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Lot Essay
The Cry is one of Isamu Noguchi's most powerful and emotionally evocative sculptures. An abstract interpretation of a human cry it is one of an important series of sculptures based on melancholic and fundamentally human themes that the artist created between 1959 and 1962. Along with other sculptures from the series including Solitude, Victim, and Mortality, The Cry is one of the foremost examples from this extraordinary group of sculptures in which Noguchi attempted to give physical form to what are essentially abstract human characteristics and emotions.
For each of the works in this series, Noguchi took the unusual step of attempting to counterbalance the fundamentally heavy and melancholic themes he had chosen by using the exceptionally light material of balsa wood. Each sculpture in the series was carved in the raw from this deceptively light and fragile wood. In this way, the bulky, dense and heavy forms that constituted Noguchi's sculptural interpretation of these weighty emotions and states of being, were undermined. In each of these works the balsa wood offered itself up as a metaphor for the fragility of human life thrown into contrast with the dense and heavy forms that conveyed the weight of human emotion. In the balsa version of The Cry (now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) an airy sense of lightness, fragility and pain is conveyed in equal measure.
Having made these works, Noguchi was clearly not entirely satisfied and in 1963, he took the unusual step of having them cast in bronze. Bronze was a material that Noguchi had hitherto always avoided. A traditional material in Western sculpture, bronze casting is essentially a reproduction of the artist's original labor. Unlike modelling or carving, the casting process is remote from the energized touch of the artist's hands and the interaction between man and material which plays such a key role in Noguchi's art. In the case of this series of sculptures however, he felt that the casting of them in bronze could lend these works a symbolic and literal weight that he recognized was regrettably absent in the balsa versions.
Dark, metallic, durable and of self-evident weight, the bronze medium lent itself admirably to his series of balsa wood sculpture. In the bronze versions of these sculptures which were collectively exhibited at the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York in April 1963, the dark color, reflective surface and manifest weight of the bronze generates a completely different feeling. Less whimsical, subtle or fragile, Noguchi's transformation of these forms into bronze lends them an ageless and heroic quality. The Cry in particular takes on the feeling of a scream rather than the weeping quality of the balsa original. The transformation of the oval mouth-like aperture into a darker and more ominous black stone-like form now seems to project like one of Picasso or Gonzalez's screaming figures. At the same time its dark orifice is transformed into an eerie tunnel with what appears to be a mysterious doorway of light at the end of it. Seeming to suck in air as much as expel it, this bronze version seems to articulate an adult scream in place of the child-like cry of its balsa counterpart.
For each of the works in this series, Noguchi took the unusual step of attempting to counterbalance the fundamentally heavy and melancholic themes he had chosen by using the exceptionally light material of balsa wood. Each sculpture in the series was carved in the raw from this deceptively light and fragile wood. In this way, the bulky, dense and heavy forms that constituted Noguchi's sculptural interpretation of these weighty emotions and states of being, were undermined. In each of these works the balsa wood offered itself up as a metaphor for the fragility of human life thrown into contrast with the dense and heavy forms that conveyed the weight of human emotion. In the balsa version of The Cry (now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) an airy sense of lightness, fragility and pain is conveyed in equal measure.
Having made these works, Noguchi was clearly not entirely satisfied and in 1963, he took the unusual step of having them cast in bronze. Bronze was a material that Noguchi had hitherto always avoided. A traditional material in Western sculpture, bronze casting is essentially a reproduction of the artist's original labor. Unlike modelling or carving, the casting process is remote from the energized touch of the artist's hands and the interaction between man and material which plays such a key role in Noguchi's art. In the case of this series of sculptures however, he felt that the casting of them in bronze could lend these works a symbolic and literal weight that he recognized was regrettably absent in the balsa versions.
Dark, metallic, durable and of self-evident weight, the bronze medium lent itself admirably to his series of balsa wood sculpture. In the bronze versions of these sculptures which were collectively exhibited at the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York in April 1963, the dark color, reflective surface and manifest weight of the bronze generates a completely different feeling. Less whimsical, subtle or fragile, Noguchi's transformation of these forms into bronze lends them an ageless and heroic quality. The Cry in particular takes on the feeling of a scream rather than the weeping quality of the balsa original. The transformation of the oval mouth-like aperture into a darker and more ominous black stone-like form now seems to project like one of Picasso or Gonzalez's screaming figures. At the same time its dark orifice is transformed into an eerie tunnel with what appears to be a mysterious doorway of light at the end of it. Seeming to suck in air as much as expel it, this bronze version seems to articulate an adult scream in place of the child-like cry of its balsa counterpart.