“If you break a piece of stone, it's stone revealed. And if you polish it, another quality is revealed.”
A testament to Isamu Noguchi’s technical and creative prowess, Stone-Abiding from 1981 epitomizes the ideals of shape, texture and spatiality that are at the crux of his singular artistic philosophy and practice. Exemplifying Noguchi’s mastery over the most difficult of sculptural mediums, this basalt sculpture demonstrates a physically complex and emotionally compelling range of textures within a single piece of stone. Completed in the last decade of his life, the present work emerged from a period of reflection in the artist’s oeuvre, in which his long-developed style comes to fruition simultaneously with the precision and ease of a master sculptor. Stone-Abiding is deeply meditative, its surface moving from polished to rough, smooth to jagged, in a natural harmony. The title, Stone-Abiding, speaks to the nature and significance of the work itself: it exists in accordance with the capabilities of the medium, and exhibits the range and capacity of the basalt medium and of the artist’s exceptional technique.
Standing roughly five feet tall, Stone-Abiding belongs to Isamu Noguchi’s legendary canon of sculptures created of basalt, a medium largely unutilized by the artist until the final decade of his life. A particularly challenging material to work with, Noguchi approached Stone-Abiding with exquisite care and consideration, working with the stone’s natural fissures and fractures to reveal an elegant natural shape that is hidden beneath the surface. The stone’s natural color is explored and dramatized in the present work, as Noguchi unveils the silky dark interior of the basalt while still leaving the rougher, red-brown surface exposed at the base.
Executed in 1981, the present work dates from a pivotal moment of personal and artistic triumph for Noguchi. Only four years after the execution of Stone-Abiding, Noguchi opened his renowned exhibition space in Long Island City, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (now known as The Noguchi Museum). The present work resided at the Noguchi Museum before being acquired by New York’s Pace Gallery in 1983, where it was exhibited in one of the last solo shows to take place in the artist’s lifetime. The present work thus emerges from a culminating period of reflective work, encapsulating the meditative attention and exceptionalism of his long career.
In its simultaneous simplicity yet specificity, Stone-Abiding speaks to a central concern of Noguchi’s life and art: an on-going exploration and discussion of what one can achieve through the formal investigation of sculpture, and in the artist's mind, the creation of social space through sculpture. Always in motion, Noguchi was constantly reconciling the various dichotomies which would permeate his oeuvre: from East to West, outsider to insider, ancient to modern, Noguchi's ability to bridge such seemingly disparate intellectual principles makes it a truly original art informed by his very particular circumstances and education. Born to an American mother in Los Angeles, Noguchi and his mother rejoined his father in Tokyo shortly thereafter though the family would soon dissolve, leaving the young boy to absorb the culture of his adopted homeland as an outsider.
"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 and as our concepts of them change so much our sculpture changes."
Eventually returning to New York, Noguchi was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and travelled to France to study with Constantin Brancusi before eventually continuing eastward to truly begin his own investigation of visual art, sculpture, and design. The influence of Brancusi is particularly apparent in the present work, with a lyrical balance and deeply emotional resonance in the stone’s delicate gradient. Demonstrated to full effect in Stone-Abiding, his aesthetic blends a particularly Zen embrace of the minimal with Brancusi's sense of modern Western abstraction and simplification. This dichotomy of identity and of stylistic practices would permeate throughout Noguchi’s career, his work seeking to achieve a balance, a harmonic spectrum, rather than harsh binary. The present work explores this through texture, exposing a delicate gradient of rough and smooth, polished and broken. Stone-Abiding in turn accomplishes a visual tension that grounds the ideals of Noguchi’s career.
