ABSTRACT
As an artist, Isamu Noguchi has not confined himself to enterprises that lend themselves to a gallery or museum presentation. After Constantin Brancusi, who remains in a class of his own, Mr. Noguchi must be considered one of the most important of those modern sculptors who have upheld the purity of carving as the essential task of their art. Like Brancusi, Mr. Noguchi has found his inspiration more often than not in traditions remote from the mainstream of Western European sculpture. The alien traditions, whether Oriental or Pre-Columbian or African or Oceanic place him in a happier, because less descriptive, relation to nature than that afforded by the conventions of Western European sculpture since the Renaissance. He has remained loyal to the obligation of artistic purification implied in the whole modernist adventure without being able to supply that adventure with an impetus and an achievement capable of extending it into the future.
