With Friends Like These: How Isamu Noguchi Became an Artist

If the The Noguchi Museum’s 25^th anniversary exhibition were an episode of Friends, it would be titled “The One Where Isamu Became an Artist.” On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and his Contemporaries, 1922-1960, which runs through April 24, 2011, demonstrates just how Isamu Noguchi navigated through the worlds of sculpture, painting, dance, theater, and even architecture and design with a little help from his friends. Borrowing bits from different means of expression, Noguchi added them together into the greater sum of his sculpture. With friends like Arshile Gorky, Constantin Brancusi, Frida Kahlo, Martha Graham, and Louis Kahn, Noguchi became an artistic force transcending traditional boundaries. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "With Friends Like These."

[Image: Isamu Noguchi, Arshile Gorky, De Hirsh Margulies. Hitler Invades Poland, September 1, 1939. Crayon and sealing ink on paper, 17 1/2 x 22 7/8 in. © 2010 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 2010 The Arshile Gorky Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy Gallery Gertrude Stein, New York.]

[Many thanks to the The Noguchi Museum for providing me with the image above and a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibition On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and his Contemporaries, 1922-1960, which runs through April 24, 2011.]

Still Pictures: Photography of Sculpture at the MoMA

My wife laughs at my penchant for taking photographs of sculpture when we travel. It’s as if I’m trying to bring these huge stone and marble marvels home with me. In The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at the MoMA through November 1, 2010, that same “take it home” impulse is examined from the very beginnings of photography to today. More than 100 artists—including some of the biggest names from the worlds of photography and sculpture—appear in more than 300 photographs, magazines, and journals. Together, they build a bigger picture showing just how the new medium of photography changed how we looked at the old medium of sculpture forever. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Still Pictures."

[Image: Bruce Nauman. American, born 1941. Self-Portrait as a Fountain from the portfolio Eleven Color Photographs. 1966–67/1970. Inkjet print (originally chromogenic color print), 20 1/16 x 23 3/4" (50.9 x 60.3 cm). Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gerald S. Elliott Collection. © 2010 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

[Many thanks to the MoMA for providing me with the image above and other press materials for The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, which runs through November 1, 2010.]

Basic Instinct

How must have Constantin Brancusi felt surrounded by artists and thinkers such as Marcel Duchamp, , Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, and others all crying out for art to return to basics—namely the primal forces and simplicity they saw in African culture and other cultures they saw as untainted by Western civilization. Born February 19, 1876 in Romania, Brancusi lived the primal connection that these artists tried to assume through the hijacking of other cultures. Growing up in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Brancusi never forgot the native crafts and music of his homeland. Surrounded by Parisian Afro-philes, however, Brancusi couldn’t help but marry some of that cultural dialect with his own art in such works as The Sleeping Muse (above, from 1910). Looking at that work now, I can’t help but think of Man Ray’s 1926 photograph titled Black and White. Ray has his model hold an African mask to generate a comparison and contrast between the two “faces,” but Brancusi allows his face to stand alone. A nomad of sorts, Brancusi found himself at home with all cultures—first distilling them to their essentials and then binding them to his own.

After World War I, the Romanian government approached Brancusi to sculpt a tribute to those Romanians who had died fighting the Germans. The Endless Column (version 1 appears above, from 1918) finally rose in 1938, just as the next world war loomed on the horizon. Amazingly, The Endless Column lived up to its name and survived both the second World War and years of Communist rule continually threatening to take it down and erase its populist message. Unlike the Egyptian obelisks that celebrated the names of the powerful, Brancusi’s Endless Column celebrates the nameless dead who might otherwise be forgotten. Brancusi built the column out of a series of rhombus-shaped modules, giving the illusion of movement, as if some force were being pumped from the earth into the sky. Perhaps Brancusi, a spiritual man, imagined the life force of the slain Romanians rising from the grave through his column and ascending to the afterlife, maybe even to oversee and protect future generations of Romanians.

The PMA boasts one of the largest and finest collections of Brancusi’s sculpture in the world, including a copy of Brancusi’s famous Bird in Space (above, from 1923). Anne d'Harnoncourt, the PMA’s late director, loved Brancusi and took a personal interest in the development of the collection. Many press photos of Anne show her sitting in that gallery with Brancusi’s works peeking over her shoulder. The common misperception of Brancusi’s work usually comes from someone looking at a work such as Bird in Space and asking “Where’s the bird?” or thinking, “I could do that.” Brancusi’s art is more about spirit and thought than about subject matter and execution. Yes, the bird isn’t there. Yes, you could do that. But no, the bird is there in its simplest sense of a flight, more real than if you could see feathers and wings. And, no, you couldn’t do that, or at least not until Brancusi showed you the way how.

A Kiss to Build a Dream on

For the first Art Poll By Bob of 2009 I asked, “Which of the following wintry works is the most chill to you?” You frostily replied that Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Hunters in the Snow (1565) was the chillingest, with 19 supporters, just edging out Caspar David Friedrich's The Sea of Ice (1823-1825), which received 16 votes. Andy Goldsworthy's Icicle Star (1980s) matched the late Andrew Wyeth's First Snow, Study for Groundhog Day (1959) with 10 votes. John Henry Twachtman's Winter Harmony (1890-1900) with 4 votes and Hiroshige's Mountains and Rivers on the Kiso Road (1857), Claude Monet's Snow at Argenteuil (1875), and Vincent van Gogh's Landscape with Snow (1888) with 2 votes each rounded out the field. Thanks to everyone who braved the cold and voted.

