CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/8/2015

Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World

"Isamu Noguchi and the airplane were both born in the United States of America in the first decade of the twentieth century. At two years of age, Isamu 'took off' or was taken off by his Japan-bound mother in what since has proved to be a half century of continuous world peregrinations. The airplane era laid a new cosmic egg in the nest of everyday reality, integrating all the previously separate civilizations' experiences in one history and geography. Unaware that the absolute political sovereignties of yesterday's world were to melt and merge into a unitary cosmos, Isamu travelled on and on, not as a tourist, not as a dilettante escapist, not as a routine airline pilot, nor as a sailor, soldier or gypsy, but as the intuitive artist precursor of the evoluting, kinetic one-town world man. As the unselfconscious prototype artist of the new cosmos, Isamu has always been inherently at home—everywhere. He has to-and-froed in his great back and front yards whose eastward and westward extensions finally merged to encircle the earth." So begins R. Buckminster Fuller's exquisite Foreword to Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World, Steidl's gorgeous new edition of Noguchi's influential illustrated autobiography. Featured image is "The Victim," 1962.