Isamu Noguchi: In Fine Form At Hirshhorn

YOU WON'T hear the word "retrospective" around the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in connection with its newest exhibition, "Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor." (Actually, Director Ned Rifkin did drop the R-word the other day when introducing the show to the assembled members of the media, but Valerie Fletcher, who curated the show, was quick to point out his misstep.) "This is not a true retrospective," she said, calling the criteria behind her selection of work very personal and noting that certain phases of the artist's career were deliberately slighted.

Such as?

While Fletcher is circumspect in her response, preferring to discuss what's in the show rather than what isn't -- thereby avoiding the public suggestion that Noguchi might have been capable of anything less than pure genius -- she will admit to judiciously pruning some of the sculptor's works in metal, for instance, in favor of his preferred materials, among them marble, granite, basalt and wood. "Metal," Fletcher says, "is not where he shines." One of the few exceptions is the burnished stainless steel "Solar," a 1958 piece that clearly evokes the trademark buffed-metal aesthetic of sculptor David Smith, yet was made a few years before Smith ever started down that road.

"Solar's" inclusion is notable for two reasons. Yes, it's a fine piece, characterized by the kind of dynamic stillness found in Noguchi's best, most Zen-flavored work, but it also serves Fletcher's thesis that Noguchi was probably more innovative than people generally give him credit for. Is there the influence of Constantin Brancusi (for whom Noguchi briefly worked as a studio assistant while in Paris) in some of Noguchi's earliest pieces? Certainly, and the biomorphic iconography of the surrealists makes more than one appearance in Noguchi's later art as well.

But art isn't a horse race, or at least it shouldn't be. What Noguchi did well he did very well. Whether works represent his fascination with the pure refinement of form, as in the gestural simplicity of 1970's "The Bow," or express the gut-punch racial politics of 1934's "Death (Lynched Figure)," or whether they lie somewhere in between, as in the phallic squishes and fleshy plops of his work of the 1940s, Noguchi's most powerful sculptures beg for extended viewing.

If there is a quibble with this show -- beyond the fact that, with a mere 55 sculptures and 25 works on paper, including preparatory graph-paper templates for some of his interlocking 3-D puzzle pieces, it ends too quickly -- it is that Noguchi's work, even at its most outraged, invites rather than compels.

That same Zen stillness that evokes a state of deep meditation on, for example, "Sun at Noon's" perfection of the circle, could come across as a little, well, soporific for some Western viewers. And although many of his works evoke obvious body parts, the temperature in these rooms is anything but hot. That's true even at Noguchi's most emotional. Take his 1943 "Monument to Heroes," created after Noguchi, a resident of the East Coast at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing, voluntarily entered a Japanese American internment camp in Arizona in hopes of improving conditions. Among the pieces of wood seemingly suspended in space through a perforated cardboard column, it contains a piece of real bone, yet the careful equilibrium between thought and feeling in the piece lends it a kind of clinical detachment.

The Hirshhorn makes much of Noguchi's status as a "global" artist -- his father was a Japanese poet, his mother an American, and he traveled, worked and studied around the world -- yet what one feels most strongly here is the pull of his Japanese tastes, if not his heritage.

It is a taste that encouraged him to find beauty even in the ugliness of war, death and racism. For some, it may be a taste that is yet to be acquired.

"ISAMU NOGUCHI: MASTER SCULPTOR" -- Through May 8 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue and Seventh Street SW (Metro: L'Enfant Plaza). 202-633-1000 (TDD: 202-357-1729). www.hirshhorn.si.edu. Open daily 10 to 5:30. Free.