Displaying items by tag: isamu noguchi

It’s a great and rare occurrence to see art installed in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Some might argue that this is where you go to look at nature rather than art — although tags and labels on the plants remind you that humans made this garden and bred plenty of the species in it. The Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) is an excellent choice for a show here, since he himself created parks, playgrounds and gardens around the world, drawing heavily from a Japanese art tradition that considered aesthetics in relation to nature.

Is “Isamu Noguchi at Brooklyn Botanic Garden” a great exhibition? No. The Noguchi Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are to be commended — along with the Noguchi’s senior curator, Dakin Hart, who organized the exhibition — for installing such a show, in which sculpture is exposed to the elements (and the wandering visitors).

Gardens have been formative playgrounds for great artists at least since Michelangelo spent his teenage years poring over antiquities in the Medici gardens in Florence. But few artists have made gardens as central to their work as Isamu Noguchi, whose museum and sculpture garden in Long Island City, Queens, turns 30 this year.

“When the time came for me to work with larger spaces,” Noguchi (1904-88) once said, “I conceived them as gardens, not as sites with objects but as relationships to a whole.”

"New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 – 1970" was the Met’s most exciting exhibition to date under the auspices of director Thomas Hoving, who turned Henry Geldzahler loose to prick the art world to alertness. Paul Kasmin Gallery announces "The New York School, 1969: Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," on view at 293 Tenth Avenue from January 13 – March 14, 2015. Curated by Stewart Waltzer, this comprehensive group show reprises Geldzahler’s seminal exhibition and includes exemplary works by Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenberg, Jules Olitski, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, featuring works from the original exhibition.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston has installed a recently acquired bronze sculpture by the renowned Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. “Albero Folgorato (Lightning Tree)” (2012), which stands over 36 feet tall, was cast from an oak tree that had been struck by lightning. It will reside on the museum’s verdant South Lawn in the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden. Created by sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the sculpture garden features masterworks of 20th- and 21st-century sculpture by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Dan Graham, Henri Matisse, and Auguste Rodin. The garden also includes a variety of plants and trees that were selected by Noguchi with assistance from the Houston-based landscape architect Johnny Steele.

Houston’s “Albero Folgorato” is the third and final version of the monumental bronze sculpture, which had its internationally acclaimed debut at the Palace of Versailles in France in the summer of 2013.