ReviewBook review: Listening to Stone - biography brings artist Isamu Noguchi alive
Author Hayden Herrera had to synthesise a vast amount of material to produce this authoritative account; however, as the details pile up over 500 pages, some passages drag.
by Hayden Herrera
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Isamu Noguchi was a difficult man who made art easy to look at. In his life and work, he was riddled with contradictions. Humble and egotistical. Listless and energetic. Steadfast and temperamental. A loyal friend and faithless lover.
Art historian Hayden Herrera, who has written books about Noguchi's artist friend Arshile Gorky and his romantic partner Frida Kahlo, explores his paradoxical personality in her meticulously researched Listening to Stone.
Herrera focuses on the lifelong tension he felt as a result of his biracial heritage. Born in the US to an Irish-American mother and Japanese father, he felt at home nowhere and was an inveterate traveller and self-described world citizen. "For one with a background like myself the question of identity is very uncertain," she quotes him as saying. "And I think it's only in art that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all."
And that he did. Blessed - even cursed at times - with vaulting ambition, ferocious energy and an unusually fertile imagination, Noguchi was widely acclaimed as one of America's greatest sculptors when he died in 1988 at age 84.