Acquisitions

Isamu Noguchi's Strange Bird

In 1995, Eileen Barber recalled how she and her husband Joe acquired Noguchi's captivating Strange Bird. With her customary understated wit and a wry down-east manner cultivated by years of summering in Maine, she wrote: "The Noguchi, purchased in 1972, has its own serendipitous story. . . . I still have the clipping of John Canaday's review of 20 May 1972 in the New York Times of the show then at Cordier & Eckstrom. In it he says, 'Isamu Noguchi's Strange Birds are casts of different types of bronze—a smooth green resembling jade, a matte black, again like stone, and a highly polished gold-plus two examples in carved aluminum, all from a carved slate master model composed of five interlocking pieces.' We liked the green one and bought it. Afterwards, we thought we'd put it in the garden of our house in Maine. When it arrived, however, it seemed far too refined for the outdoors and we brought it inside where it has remained. Luckily I had a sketch from the artist showing how to assemble it, since the shippers had unceremoniously dumped it on the lawn in pieces."

It was on the occasion of the exhibition Collective Pursuits: Mount Holyoke Investigates Modernism that Mrs. Barber decided to make the sculpture a promised gift to the museum, along with a host of other treasures including two wonderful small paintings by Max Ernst. The Noguchi occupied a place of pride in the exhibition and now, as part of the museum's permanent collection, will continue to play an important role in the teaching of sculpture and the history of 20th-century art.

Noguchi, the son of an American writer mother and a Japanese poet father was born in Los Angeles but spent part of his childhood in Japan. Returning to the United States for high school, he worked as an apprentice to a sculptor in Connecticut, later moving on to New York City where he studied sculpture and frequented the avant-garde galleries. There, he encountered the work of Constantin Brancusi in 1926 and within two years, he was working as Brancusi's studio assistant in Paris.

It was in the 1940s that Noguchi began work on a series of carved interlocking sculptures, using marble and slate slabs since the material was both easily available and inexpensive. But the fragility of the flat pieces of stone also caused him to think about translating these works into other media, like cast bronze. Canaday's description reflects the variety of materials which the artist used in his different versions of Strange Bird, and it was the beautiful patinated green bronze that so appealed to the Barbers. These pieces reflected both the biomorphism of the European Surrealists and the spatial conceptions of Cubism. As Noguchi was later to say of these works "giving the basic definitions of volume (like a three-dimensional cartoon) each sculpture had only to be completed in the eye of the spectator."

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