Exhibition on Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi was not only a designer and sculptor, but also a garden artist. One of his most famous gardens is probably the Garden of Peace at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. His works can currently be seen at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Frank Maier-Solgk was on site for us.

Sculptor, designer, garden artist. Isamu Noguchi, born in the USA in 1904 to a Japanese poet and an American writer, was a bit of each and at the same time everything in one. In Europe, he was primarily known as a designer; his variously rounded, weightless Akari lampshades (Akari, Japanese for light) made of bamboo and Japanese washi paper, which used to hang from the ceiling of every second teenager’s room thanks to a Swedish furniture store, became popular. The fact that Noguchi can indeed be considered a sculptor of avant-garde modernism and was also an important garden designer, whose horticultural traces can be discovered on three continents, can currently be seen for yourself at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

For the first time in a long time, the museum is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to this artist figure, who alternates between cultures and professions; around 150 works from all creative phases are on display, whereby the exhibition emphasizes the sculptural side (curator: Rita Kersting), but also reveals the interfaces between the professions, which are by no means as separate as they first appear: Isn’t a garden also designed nature and don’t stones play a main role in a garden – at least according to the traditional Zen view? Stones, whose shapes were in turn repeatedly used as models by modern sculptors. Noguchi saw his lamps less as design products than as the result of formal exploration of the idea of combining tradition (material) and modern technology (electricity) in an effortless, everyday way – almost in the sense of an understanding of art as social practice.

The avoidance of conventional art-historical classifications, the attempt to integrate art into the social environment and the almost self-evident connections between applied and autonomous art are all constants in Noguchi’s work. They are encountered in different variations in the Cologne exhibition: right at the beginning in the first hall, one encounters a “Tsukubai”, a pentagonal granite sculpture with a water-filled depression in its center. The work, which is clearly machine-made, is a modern variation on the basin used for ablution in Japan, which was often placed at the entrance to sacred places.

Future mobile for James Bond

At the very end of the exhibition, one of his most famous play sculptures, the 1965 “Play Sculpture” (112.7 x 261.6 x 261.6 centimetres), made of shiny red steel, has been set up in the Ludwig Museum and is available for younger visitors in Cologne to try out sitting or climbing on. The origins of Noguchi’s constantly sought-after combination of sculpture with neighboring professions can already be found in his early years. At the end of the 1920s, he met the architect and technical visionary Buckminster Fuller, with whom he designed a model of a sleek car of the future that could also be imagined in an early James Bond film. A little later, his collaboration with the legendary American dancer and dance teacher Martha Graham, for whom he designed stage sets from the 1930s onwards, was even more intensive and in this way tested the theatrical connection between sculpture and stage space, which became important for later, larger projects.

Play sculptures by Isamu Noguchi

It is probably no exaggeration to say that it was above all his public and private gardens, albeit small in number, that embodied Noguchi’s thinking in the most “exemplary” way. His first realized garden from 1951 in Japan (Readers Digest Building, Tokyo) was preceded by several designs for playgrounds in the USA, including the plan for a large “Play Mountain” with slides and toboggan runs in the middle of New York. The playground equipment, climbing frames and slides that he designed also fall into this phase, which Noguchi again saw primarily as sculptures beyond their function. The artist first realized a large-scale playground or play park according to his specifications in the USA in 1976 in Atlanta (Georgia), where his Playscapes sculptures took center stage.

If you want to experience Noguchi’s garden art first-hand today, the best place to go is Paris. Here, Noguchi created the 1,700 square meter Garden of Peace for the opening of the UNESCO headquarters on Place de Fontenoy in 1957, which was also intended to express the purpose of the entire institution through its remembrance of Hiroshima. Here, on the east side of the building – opposite on the west side, the former main entrance, are sculptures by Henry Moore and the underground gardens of Burle Marx – he combined the idea of the Japanese Zen garden with Western minimalism, had granite stones flown in from Okayama and Shikoku, laid out a water staircase connecting two levels and wrapped all these stone and architectural elements with Japanese magnolia bushes, cherry and plum trees.

Noguchi described his relationship to the tradition of Japanese garden design as follows: “To learn but still to control, not to be overwhelmed by so strong a tradition, is a challenge. My effort was to find a way to link that ritual of rocks which comes down to us through the Japanese from the dawn of history to our modern times and needs.”

Moerenuma Park by Isamu Noguchi

The main gardening work in Paris (which can be visited) was followed at intervals by other gardens, often symbolically charged by their location: in 1965, his “Bill Rose Art Garden” opened for the then newly built Israel Museum in Jerusalem, an important two-hectare sculpture park, which he had created on the natural slope interspersed with rocks and native vegetation. This was followed by a series of gardens for American companies, including the “Sunken Garden” for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York (1961-1964). His last major work, Moerenuma Park, can be found in Sapporo, Japan. The extensive park was created on a former waste site, which was started as part of an extensive so-called land reclamation project in the early 1980s; it was completed – posthumously – in 2005; it was and is furnished with Noguchi’s play sculptures: a park, according to Noguchi, “that is considered to be one complete sculpture”.

However, the most intense effect in the exhibition – Noguchi’s gardens are presented in films and photographs – is in the room in which the design for a land art work planned by Noguchi but never realized, entitled “Sculpture to be seen from Mars” or “Memorial to man”, was applied to the wall. (The only existing document is a photograph.) The design was created in 1947, after Noguchi had visited the destroyed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a plan of a human face several kilometers high in the desert (the nose alone was to be one kilometer long), intended as an artistic memorial in memory of a humanity that seemed to be working towards its end with its first atomic bombs. Today, wars and, not least, a climate crisis can give rise to similar visions of the end times. Noguchi’s extremely wide-ranging creative imagination, which has hardly lost any of its topicality, is not only evident in such designs.

The Isamu Noguchi exhibition at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, can be seen until July 31, 2022.

Not in Cologne right now? A new sculpture exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Zurich runs until September 2022 .