“The essence of sculpture is for me the perception of space, the continuum of our existence. All dimensions are but measures of it, as in the relative perspective of our vision lie volume, line, point, giving shape, distance, proportion. Movement, light, and time itself are also qualities of space. Space is otherwise inconceivable. These are the essences of sculpture as our concepts of them change so must our sculpture change.”
The present bench represents Isamu Noguchi’s mastery of his medium of stone, and figures as a singular object within the sculptor’s oeuvre in its artistic combination of form and function. The bench was commissioned in 1956 by famed Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft as part of an expansive corporate complex. Notably, the monumental three-piece sculpture titled The Family was created by Noguchi as another integral part of his design for this same commission. Given that the bench has remained in its original outdoor location since its creation it presents in a remarkably well-preserved state. Carved from granite, the seventeen-feet-long structure was placed strategically in the long, exterior courtyard that flanked the Southern façade of the main building.
The corporate commission in question called for Noguchi to design four interior courts and one long plaza for the imposing headquarters of a company located in rural Connecticut designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). In Martin Friedman’s words, “it was [Bunshaft’s] idea to have a sculptor design a total space adjacent to and interacting with the building as a means of humanizing the ground level areas around it.” Noguchi later referred to the plaza, the space for which the bench was designed, as his “first perfectly realized garden.”
The five outdoor spaces each provided him with the opportunity to utilize a combination of what he had learned through experience and to act on his ideologies on the sculpture of space. Noguchi infused the spaces with design mechanisms that he learned from working with master Japanese gardeners and successfully crafted multiple microcosmic experiences within the grand design, most notably by bringing together water and stone elements. As seen in three of the courtyards, Noguchi utilized biomorphic curves in the plan punctuated with stepping stones to create a sense of structure and controlled movement through the space. For the other two, he referenced the clean, crisp lines of the building’s modernist architecture by drawing a grid pattern through the gardens with alternating beds of gravel, grass and water. He juxtaposed light with dark, smooth with rough, and organic with geometric while striking a calming balance and offering a visual respite for visitors.
Noguchi believed that art and the environment are inseparable. The union of opposing concepts are indeed reflected in the design of the bench itself. The weight and proportions of the granite structure, reminiscent of the ishi (large stones) placed throughout traditional Japanese Zen gardens, contrast with the piece’s delicately undulating design suggestive of water. Noguchi’s travels through Kyoto, Kobe, and Tokyo in the early 1930s, and the Japanese rock gardens he studied there, surely informed his later practice. Ryoan-ji Te, one of the most iconic and famous of all Zen Buddhist gardens in Kyoto, features fifteen stones surrounded by smooth gravel raked daily by the monks who tend the garden. Placed inside an open-air enclosure, the stones are strategically positioned so that the entire composition cannot be seen at once, making the stone garden a visual paradox akin to a zen koan, or meditative riddle.
Equally as influential as his ties to Japan was the shared postwar anxiety and Surrealist formal vocabulary that were essential ingredients in the emerging American vanguard of the time – alongside some of his peers like David Smith, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Rothko – though in comparison, Noguchi’s interpretations feel calm and collected rather than fraught and ominous. His admiration of the organic composition and lyrical refinement that defined Constantin Brancusi’s sculptural genius is a clear inspiration for his departure from realist figuration and towards an abstraction that blended the most natural materials with a primal sensibility. A testament to the variety of pluricultural influences that made up his work throughout the 1950s, the present work figures as an exceptional sculptural fusion bringing together stone and water, East and West, ancient and modern.
The present offering consequently marks a truly rare and remarkable opportunity to acquire a central element of a comprehensive design by one of America’s most important sculptors. This bench not only speaks to the pivotal project for which it was created, it also represents a testament to Noguchi’s success at integrating man and nature in his singular artistic vision. Sculptural, rhythmic and poetic, the bench elicits wonder and exudes the very qualities that make Noguchi’s work unparalleled.