A truly monumental expression of the essential tenets at the core of Isamu Noguchi’s singular artistic practice, The Family is an exquisite and breathtaking masterpiece. Commissioned in 1956 by famed Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft as part of an expansive corporate complex, The Family comprised, in Noguchi’s own words, the artist’s “first perfectly realized garden” (the artist cited in Hayden Herrera, Listening to Stone, New York, 2015, p. 321). The three stone figures represent “a sixteen-foot-high father, a twelve-foot mother, and a six-foot child,” each with its own unique shape, yet all united by the distinct character of Noguchi’s unmistakable visual language (ibid.). Placed in close filial proximity, the figures' current relationships to each other were carefully configured by the artist. As described by his biographer, famed author Hayden Herrera, “Noguchi’s family is at once awe-inspiring in its stark primitivism (he saw the three figures as related to Pacific Island totems and to monuments such as Stonehenge) and whimsical in a way that brings to mind the comic imagery of Paul Klee. The rough unpolished surface … anticipates Noguchi’s late work in which minimal incursions with the chisel allowed stone to speak for itself” (ibid.). Amongst his most ambitious and significant works, The Family elegantly distills the myriad influences and conceptual crosscurrents that defined Noguchi’s prolific output into a powerful masterwork.
Central to Noguchi’s praxis is the symbiosis between sculpture and surroundings, and the role of art in creating social spaces. Carefully considering the setting of his pieces, Noguchi sought to create a seamless interplay between the work and its environs. The present example for instance is composed from three elements of Stony Creek granite, a local quarry in Connecticut near the original location of the sculpture. Famed for its distinctive pink hue, Stony Creek granite is featured in several landmark monuments, including the original façade of Grand Central Terminal and the floors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, linking The Family to both its immediate location and a wider historical lineage of grand architecture. Noguchi was originally commissioned to create the work by Gordon Bunshaft, the influential architect behind Lever House and the Hirshhorn Museum, and the resulting composition of stone bespeaks Noguchi’s own architectural and philosophical relationship with space. In his own words, “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 relative perspective of our vision lay 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 must our sculpture change” (the artist cited in Sam Hunter, Isamu Noguchi, New York, 1978, p. 85). Thus the three stone figures of The Family both derive inspiration from and provide definition for the space they inhabit.
Paul Klee, Enterprise, 1938. Kunstmuseum, Bern. Image: Artothek / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2023 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / ARS, New York
Joan Miró, Personages with Star, 1933. The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Resource, NY. Art © 2023 Joan Miró, ARS, New York
Juxtaposing smooth with rough, vertical with horizontal, geometric with organic, Noguchi highlights a remarkable variety of textures and colors within the granite itself. From rosy blush tones to silvery slate, the mutable surface takes on ever-shifting hues and moods with the changing light, season to season. Seeking the inherent spirit and dynamism of each material, the artist strove to reveal his chosen stone’s identity, or the intent of its being; here, the resulting sculptures, with their serene presence in space, exude a remarkable sense of balance and timelessness. In contrast with the sheer magnitude of the towering stones are the delicately carved glyphs marking their faces: Noguchi draws upon the iconography of Surrealist biomorphism, European modernism, and Japanese minimalism, hinting at symbolic meaning yet ultimately resisting legibility. Symbolism on a deeper level was central to Noguchi’s practice; as explained by historian Sam Hunter, “For Noguchi, stones are identified with landscape in an even more profound sense, which he stresses in conversation: He associates stone with the mother lode, the planet earth itself. He has a profound and fundamentalist instinct for the nature of stone sculpture and discerns deep human meanings in the very choice of his materials. Stone symbolizes the root life experience; it is the stable center in the shifting currents and vicissitudes of his artistic development. Stone carving puts Noguchi in touch with enduring and consoling human and artistic realities, and, beyond them, with the eternal verities and with his own passionate fountainhead” (Sam Hunter, Isamu Noguchi, New York, 1978, p. 121).
Haida Gwaii memorial Totem poles, Anthony Island, Canada. Alamy Stock Photo.
Of particular importance to the development of Noguchi’s artistic philosophy – and especially palpable in the present work – was the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. A Guggenheim fellowship in 1927 afforded Noguchi the opportunity to travel to Paris, where he spent six months as an assistant in the Romanian modernist’s studio; it was here that Noguchi first approached stone and marble as a medium.
Important 1950s Works in Museum Collections
Noguchi’s admiration of the organic composition and lyrical refinement that defined Brancusi’s sculptural genius is a clear inspiration for Noguchi’s movement away from realist figuration and towards an abstraction that blended the most natural materials with a primal sensibility. Here, Noguchi appropriates those qualities that he admired in Brancusi’s work and assimilates them into his own organic visual language, offering a playful amalgamation of figuration and abstraction while simultaneously accentuating the granite’s natural properties. The resulting figures transcend time and space to appear utterly universal; equally ancient and modern, it seems as possible that they were created yesterday as that they are discovered relics from a lost civilization on any continent.
As influential as Brancusi on Noguchi’s output were his travels through Kyoto, Kobe, and Tokyo in the early 1930s, and the Japanese rock gardens he studied there. 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. At once rich in meaning yet symbolizing nothing, this Zen relationship between form and field affected Noguchi deeply, and becomes most palpable in works like The Family. The multiple figures cannot be seen from all sides at once, forcing us to engage more actively in exploring the space, their immense height enveloping the viewer and further resisting a complete view.
Synthesizing fusions between dichotomies such as Asian and Western cultures, ancient and modern art, and the practical and the utopian, Noguchi was a master of many modes. By 1956, the year in which the present work was conceived, Noguchi had distilled these myriad influences into the concentrated substance of his own artistic purpose. Although he shared the postwar anxiety and Surrealist formal vocabulary that were essential ingredients in the emerging American vanguard of the time – alongside peers like David Smith, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Rothko – Noguchi’s interpretations feel calm and collected rather than fraught and ominous. His exquisite carvings, exemplified by The Family, emerge like totemic monuments to universal themes like space, balance, and the ultimate transcendence of nature.