Here’s your starter for 10. Who or what was Gutzon Borglum? And, while you’re at it, who was Isamu Noguchi? Borglum was a sculptor, a maker of gargantuan kitsch who, using just (just?) dynamite and pneumatic drills, carved the monumental heads of four American presidents out of the living rock of Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. For a brief space, Noguchi was his assistant, though Borglum thought him untalented, as he was untrained, and longed to be rid of him. Today, the assistant is much better known than his master.

How well known is that? A quick poll, recently conducted (by me) at the thrilling Noguchi exhibition now at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, yielded a surprising result. Of the seven people questioned, only one had heard of Noguchi. Other evidence heightens the suspicion that he is far from a household name in this country. There is just one sculpture by him — an abstract cast in iron — in all our public collections, and this is the first proper Noguchi show ever staged in Europe, let alone Britain. (It was hard to put together, not least because of transport costs — everything has come from the United States or Japan.)

Admittedly, Noguchi’s reputation is bigger in America, where he was born in 1904, the son of a Japanese father and an American mother, a poet and writer respectively. Yet even there it was ages before his career as a sculptor took off. His first full retrospective was staged in 1968, and he wasn’t asked to represent America at the Venice Biennale until 1986. (Since he died two years later, this turned out to be a kind of swan song.)

Moreover, the beautiful Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, from which most of this large show comes, is neither a national nor a municipal institution. Disappointed by a lack of official interest, Noguchi established the museum himself, and it remains entirely private.

In America, most people think of Noguchi primarily as a designer. His elegant coffee table — an oval glass top supported by two interlocking organic forms in wood (1944) — is as iconic a modern design as the Eames chair or the Bauhaus table lamp. He also produced cutlery and crockery, much of which is still manufactured.

He created pristine white lamp shades from bamboo ribbing and Japanese washi paper (made from the inner bark of the mulberry tree), filling Ikea and Habitat with innumerable rip-offs to this day.

In 1937, he even dreamt up a Bakelite intercom for the Zenith Radio Corporation, his first mass-produced creation, which sported a ribbed face inspired, it’s said, by the kendo mask he dressed up in as a boy.

Noguchi was a truly great garden designer, too; and he devised sets and costumes for the Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham dance companies — and, incidentally, for an RSC production of King Lear in 1955, starring John Gielgud.

Yet those in the know — and they tend, significantly, to be other sculptors — marvel at Noguchi’s sculpture. For them, he’s simply one of the greatest 20th-century artists, as important in his way as Henry Moore or David Smith. They’re amazed by the variety of his materials and what he could do with them. They’re also staggered by his prowess as a craftsman. He could cast complicated forms in the least promising material, iron. He could cut, carve and polish the hardest granite and basalt to produce forms of the utmost simplicity and poetic suggestiveness that interlock as tightly as a Rubik’s Cube.

On show here, for example, is Sun at Midnight (1973), which simply consists of a ring, almost 5ft in diameter, made of highly polished granite elements, alternately black and dark grey. The elements fit together so tightly, you can scarcely see the joins. Together, by a miracle of craftsmanship, they form a perfect circle.

Noguchi, his admirers claim, has also been hugely, if quietly, influential. He anticipated land art, the vast outdoor projects of people such as Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria, by decades. His Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars was never realised, but the concept dates from 1947. Created in a desert, it would have consisted of a face made of mountains of sand, with a stone pillar a mile high to represent the nose. The image would have made sense only when viewed from at least as far away as the moon.

As a sculptor, Noguchi was extraordinarily various. He worked in terracotta, wood, brass, steel and stone, the harder the better. And the styles he adopted and created are equally varied. At first, they do look derivative. Surrealism coexists with constructivism. There are hints of Giacometti, Arp, Calder and Tatlin. You may therefore conclude that the exhibition contains the work of at least four artists. Yet these Noguchis are so strong and individual, you quickly forget the similarities with other artists and concentrate on what makes a Noguchi unique.

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