For February’s Art Poll By Bob, I’m heating things up. Love is in the air, so in honor of Valentine’s Day, I’m asking, “Which of these famous kisses gets you in the mood?”:

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The First Kiss (1873)

Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss (1908)

Marc Chagall, The Birthday (1915)

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1907-1908)

Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss V (1965)

Edvard Munch, The Kiss (1892)

Auguste Rodin, The Kiss (1889)

Franz von Stuck, The Kiss of the Sphinx (1895)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, In Bed: The Kiss (1892)

None of these smooches may reach the top 5 all time, like the kiss at the end of The Princess Bride (top of post), but they come close. Grab your sweetie, pucker up, and vote!

Not Just Kids’ Stuff

Cover image, courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

When you become a parent, your entire world changes. As your child grows, you try to bring that entire world to them in all its color and beauty. For anyone who loves art and wants their child to love it, too, Maria K. Shoemaker and Katy Friedland’s A Is for Art Museum (above) is a good place to start. Using the entire width and breadth of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Shoemaker, the PMA’s Senior Curator of Education, and Friedland, Manager of Family and Children’s Programs at the PMA, use every children’s educational trick in the book in this book to make the journey through the alphabet a treat for the ear and the eye as well as for the imagination, planting the seeds so that parents can nurture the budding art lover deep inside every kid. “Here is a building filled with art. What will you find inside?” the first page reads, with the majestic classical columns of the PMA sitting atop the Rocky Steps drawing the young reader in for closer inspection. With such a great start, the fun (and learning) is just beginning.


The Kiss (Constantin Brancusi, French, born Romania, 1876-1957). Limestone, 23 x 13 ¼ x 10 inches, 1916. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arsenberg Collection, 1950.

Like any good children’s book, A Is for Art Museum will keep adults interested, too, wondering what will happen next. “D is for Dancer” brings us to the Edgar Degas’ statue of the Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen. I can just imagine the feeling of a child, perhaps a little girl taking her first dance class, connecting with this image and later even going to see the sculpture itself at the museum—a friend waiting for her all this time. “E is for Eyes” presents the museum’s collection of miniature paintings of eyes, one of the wonderfully strange slices of the past hidden in plain sight in one of the museum’s lesser travelled rooms. “K is for Kiss,” featuring Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss (above) calls on youngsters to stretch their minds to see the two figures smooching. When “N is for Neck” rolls around, the authors ask the young reader to try physically stretching his or her neck just like the woman in a painting by Amedeo Modigliani does. Labels such as classical, Impressionist, modern, or even foreign have no place in this alphabetical tour of cultures and styles, opening up the child’s imagination to a literally boundless world.

Three Musicians (Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, Spanish, 1881-1973). Oil on canvas, 80 ½ x 74 1/8 inches, 1921. Philadelphia Museum of Art: A.E. Gallatin Collection, 1952.

The first time I flipped through A Is for Art Museum, I did so with my 2-year-old Alex in my lap. He knows all his letters, not necessarily all in order, so he was able to concentrate on the visuals of the book. (The inclusion of uppercase and lowercase letters—not always a given in alphabet books—shows that the educators knew what they were doing.) When I came to “M is for Musicians,” for which the authors made the remarkable choice of Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (above), I asked Alex if he could see the instruments. Finding anything in Picasso’s Cubist jumble challenges most adults, but Alex didn’t “know enough” not to try. After a few valiant guesses, Alex looked up at me and I showed him where they were. The look of discovery in his eye alone was worth the price of the book. It said, “Of course, there they were all along.” Not every work in the book is as challenging as Picasso’s, but the diversity of the works will keep the inquisitive child coming back again and again to find new things they didn’t see before. I can easily imagine A Is for Art Museum serving as the beginning of an art scavenger hunt through the PMA with kids giggling in the galleries as they come face to face with their new “old” friends.

The Orchard Window (Daniel Garber, American, 1880-1958). Oil on canvas, 56 7/16 x 52 ¼ inches, 1918. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Centennial gift of the family of Daniel Garber, 1976.

I can’t imagine any better advertisement or marketing tool to the four-and-under set than A Is for Art Museum. The heavy hitters in the Philadelphia lineup, such as Picasso’s Three Musicians and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are here, but quieter gems such as an ornate German helmet from the armor collection and a Qing Dynasty dog cage. The choice of works such as Daniel Garber’s The Orchard Window (above) lends a distinctly Philadelphian flavor to the book, too. Proceeds from the launch party for A Is for Art Museum will go towards providing free copies to local libraries, Head Start programs, and community centers, adding to the aura of good feelings surrounding this book. Even if you’re not from Philadelphia, A Is for Art Museum will pull you and your child into the circle of readers and art lovers and never let you go.

[Many thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing me with a review copy of Maria K. Shoemaker and Katy Friedland’s A Is for Art Museum and for the images above.]