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. . . . Beautifully illustrated."--Library Journal


Book Description
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


About the Author
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-Tamaki 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).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics scholars illuminate the overlooked zone of interaction between conceptions of art and craft by focusing on the work of ceramic artists who believed themselves centrally engaged with modernism, surrealism, and other issues of concern to an international art world. Bert Winther-Tamaki considers issues of identity that shaped Noguchi's "embrace" of the Japanese earth as a medium of modern sculpture and design. An essay by Niimi Ryu examines the broader discursive milieu of Japanese ceramics in the early postwar years. Louise Allison Cort focuses on postwar Japanese ceramic artists ranging 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. Bruce Altshuler's essay reviews the ways in which the American reception of Noguchi's ceramic work displayed particular attitudes toward art-making and national identity. Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics will appeal to scholars, contemporary sculpture enthusiasts, and all those interested in Japanese ceramics and sculpture.

SYNOPSIS

This volume presents the ceramic oeuvre of Isamu Noguchi and includes other major ceramic artists from postwar Japan, analyzing the conflict between modernity and tradition and the search for cultural identity.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal