Isamu Noguchi

The Artist
Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., New York (acquired from the above in 1968)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1969

New York, Egan Gallery, Isamu Noguchi, March 1949 (the 1946 marble)
Sâo Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna, Bienal I, October - November 1951, cat. no. 90, p. 83 (checklist) (the 1946 marble)
New York, Finch College Museum of Art, Selections from the Permanent Collection, March - April 1974 (the 1946 marble)

Nancy Grove and Diane Botnick, The Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi, 1924-1979, A Catalogue, New York, 1980, cat. no. 243B, pp. 43-44, illustrated (the 1946 marble, cat. no. 243A)
Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and travelling), Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculpture, 2004, p. 113, illustrated in color (the 1946 marble)

This sculpture is in excellent condition. It has recently been cleaned and waxed as part of standard maintenance for a patina after a period of several years. As is typical of Noguchi's interlocking bronzes, there were scattered fine scratches located primarily near the slots where the interlocking elements are inserted. These were minimally inpainted with reversible acrylic.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

“The essence of sculpture is space, the continuum of our existence. All dimensions are but measures of it, …I say it is the sculptor who orders and animates space.” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Fourteen Americans, 1946)
 

Isamu Noguchi’s eloquent The Gunas exudes a timelessness and universality that are a hallmark of this sculptor’s greatest work, acknowledged by the inclusion of the 1946 carved marble of this title in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Yet as with much of the art born of the post-war years of the Twentieth Century, the clarity and presence of The Gunas emerged from the turbulent crucible of that time. Noguchi was a Modernist of the New York School who synthesized dichotomies and tensions between Asian and European/American cultures, ancient and modern art, the practical and the utopian.  Works such as The Gunas reveal the abiding influence of the artistic milieu surrounding Noguchi in the 1930s and 1940s, from Surrealist biomorphic forms to the elegant reductionism of contemporary sculptors such as Jean Arp, Henry Moore, and Constantin Brancusi. Unlike the notions of heroic self-expression that characterized the Action Painters at mid-century, Noguchi’s creative spirit was more akin to philosophical artists such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman. Consistent with his beliefs, Noguchi’s sculptures and public commissions aspired to achieve a broad social good and moral uplift in the 1930s and early 1940s, but by the time he first began to carve and construct works from marble and stone slabs in 1944, Noguchi’s aesthetic aims shifted to a more intimate notion of sculpture and its relationship to the viewer. By this time, he had achieved recognition among figures such as his friend Arshile Gorky and the dealer Julien Levy and was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s influential exhibition Fourteen Americans in 1946. Yet, as Bruce Altshuler has commented about Noguchi’s statement in that exhibition’s catalogue, “now [Noguchi] addressed more inward needs: the ‘adjustment of the human psyche to chaos’ and the ‘transformation of human meaning into the encroaching void.’ Like many artists of the postwar period, Noguchi had moved from the social to personal issues, seeking existential meaning from art in a world bereft of stable values.” (Bruce Altshuler, Isamu Noguchi, New York, London and Paris, 1994, p. 49)

Conceived first in Tennessee marble in 1946 and cast in bronze later in 1966, The Gunas is an extraordinary paragon of Noguchi’s aesthetic creed. The title refers to a fundamental concept espoused by the philosophy of Yoga, in which all matter in the universe is comprised of three primary qualities called gunas that create the essential aspects of all nature, namely energy, matter, and consciousness. In its tripartite composition and the technical mastery of its design, The Gunas is the quintessential summation of Noguchi’s oeuvre in its expression of his fundamental concern for art’s integration with its surrounding space and for the elimination of the nonessential through formal reduction. In applying for a Guggenheim fellowship in 1927, Noguchi wrote, “It is my desire to view nature through nature’s eyes, and to ignore man as an object for special veneration. ..Indeed, a fine balance of spirit with matter can only concur when the artist has so thoroughly submerged himself in the study of the unity of nature as to truly become once more part of nature.” (Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Bruce Altshuler, eds., Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, New York, 1994, p. 16)

Having won the fellowship, Noguchi traveled to Paris, spending six months in Constantin Brancusi’s studio, and his admiration of the sublime grace and quiet power of Brancusi’s sculptural genius is a clear inspiration for Noguchi’s earliest experiments away from realist figuration and toward an abstraction that blended the most natural materials with a very primal sensibility. Working with driftwood, paper, bones, and string, Noguchi explored new boundaries in his sculptural practice, along with initiating his first experiments with modernist furniture design in the early 1940s. In both arenas, a new appreciation for organic composition led to a greater refinement and lyricism which found its fullest expression in his innovative forms of the mid-1940s which are so pivotal to his pre-eminence among modern sculptors of the mid-century. Anthropomorphic shapes similar to Yves Tanguy’s Surrealist paintings and the multi-planar constructs of Picasso’s Cubist works coexist in Noguchi’s works such as The Gunas. In their fully volumetric presence, the three figurations in The Gunas are locked in a communal embrace of quietude, grace, and seemingly effortless balance, standing like sentinels that simultaneously animate and guard the space around them. As with other monumental works from this corpus such as Kouros, Remembrance, Avatar, and Cronos, the interlocking elements of The Gunas successfully express a sense of connectivity, at once precarious and cohesive. The individual elements are not artificially attached; Noguchi used principles of tension and balance to perch the planar slabs into horizontal and vertical equilibrium.

Eastern sensibilities about the fragility of beauty are at the heart of these creations: even cast in bronze, the viewer is challenged to determine how sculptures such as The Gunas are assembled, while sensing that the removal of any one piece will destabilize the whole. A full understanding of the practice of Yoga informs the viewer’s appreciation of Noguchi’s grand aspirations for his sculptures. The three primary gunas consist of tamas (a state of darkness and inertia), rajas (a state of energy and change), and sattva (a state of harmony and balance). All three are present in every living being or thing, and although they cannot be removed or separated, they can vary in their relative proportions. Noguchi’s primary message in these interlocking sculptures is that we are all connected and mutually supporting, and with its title The Gunas is a uniquely concise and eloquent manifestation of Noguchi’s beliefs.