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FLORIDA TIMES UNION
JACKSONVILLE
1/12/58 (SUNDAY) 

THE FLORI[[cutoff]]

INSIDE ART

Versatile Artist Aids Twain to Meet at Last

By MEYER LEVIN

What is Isamu Noguchi? Sculptor, painter, stage designer, lamp and furniture designer, or garden poet? Exactly what? And is he to be thought of as a Japanese artist or an American artist, or is he indeed that ubiquitous being the cosmopolitan?

The first time I saw Isamu Noguchi was in Hollywood shortly after Pearl Harbor. He would appear suddenly at the house every few weeks. He seemed to be living in his station wagon, driving around to the relocation camps for the Nisei, worried.

Of course he was a completely loyal American, yet he had been raised in Japan until he was 13, and he was driven by the inner struggle between the two cultures.

At that time I was presented with a small piece of his sculpture, a round-faced carving of a woman's head, rather like a bas-relief, in orange wood. Only years later I noticed that the treatment of the woman's hair, around the face, gave the piece the suggestion of the sunray emblem. I was sure the motif had sprung from his subconscious. And all my sympathy for the artist, torn between the two cultures, reawakened. 

[[image - photograph of a sculpture] 
"NOODLE" SUGGESTS LARGE HAND
Locked fingers are unified.

But then, I thought, perhaps it is exactly this stress which leads to the purity and lyric beauty of Noguchi's work. He draws inspiration from both cultural streams, but through his inner sturggle [[struggle]] burns away all which might be jingoistic, so that only universal loveliness remains.

I MET NOGUCHI again just after the war, in his little studio in famed MacDougal Alley, in Greenwich Village. The shop was crowded with experimental forms for the free-play sculp-tural elements he invented, to be used in playgrounds. Boul-derlike shapes, with tunnel holes in them, shapes for climbing on and for crawling through, shapes which nevertheless give the child an early sense of sat-isfaction and usefulness in beautiful forms.

Noguchi also developed his furniture and lamp designs, the free-form cocktail tables which became so popular and the "bubble" lamps which for a time were imitated by every decorator.
Then in the intervening years I read about him. There was the Sunday picture story of Noguchi living in a Japanese village with his movie star wife, Shirley Yamaguchi. Later there were items about Noguchi in India, where he was to design a vast garden. And about Noguchi in Paris, creating a sculptural garden for the new building of UNESCO. Recently he was back in New York.

[[image - photograph of Noguchi working]] 
NOGUCHI AT WORK
Ancient temple motifs recalled.

I dropped in to see him at the Stable Gallery, where there is a permanent show of No-guchi sculptures, in the base-ment. "You see, I have no home now," Noguchi remarked. "They knocked down that build-ing in MacDougal Alley to build a big apartment house. I have no place for my things, and I travel around so much; this way, at least my things have a home."

I HAD SEEN some of the pieces in major exhibitions. There were the terra cotta vases, suggesting archaic interpretations of the human form. There was "Noodle," suggesting a large hand with the fingers locked in different directions, yet all unified in the form of the whole. Perhaps this was symbolic for the sculptor, who is not without a sense of humor. 

There were abstractions, some based on ancient stands for gongs and bells in Japan, and others which seemed more closely related to modern American industrial forms. There were representational forms too. There was the work of a restless, ever-seeking spirit, and artist who would not be trapped into a trade-mark style.

We talked of the exciting settings Noguchi had created for Martha Graham and her dancers; he would like to do more stage design. Perhaps the gardens which absorb him now are a form of state design.

Noguchi visits Japan every year or two, but his marriage is ended. He wonders where he will "settle." Probably New York, he thinks. I wonder where I'll see him next.