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years ago to his classes at Harvard, that Titian would be a fine banker today still holds generally true for the arts, and particularly so for sculpture. 


THE occasion for these comments is two exhibitions of the best work being done in the United States. One, by Isamu Noguchi, closed at the Stable Gallery on January 8; the other, by Herbert Ferber, will open at the Kootz Gallery about February 1. 

 Noguchi's art is of course rooted in Japan, where he spent his childhood, but he was born in California and he has worked in America as much as anywhere else. He has successfully avoided all those pitfalls of kitsch which entrap most persons who aspire to achieve a meeting of East and West. His art is personal, international, powerful, and very modern. It is tense, spare, daring, and often humorous. His animal caricatures belong with Toba Sojo's agile rabbits. His children, half lost in shredded ponchos, are more concentrated symbols, more poignant waifs, than Tchelitchew's. His vases- for reeds and rushes-are as sculptural as Marcel Breuer's stone fireplaces. He can make baked clay look as hard as sheets of bent iron, and as durable. His rock slabs rival Egypt and Mexican grinding stones. Taken as a whole, the exhibition was the most beautifully displayed sculpture show it has been my privilege to see in years, partly because of the spatial arrangement - Noguchi's own-partly because the Stable is New York's most beautiful gallery. 

 Since his last show, which exploited to the full potentialities of bush forms, Herbert Ferber has been mining a new vein. His theme is the root and the pressure it exerts between the limits of horizontal and vertical planes. A greater compactness results, with a necessary sacrifice of the ingratiating lift of upward movement. Ferber fans, of whom I am in the lead, will have to get used to his new "roofs," but if they will apply the principles of Michelangelo's crowding of the frame as a way of expressing vitality, I freely predict that they will agree with me that Ferber's living art is continuing to evolve. 

 There was a heartening scatter of little red stars at the Stable Gallery. I profoundly hope that Ferber's new show will also be more than a succès d'estime. 

January 15, 1955
 The Nation