Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi
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Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. 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 remarkable 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. As Herrera writes, 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.
Throughout his career, 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.
Combining the personal correspondence of and interviews with Noguchi and those closest to him—from artists, patrons, assistants, and lovers—Herrera has created an authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most important sculptors. She locates Noguchi in his friendships with such artists as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women including Frida Kahlo and Anna Matta Clark. With the attention to detail and scholarship that made her biography of Gorky a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Herrera has written a rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu. Listening to Stone is a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own "essence of sculpture."
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Hayden Herrera. (2015). Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Hayden Herrera. 2015. Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Hayden Herrera, Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Hayden Herrera. Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
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Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. 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 remarkable 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. As Herrera writes, 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.
Throughout his career, 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.
Combining the personal correspondence of and interviews with Noguchi and those closest to him—from artists, patrons, assistants, and lovers—Herrera has created an authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most important sculptors. She locates Noguchi in his friendships with such artists as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women including Frida Kahlo and Anna Matta Clark. With the attention to detail and scholarship that made her biography of Gorky a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Herrera has written a rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu. Listening to Stone is a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own "essence of sculpture."- reviews
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- source: Nicholas Fox Weber, author of The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism
- content: "From beginning to end, Listening to Stone is a beautifully written biography and an engrossing tale of one of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century. As she elucidates Noguchi's poetic genius and his wonderfully unclassifiable approach to art, Hayden Herrera brings to life the milieus in which Noguchi lived like no one else. From the mountainous coast of rural Japan to bohemian New York in the 1920s to Paris and Tokyo in the following decade, she vividly presents Noguchi's relationship with his settings. This is an enticing book achieved with an élan consistent with the magical work of a remarkable artist."
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December 15, 2014
Herrera (Arshile Gorky) delves into the details of the life of influential and enigmatic American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in this thorough and solid biography. Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904, to an American mother and a Japanese father, the poet Yone Noguchi, who abandoned them before Noguchi was born. Herrera reveals how Noguchi’s identity as half-Japanese and half-American shaped his identity as an artist. Describing Noguchi’s career from his itinerant youth in LA and Japan to his embattled redesign of Miami’s Bayfront Park, Herrera leaves no stone unturned. This critical biography relies extensively on Noguchi’s writings and letters, but Herrera’s expertise and insight illuminate Noguchi’s evolving creative process, as well as the full scope of his personal relationships. In short chapters, Herrera walks readers through every phase of Noguchi’s life, including his affair with Frida Kahlo, the design of his iconic table, his collaborations with choreographer Martha Graham, his time at a Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona during WWII, and his creation of the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York. Herrera adroitly shows that Noguchi was more than just a sculptor—he was a skilled craftsman, a heartbreaker, and a philosopher of design. This biography carves a smooth portrait of one of the most prolific and original artists of the 20th century. 132 illus. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.
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January 15, 2015
A comprehensive biography of a sculptor of stone and space.Art critic Robert Hughes called Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) "the pre-eminent American sculptor...the chief living heir, not only to his teacher [Constantin] Brancusi, but also to the classical Japanese feeling for material and nature." In this meticulously researched biography, Herrera (Joan Snyder, 2005, etc.) chronicles the long, productive career of the acclaimed 20th-century modernist. Born to an unconventional American mother and a Japanese father, a famous poet who neglected him, Noguchi spent his early childhood in Japan; at 13, his mother sent him to school in America, alone. "Banished" to another culture, he claimed throughout his life that dual identity made him feel like an outsider. As an artist, he drew on both cultures, and his precocious talent attracted teachers and mentors: Brancusi, for whom he worked in Paris; and Buckminster Fuller, who taught Noguchi about "the new technology of space and structures." Although Noguchi began his career making busts of celebrities (Thornton Wilder, George Gershwin, Lincoln Kirstein), he soon moved to sculpture, stage sets (he designed for Martha Graham for decades), and public plazas and gardens (for UNESCO, Yale's Beinecke Library and others), earning a reputation "as a sculptor of space." Herrera allows colleagues and lovers to characterize Noguchi's personality. "He was elegant and flirtatious," a close woman friend disclosed. "He was a seducer and a charmer." He pursued women who were usually decades younger and dazzled by his attentions and his fame; he married one, an actress, but that relationship ended in divorce after a few years. Short-tempered and egotistical, he could be difficult. One colleague said he was "stubborn as a mule" and an astute politician. "Noguchi was a genius in knowing how to use people," said another. Although reticent about putting forth her own insights about her subject's mind and heart, Herrera gives readers an ample, thorough analysis of his estimable art.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from February 1, 2015
The phenomenally gifted and versatile sculptor Isamu Noguchi (190488), the American-born son of an Irish American mother and a Japanese father, felt like an outsider wherever he went. Leonie Gilmour met poet Yone Noguchi via a newspaper ad. She was looking for work. He needed help with his English. Not only didn't Yone marry Leonie, he returned to Japan while she was pregnant, and when Leonie followed several years later, she discovered that he had another family. Young Noguchi, a nature-loving prodigy, thrived nonetheless. Sent back to the States alone at age 13, as tenacious as he was talented, Noguchi endured extreme hardships until attaining success and social standing, first with portraiture, then by creating an eloquent form of modernism that fused tradition and innovation, East and West. A passionate stone carver and a constant traveler with a notoriously complicated love life, Noguchi constructed, with tremendous vision, skill, and turmoil, dynamic outdoor installations all around the world. But as Herrera, the biographer, too, of Arshile Gorky and Frida Kahlo, so sensitively illuminates and assiduously documents, his mixed heritage and illegitimate birth caused him endless anguish, including time in a WWII Japanese American internment camp. Herrera tells Noguchi's astounding, many-chaptered story of unstoppable creative energy, fame, and perpetual alienation with thrilling narrative drive and deep perception and reinvigorates appreciation for Noguchi's searching and evocative art.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
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November 1, 2014
Herrera draws on celebrated modern sculptor Isamu Noguchi's personal correspondence and interviews with other artists, as well as Noguchi's patrons, assistants, and lovers, to clarify not just his art but his larger life. That included friendship with Arshile Gorky and an affair with Frida Kahlo, both of whom were subjects of Herrera's previous works.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. 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 remarkable 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. As Herrera writes, 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...- sortTitle
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