WASHINGTON, D.C.-“Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor” is the first museum show in 30 years to focus on Noguchi’s sculpture as distinct from his commercial designs. Opening at the Hirshhorn on Feb.10, the exhibition is co-organized with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and curated by the Hirshhorn’s Valerie Fletcher. The exhibition brings together approximately 52 sculptures and more than 25 works on paper. Some have rarely or never before been seen in public, such as all seven surviving “Lunar” works and several examples of “Parisian Abstraction,” a series of subtly toned, boldly simplified compositions of gouache on paper created in the 1920s. Noguchi experimented with diverse and unusual materials, ranging from plaster, terra cotta and bronze to paper, string, Magnesite cement, chrome, plastic and electric lights. His sculptures hang on walls, suspend from armatures, repose on the floor and stand like apparitional figures. Drawing upon many cultural sources throughout his long career, Noguchi created his own resolutely individual art, characterized by poetic metaphor and technical mastery.

The son of an American writer and a Japanese poet, Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) traveled extensively throughout his life. For more than six decades as an artist, he sought to understand and integrate various aspects of Asian, American and European culture. First educated in academic realism, he earned his livelihood as a portraitist but made a radical shift to abstraction during his stay in Paris (1927–1928). After a stint as Constantin Brancusi’s assistant, Noguchi developed his own style of abstraction based on elegantly simplified forms, asymmetrical tensions and constructivist compositions. During 1930–1931 he spent extended periods in Beijing, China and Kyoto, Japan, learning traditional techniques and seeking to unite Eastern and Western aesthetics. While in New York, Noguchi planned several visionary public sculptures, including the “Monument to Benjamin Franklin” and sculpted a savage indictment of racism in “Death (Lynched Figure).”

This exhibition explores in depth Noguchi’s sculptures from the 1940s after his life was abruptly changed by the United States’ entry into World War II. Persuaded that his design expertise could improve internees’ living conditions, Noguchi spent six months of voluntary imprisonment in a Japanese-American internment camp in 1942. He was profoundly shaken to find that his mixed parentage could cause many of his fellow citizens to consider him an enemy alien. This experience moved him to create landscape-like sculptures alluding to his fears and dreams of escape, including “This Tortured Earth” and “Night Land.” After these dark works, Noguchi created a series using white Magnesite cement, and lit the organic shapes with multicolored electric lights, creating the “Lunar” sculptures, which glow evocatively in the dark. “Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor” reunites for the first time all seven of the surviving “Lunars.” The show also features the remarkable interlocking totem sculptures of the 40s, most in their original materials such as wood, gray-green slate and brown marble. For Noguchi, the materials and methods of these pieces express the fragility of the human psyche and the tenuousness of personal relationships and national alliances, as he stated in an interview with Katherine Kuh, “The very fragility gives a thrill.… It’s like life—you can lose it at any moment.”

During his postwar global travels, Noguchi sculpted in iron, rice paper and clay in Japan yet preferred aluminum and stainless steel in the U.S.—exemplified by “War,” “Calligraphics” and “Solar” in the exhibition. During the last two decades of his life, the artist gathered stones from many countries including white Penteli marble from Greece, pink and yellow marbles from France and Portugal, black granite from Sweden and basalt from Japan; these inspired an astoundingly diverse array of abstract sculptures, as seen in the last section of the exhibition. “Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor” reveals the remarkable diversity of forms, ideas and materials of an artist who believed in the power of art to transcend barriers and enrich the lives of ordinary people all over the world.

Major support for this exhibition was provided by the Holenia Trust in memory of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy, The Henry Luce Foundation and the Friends of James and Barbara Demetrion Endowment Fund.