Noguchi moved from sculpture to furniture, and from playgrounds to sets for his friend the choreographer Martha Graham, and back again working in wood, iron, clay, steel, aluminum, and, of course, stone. Noguchi traveled constantly, from New York to Paris to India to Japan, forever uprooting himself to reinvigorate what he called the "keen edge of originality." Wherever he went, his needy disposition and boyish charm drew women to him, yet he tended to push them away when things began to feel too settled. Only through his art -- now seen as a powerful aesthetic link between the East and the West -- did Noguchi ever seem to feel that he belonged"--Provided by publisher.

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