A master of what he called "the sculpturing of space," Isamu Noguchi was
a vital figure for modern public art. Born to an American mother and a
Japanese father, Noguchi never felt like he belonged anywhere and spent
his life assembling identities in his statues, monuments, and gardens.
He traveled incessantly from New York to remote Japanese islands, from
Paris to Bangladesh, synthesizing aesthetic values. The result--massive
sculptures of interlocking wood, Zen-like gardens of granite, and stone
slides--is now seen as a powerful artistic link between East and West.
Drawing on Noguchi's personal correspondence and interviews with
artists, patrons, assistants, and lovers, Hayden Herrera creates another
compulsively readable biography of one of the twentieth century's most
important artists. Noguchi was elusive, forever uprooting himself to
reinvigorate what he called the "keen edge of originality." Yet Herrera
locates this man in his friendships with artists like Buckminster Fuller
and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women like Frida Kahlo.
Herrera reveals his playfulness and his intense immersion in his work,
from designing sets for Martha Graham to creating the Noguchi Museum in
Queens.
A rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu, Listening to Stone is
a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself
as he searched for his own "essence of sculpture."
