Customer Reviews

Noguchi East and West

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This volume is one of the more comprehensive reviews of Noguchi's life and work. Having met with Noguchi a couple of times at the premises of the future Museum, I regret not having then the insight now made accessible by our new digital lifestyle resources. His cross-cultural, multi-media artistry reflects Midwestern adolescence with Pacific overtures. Ashton states "Noguchi's biography is rich in hints of the sources of his formative years, and while no single source can be isolated, some are more suggestive than others. Dr. Rumely, the progressive educator who founded the Interlaken School in Indiana where Noguchi began his American education, had placed Noguchi in the home of ... a Swedenborgian minister. The boy was thrust into a situation in which the thoughts that had helped shape the modern movement -- through such figures as Blake, Emerson, Poe, and Baudelaire -- were sacred. ...the notion of a universal rhyming scheme had attracted nineteenth-century artists who wished to see some kind of elemental unity in the universe; who relished the endless possibilities of analogy."

Combining influences of the industrializing modernity of small cities and towns of the Midwest at this time, and seemingly inspired both by ancient Japanese "tumuli" and the Native American Mound Builders, his mnemonic response to the sights of such landscapes "got me going". With this amplified illumination into Noguchi's background and more familiarity with his abiding interests in "earth sculpturing", perhaps new educational paradigms should be considered in our thinking of art, architecture and American historic preservation.