Whose idea was it to host concurrent retrospectives of Romare Bearden and Isamu Noguchi at the Whitney Museum of American Art? It was a brilliant stroke, really. Noguchi’s streamlined, abstract sculptures distill experience by expunging it of clutter; Bearden’s collaged portrayals of farmers, jazz musicians and religious ritual embrace clutter as a glorious and, at Read More
Priscilla Morgan met Isamu Noguchi 45 years ago today, on Bastille Day, July 14, 1959, though she already had taken note of him, and he of her, at places like the Artists’ Club in Greenwich Village. He was a dashing world-renowned sculptor; she, a successful William Morris agent. Both were already divorced. When an invitation Read More
Edla Cusick’s show Cityscapes at the Asyl Gallery, which came down on Feb. 5, frankly wasn’t a resounding success. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the pictures didn’t sell. The gallery’s location, on a Godforsaken stretch of frozen tundra off the Hudson River, at 547 West 27th Street, may have had Read More
For the past 10 years, the Museum of Modern Art has been selling highly designed, museum-endorsed products from an outpost across the street where design seems to have been an afterthought. All that is about to change. Between July 31 and Aug. 14, the MoMA Design Store, 44 West 53rd Street, is putting its Noguchi Read More
Few sculptors of the modern era have matched the success of the late Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) in meeting the very different challenges of an art designed for public space and an art conceived to serve as an object of private delectation. He had few peers, either, in successfully negotiating an esthetic dialogue between the traditions Read More
