In touch with the earth

Isamu Noguchi lived in Los Angeles for only the first two years of his life, but his story is sure to strike a chord with Angelenos, so many of whom share his experience of straddling multiple cultures. That L.A., and the Japanese American National Museum specifically, should be the sole West Coast venue for “Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics” is both fortunate and fitting.

Focusing on the sculptor’s three short but intense periods of involvement with clay -- all of which took place in Japan -- the exhibition portrays a man struggling to immerse himself in the essence of a culture he felt half outside of yet deeply connected to. He later described the first of these periods, in 1931, as “my close embrace of the earth ... a seeking after identity with some primal matter beyond personalities and possessions.” The work that resulted isn’t the boldest or most definitive of his career, but it is probably among the most intimate, insofar as it reveals the artist wrestling with not only the culture but also the very substance -- the earth -- of his father’s homeland.

Noguchi’s parents, American writer Leonie Gilmour and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, met in New York and parted before the artist’s birth in 1904. Leonie rejoined Yone in Tokyo two years later, but the relationship was short-lived, and Isamu rarely saw his father, who married a Japanese woman several years later and became a fierce nationalist. Leonie, who is only a footnote to the exhibition but looks to have been a fascinating woman, remained in the country for 17 more years, giving birth to a daughter in 1913, the father’s identity apparently a mystery, and supporting herself by teaching English.

When Isamu was 13, he was sent to a progressive boarding school in Indiana, then taken in by a local minister when that school was closed for military use during the war. At 18, he moved to New York to study medicine at Columbia University but dropped out two years later to devote himself to sculpture, at the same time changing his name from Gilmour to Noguchi, against his father’s wishes. After two years on a Guggenheim travel grant in Paris, where he worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, he returned to New York and began supporting himself as a portrait sculptor.

The current exhibition begins a few years later, in 1931, when Noguchi (who died in 1988) returned to Japan for the first time since his childhood. After two unpleasant months in Tokyo with his father, who accepted his visit only grudgingly, he spent five months in a potter’s studio in Kyoto, working primarily in molded terracotta. The most striking of the few works represented from this period is a simple yet handsome portrait of the artist’s uncle.

When Noguchi returned again to Japan 19 years later, it was to a considerably warmer welcome, both from the family of his father (who had died three years earlier) and from the artistic community, which was struggling to regain its footing following the war in the midst of the American occupation. A local arts organization offered him an exhibition, so he took up residence in a ceramics facility in the town of Seto and, remarkably, churned out nearly two dozen sculptures in a single week.

Of all the works in the show, these are the most recognizably Noguchi: jaunty, surrealistic forms with sharp lines and smooth surfaces. They’re finely crafted but feel more like studies in clay than works in their own right, and it’s not surprising that he didn’t return to the medium for such a purpose again.

The majority of the works -- and by far the most exciting -- belong to the third period, in 1952. Noguchi had recently married actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko, and the two were living in a cottage on the property of well-known potter Kitaoji Rosanjin. The marriage didn’t last, but its initial effect, combined with that of the rural setting, was clearly quite salutary.

Here one finds Noguchi beginning to approach the clay on its own terms, exploring its strengths and weaknesses, its pleasures and dangers, its elegance and its clumsiness, all the while reveling in its earthy character.

The slabs, whether cut to form square plates, draped around tiny figures or folded into sculpture, are thick and rough around the edges. The glazes are syrupy and unevenly applied. Textural blemishes abound.

The result is rollickingly sensual. It’s not surprising that the photograph from this time that appears in the catalog -- depicting Noguchi and his wife on the veranda of their cottage -- is one of the only in which the handsome, brooding artist is actually smiling. He’s clearly having fun.

Noguchi’s works make up about half the exhibition. The other half is given over to natives of both the country and the medium: ceramic sculptors who were Noguchi’s teachers and peers throughout his three periods of work in Japan. In addition to providing a valuable historical context, lest we ascribe to Noguchi more than his share of originality, this aspect of the show offers a number of exquisite objects.

Particularly beautiful are several rough-hewn works by Rosanjin, such as a glossy green vase with latticed rather than solid walls and a shallow, unglazed dish decorated with a nest of what look like slender burn marks (actually made by laying rice straw soaked in salt water across the clay prior to firing).

Also memorable are the works of artists in an avant-garde group called Sodeisha (Crawling Through Mud Society), which, inspired in part by Noguchi, strove to push the medium away from function and toward the realm of abstract sculpture. In their work, one encounters many of Noguchi’s own tendencies brought to radical fruition.

The acknowledged irony of the exhibition is that Noguchi himself never came around to the medium but gravitated, later in his life, toward harder and harder stone. As he told an interviewer in 1960: “Working in clay did not satisfy me.... Because in a medium like clay anything can be done, and I think that’s dangerous. It’s too fluid, too facile.... The very freedom is a kind of anti-sculpture to me.”

Far from rendering the exhibition irrelevant, however, the comment only makes this little-seen work, and particularly the romp of 1952, that much more interesting.

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‘Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics’

Where: Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., Los Angeles

When: Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Fridays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: May 30

Price: $3-$6

Contact: (213) 625-0414