Girl Torso

Isamu Noguchi's early education in Japan and subsequent attendance at an American high school grounded him in two cultures that colored his life and art. As a young man, Noguchi apprenticed in Japan with a cabinet-maker, where he first developed his reverence for natural materials. Later, he apprenticed with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. After a brief sojourn in medical school, Noguchi received a 1927 Guggenheim Fellowship that took him to Paris, where he became a studio assistant to Constantin Brancusi. Noguchi responded to what he saw as the Japanese aesthetic of his mentor's work, and, like Brancusi, understood abstraction as an investigation of a subject's essence, as well as a revelation of the "truth" of the materials with which he created. Noguchi favored working in stone, carving away rather than artificially appending anything to his material. "Girl Torso" was created from a block of Pentelic marble and the abstracted figure is reminiscent of archaic Greek sculpture. Noguchi saw little distinction between fine and applied arts and was a designer of everything from furniture and industrial products, to gardens, bridges, and stage sets and costumes. His mulberry paper and bamboo Akari lamps are an icon of mid-twentieth-century design and display the same harmonious marriage of Asian aesthetics and Western modernism as his organic-abstract sculpture.