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Last time I revisited the Isamu Noguchi Museum as it nears its fortieth anniversary by the Queens waterfront. The museum celebrates with a modest rehanging. Here let me excerpt a fuller review from one of my very first visits, for a better introduction to a place you should know.

To begin then, At the very end of his career, Isamu Noguchi worked on a large, roughly human scale. Like living animals, too, the sculpture sprawls oddly without losing stability. It rests on the ground without stands or supports—except where the base transforms the art object itself. Moving around a room’s central partition made me think of wandering in a zoo as a child. Yet late work has become completely abstract. Dark materials suggest the monochromes of late-modern painting, in Noguchi’s contemporaries from Mark Rothko through abstraction today. Arbitrary changes in texturing echo and subdue a painter’s more extravagant gestures.

The layout upstairs becomes only slightly more prosaic, like a maze of numbered boxes. It could represent a deliberate shift backward, to the architecture of an earlier Modernism. Noguchi’s career shifts with it. Its twin poles of art and urban reality do not. Elsewhere upstairs, the artist struggles in his role as public servant, with commissions that never got built. Yet a room devoted to the Japan project makes a fitting memorial quite by itself—only now, to an artist holding true to himself.

One gets a brief tour of the sculptor’s early career in Paris, under Constantin Brancusi. He learns effortlessly Brancusi’s imagery and materials. One meets again those bronze skulls and slim, towering birds. Noguchi also has his fling with Surrealism, in tight arrangements of small objects. He then grows more abstract, but also more at home in the conscious, the familiar, and the prosaic. He is finding his way to a personal style, away from Modernism’s dark interiority.

Elsewhere upstairs, the California-bred artist struggles in his role as public servant. He returns to Japan, where he also grew up, to commemorate victims of the atomic bomb. Later on, he worked alone and with Louis Kahn, the architect, on playgrounds along the Hudson River that would have made Sanford Robinson Gifford proud. Not one plan got built, in Japan or New York, but the artist never lost his utter self-confidence. For Manhattan, Noguchi submitted his projects again and again and again. A room devoted to the Japan project makes a fitting memorial quite by itself—only now, to an artist holding true to himself.

I thought of a play just on the edge of limits, too, as I walked again in the garden downstairs. I started by following the garden path, in its careful course past each work. Yet I could not resist breaking off to the small, loose stones for a closer look. I could not help running my hand through a slim sheet of water that trickles off the fountain. If art here tumbles on the edge of nature, so did I.

The factory versus the museum, the special exhibition versus the career history, the market versus the product—each tells a similar story. Noguchi speaks to a modern artist’s difficult identity as source for a richer art. As an American high modernist, with roots in three countries not long ago at war, he may well define the puzzle. As I walked again in the garden downstairs, I could not resist breaking off to the small, loose stones for a closer look. I could not help running my hand through a slim sheet of water that trickles off the fountain. If art here tumbles on the edge of nature, so did I.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Here it is, spring, so how about a glorious expedition? Starting fifty years ago, Isamu Noguchi pulled off a miracle. He turned a factory in Queens into a garden.

More precisely, it became the Noguchi Garden Museum and a tribute to one of Modernism’s greatest sculptors. Costco had not yet come to the neighborhood, where a piano factory a quarter mile north still held sway. A motel on Broadway looked none too inviting, and Socrates Sculpture Park on the waterfront was little more than an untended patch of green. And still, with the museum’s opening in 1985, three years before its creator’s death, it brought a place for awakening and for peace. It has served ever since as a venue for Noguchi and more.

Can it look half as miraculous today? Approaching its fortieth anniversary, it attempts something almost as daring. To celebrate the occasion, it rehangs the collection—nineteen galleries plus an actual sculpture garden. Amy Hau, its director since January 2024, asks to compete with Noguchi himself. He purchased the building across from his Astoria studio and took pains with every inch. As sales of his work rose and fell, he needed a place for what had become his private collection, and he wanted it to look just right.

He built just three rooms from scratch and adapted the rest to his art. Even now one can marvel at how factory interiors look so open, how sculpture blends into the garden, and how both turn the space inside-out. The museum (since an earlier renovation, simply the Noguchi Museum) reopened on a sweltering Thursday before Labor Day, in 2024, as a relief from summer and the claustrophobic gallery season about to begin. It was a chance, too, to shine without special exhibitions. Past shows have included Saburo Hasegawa and Christian Boltanski, along with Noguchi’s hopes for a Memorial to the Atomic dead. Now it could reclaim the entire building for him alone.

Not everything has changed. His legacy may be daunting, but Noguchi was always an eager collaborator—on a Yale museum with Louis Kahn, the unfinished memorial to Hiroshima, city parks, and even a swimming pool. For him, play was indistinguishable from craft and art. And the rehanging is respectful enough, to the point that you may not notice a change. It may be a tad stricter in grouping sculpture by materials and forms. But then Noguchi can hardly help looking familiar whatever his survivors have done.

One enters to work from the 1970s, at his most memorable. Pockmarked surfaces bring out the weight of stone and give way to polished marble. As color enters, the lines of his sculpture turn on themselves without ever quite closing the circle. The second floor returns as ever to early work with more hints of figuration, including portrait busts, and gathers public projects. Allow me, then, to draw on to my first review of the Noguchi Museum, more than twenty years ago, next time for a fuller and to invite you to read more. Meanwhile I combine the present post with a past report on exhibitions ten years ago of Noguchi’s connections to calligraphy, costumes, and dance for a longer review and my latest upload.

A Whitney retrospective that very year could not carry the same punch. Pieces looked like nothing more or less than, well, works of art. Where Jacques Derrida spoke of an artwork’s frame as a supplement that undermines art’s claim to finality, at the Whitney a sculpture’s base appeared as just one more effort to remove a beautiful object from this world. Smaller rooms for his lamps looked like a brand-name designer’s section of a department store. At his own museum, Noguchi erodes the very distinction between an art object and its surroundings. He sets his work free to enter the world.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.