[audiobook] Fly Fishing the Brandywine River; Delawareware: An Excerpt from Fly Fishing the Mid-Atlantic by Beau Beasley in Arts-Photography

Description

Throughout the twentieth century; Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. From interlocking wooden sculptures to massive steel monuments to the elegant Akari lamps; Noguchi became a master of what he called the "sculpturing of space." But his constant strugglemdash;as both an artist and a manmdash;was to embrace his conflicted identity as the son of a single American woman and a famous yet reclusive Japanese father. "Its only in art;" he insisted; "that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all." In this remarkable biography of the elusive artist; Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchis creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature. As a boy in Japan; Noguchi would collect wild azaleas and blue mountain flowers for a little garden in front of his home. As Herrera writes; he also included a rock; "to give a feeling of weight and permanence." It was a sensual appreciation he never abandoned. When looking for stones in remote Japanese quarries for his zen-like Paris garden forty years later; he would spend hours actually listening to the stones; scrambling from one to another until he found one that "spoke to him." Constantly striving to "take the essence of nature and distill it;" Noguchi moved from sculpture to furniture; and from playgrounds to sets for his friend the choreographer Martha Graham; and back again working in wood; iron; clay; steel; aluminum; and; of course; stone. Throughout his career; Noguchi traveled constantly; from New York to Paris to India to Japan; forever uprooting himself to reinvigorate what he called the "keen edge of originality." Wherever he went; his needy disposition and boyish charm drew women to him; yet he tended to push them away when things began to feel too settled. Only through his artmdash;now seen as a powerful aesthetic link between the East and the Westmdash;did Noguchi ever seem to feel that he belonged.Combining the personal correspondence of and interviews with Noguchi and those closest to himmdash;from artists; patrons; assistants; and loversmdash;Herrera has created an authoritative biography of one of the twentieth centurys most important sculptors. She locates Noguchi in his friendships with such artists as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky; and in his affairs with women including Frida Kahlo and Anna Matta Clark. With the attention to detail and scholarship that made her biography of Gorky a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Herrera has written 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."