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THE ARTS

Back to Clay

A quick look at some of the new ceramic sculptures of Isamu Noguchi—— now on exhibit at the Stable Gallery in New York - might give the impression that he was a fugitive from a bakery.

[[image - photograph of a sculpture]]
Noguchi's "Mr. Atom": Primitive

This 50-year-old American of Japanese descent seems to have molded, folded, pushed, and cut his sheets and lumps of clay as if they were so much dough.

By bulkiness of style, Noguchi hopes to demonstrate an artistic preoccupation of long standing with the primitive relations between man and nature— or, sometimes, between man and certain basic mechanical forces (see picture).

Versatile: It is a preoccupation which has never interfered with Noguchi's versatility of expression. In New York in the '20s, he won success with his portraits and abstract sculptures. His famous lamps - and other useful artifacts - are also found in modern living rooms. Noguchi sets have been used by Martha Graham's dancers, and a Noguchi view of newsgathering processes, expressed in a ten-ton stainless-steel relief, crowns the entrance of the Associated Press headquarters in New York. In Japan, among other things, are the new peace bridges at Hiroshima.

The range of Noguchi's interest is matched by his background. His father, Yonejiro, was a Japanese poet who wrote in English; his mother, an American of Scottish extraction. He was educated in Japan and in La Porte, Ind. He studied art in New York, Paris, and China.

This unusual combination of the Eastern and the Western world has left Noguchi a little restless when confined to either one. Perhaps this is why he sets such store in his work on pure nature, unconcerned with rival cultures. "Whatever quality my work now has," he writes, "is I hope that of nature...There has I trust been a minimum of the imposition of will and thought. The medium which is the earth itself has its own way..."

THEATER:

Open and Shut

"Abie's Irish Rose," the Anne Nichols opus that opened to a crackle of adverse criticism in 1922 and lasted for a thundering 2,327 performances, is back on Broadway for the third time, just as full of good will as ever and twice as archaic. It is not to be laughed at, in any sense of the word. Neither was "One Eye Closed," an unhappy little farce that closed after three performances. Two new productions, however, had something worth-while to offer last week.

"Wedding Breakfast," by Theodore Reeves, is a four-actor drama with four good performances and some sensitive writing about two Bronx-type sets of roommates living in Greenwich Village. Harvey Lembeck and Virginia Vincent are so agreeable as the solid dullards of the group that the play should, perhaps, have been written about them; instead, the author is misguidedly concerned with

[[note]] Newsweek Dec. 6, 1954 [[/note]]