Isamu Noguchi, Gregory (Effigy)

0:00:06.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art looking at one of my favorite sculptures. This is by Isamu Noguchi, and it’s called Gregory (Effigy). And it dates to 1945, just at the end of the Second World War.

0:00:21.9 Dr. Jen Padgett: The sculpture stands at about the height of an adult person. The body is made up of this flat, slightly irregular oblong shape standing on three elements that almost feel like limbs that gracefully rest upon the floor.

0:00:39.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: Sculpture had been for centuries, for millennia, a representation of the human body. But Noguchi here is creating an abstraction that is still somehow the human body in space.

0:00:52.7 Dr. Jen Padgett: Noguchi includes a number of elements that almost read like limbs, and they’re not connected through soldering of joints or through any fixing of the material. And you have elements that can be removed. That sense that this has a fragility and a precarity to it, that it’s many pieces that could be perhaps removed or reconfigured.

0:01:12.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: I love to imagine how I might disassemble it and if there are alternative reassemblies that might reinvent it.

0:01:19.7 Dr. Jen Padgett: That sense of mobility and reconfigurability is something that seems like it would be antithetical to the idea of bronze, which is such a storied and important material and has that sense of permanence to it.

0:01:32.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s almost like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. These pieces are not attached, but literally hang onto each other. And so we’re confronted not with something that is entirely stable, but something that feels contingent, as if it could be figured and reconfigured in different ways.

0:01:51.0 Dr. Jen Padgett: That contingent or puzzle-like quality reflects the way that Noguchi made the sculpture as well. So first he took pieces of thick paper and traced out different shapes on them and assembled them to get a sense of the construction before he ever turned to the material he was using to make the work. He originally created this work in slate, this very fragile material. He took his pieces of paper, traced onto the stone, and then cut by hand the forms for that work. Noguchi, after creating the slate work many years later, so in the 1960s, returned to this form and made a series of bronze castings.

0:02:30.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: Noguchi seems to be self-consciously placing his very modern sculpture in this ancient lineage.

0:02:37.4 Dr. Jen Padgett: Noguchi was interested in a vast number of different references, not only thinking about Roman bronzes, but also the Rarotonga of the Cook Islands.

0:02:48.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: The title is Gregory, and here we think that the artist is referencing Gregor Samsa, the main character of Franz Kafka’s very famous novella, The Metamorphosis.

0:03:00.9 Dr. Jen Padgett: And in that novella, the central figure, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into an insect, one that Kafka never fully describes, leaving it very much to the reader’s imagination. Gregor’s transformation into this insect is one that not only alienates him from others, but calls into question the whole of his existence and humanity.

0:03:24.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And it’s a tragedy. He is abandoned, even by his younger sister, ultimately, and he dies.

0:03:29.0 Dr. Jen Padgett: Noguchi didn’t want to illustrate the story of The Metamorphosis in a literal way, but it’s worth mentioning that one of the events within the narrative involves Gregor being injured when a family member hurls an apple at him. So that quality of a wound or injury is also another layer of meaning that we might think about when looking at these larger cutouts or elements that are intersected by these objects, which may be part of the body, but may also be foreign objects.

0:03:58.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: Noguchi isn’t reinventing sculpture out of whole cloth. He had been the studio assistant for one of the most important early 20th-century sculptors, Brâncuși, who in turn had been the student of Rodin. And so you have this lineage of the development of modern sculpture and the reinvention of the human body in space.

0:04:17.9 Dr. Jen Padgett: Noguchi was creating this during a period in which global war had left so many feeling alienated, displaced or otherwise traumatized. As a person of Japanese descent within the U.S. at this time, Noguchi had been in one of the concentration camps for Japanese Americans in Poston in 1942.

0:04:42.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: I can imagine that it was a time when it may have seemed that the old solutions for the representation of humanity, of the human condition, might no longer fit. And it was a time when it was appropriate to invent new solutions that might draw on the great history of art, but that were appropriate to this moment of alienation. We are confronted here with a human figure that stares back at us, but it’s one that we don’t recognize.

0:05:09.5 Dr. Jen Padgett: Noguchi thought about that quality of the universal. What is it that connects us all? So here, Noguchi is pulling on both the idea of something that is permanent, fixed, eternal, and yet also reconfigurable, mobile, of this moment and fluid.

This work at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

More on the artist from the Noguchi Museum

Design, 1950–75 on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Rita Kersting, Florence Ostende, editors, Isamu Noguchi (Munich: Prestel, 2021).

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1945–80 in the United States, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, Itinerant Modernisms: Cosmopolitans, Exiles, Travelers since 1950