Smash hit

Noguchi was also influenced by Brancusi, whose studio assistant he was for six months in 1927 and 1928. Brancusi taught Noguchi to carve in stone, and he was an attentive pupil. True, some of his sculptures, including Torso (1982) and Helix of the Endless (1985), instantly betray their source (as does his use of polished brass), but most of his stone carvings aren’t like Brancusi’s at all. Noguchi treats his material in a way that brings out the inherent colours of the block. He intervenes, at some points quite radically, but leaves the sculpture looking natural, as though it has been like this for a few millennia.

This artist-assisted naturalness is a characteristic of much Japanese art, and the affinities are emphasised here by placing groups of small stone sculptures in large trays of gravel, as if in imitation of a Zen sand garden. Noguchi, of course, was both Japanese and American, a heritage that caused him grief in the USA after 1941, when he voluntarily entered an internment camp for “enemy aliens”. He grew up in Japan, visited regularly once the war was over and eventually bought a house and studio there. His first wife was a Japanese movie star.

Much of his work, from the lamp shades, which were inspired by observing nocturnal cormorant- fishing at Gifu, to granite benches that look like works of nature, has a Japanese sensibility. Like so many Japanese craftsmen, he was an extraordinarily gifted carpenter, capable of bringing wood and stone together, as when he let a rectangular piece of wood into a flat slab of rough granite, creating a place to take off his shoes before entering his house. The fit is so perfect that the wood looks as though it grew there.

Noguchi’s belief, expressed above all in his designs, that a functional object can be sculpture is Japanese, too, as are many of his laconic utterances. “The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement,” he once wrote. “Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature.” “But,” he goes on, “I am also a sculptor of the West. I place my mark and do not hide.”

The quality of Noguchi’s sculpture is often explained in terms of a synthesis of East and West. Yet this superb exhibition makes Noguchi’s Oriental stillness and desire for contemplation seem more fundamental to his art than anything Western in form or philosophy.

“Why do I continuously go back to Japan, except to renew my contact with the earth?” he asked. “There still remains the familiarity with earthly materials and the skill of Japanese hands. How exquisitely functional are their traditional tools. Soon, these, too, will be displaced by the machine. In the meantime, I go there as a beggar or a thief, seeking the last warmth of the earth.”

In the end, however, even the Japanese seem to have failed to perceive what a great and quintessentially Japanese artist Noguchi was. In 1988, the year of his death, he was awarded the Order of Sacred Treasure. Inexplicably, it was only Third Class.

Isamu Noguchi, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield, until February 22, 2009

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