Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi

In a career spanning more than six decades from the 1920s until his death in 1988, he travelled incessantly, from New York to remote Japanese islands, from Paris to Bangladesh, synthesizing aesthetic values. The result – massive sculptures of interlocking wood, Zen-like gardens of granite and stone slides – is now seen as a powerful artistic link between East and West. He also designed stage sets and a number of lamps and pieces of furniture that are counted among the greatest classics of modern design.

Using Noguchi's personal correspondence and interviews with artists, patrons, assistants and lovers, Hayden Herrera creates a compulsively readable biography of one of the twentieth century's most important artists.

Noguchi was elusive, forever uprooting himself to reinvigorate what he called the ‘keen edge of originality’. Yet Herrera locates this man in his friendships with artists such as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women such as Frida Kahlo. Herrera reveals his playfulness and his intense immersion in his work, from designing sets for Martha Graham to creating the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York.

A rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu, Listening to Stone is a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own ‘essence of sculpture’.