Myo

A noble monolith, Myo is the first of Isamu Noguchi’s seminal series of broken granite blocks, its enigmatic gravity providing the sculptor the key to his most celebrated works. For the legendary sculptor, stone provided the key to his artistic enlightenment. His first stone sculptures conceived in the 1920s were his way of merging from the shadow cast by Constantin Brâncuși while living in Paris under Modernism’s spell. Noguchi had become disenchanted by the physical and conceptual distance that bronze—the favored medium in Paris—created between the direct hand of the artist and the final result. Noguchi thus returned to gardens and stone to resuscitate a direct contact between him and his materials, liberating himself “from the artificiality of the present” and any dependence on the industrial products of modernity (I. Noguchi, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, New York, 1987, p. 11).
These first efforts in stone led to three decades of exacting study and meditation on the stone form, granting him greater awareness of the natural world and of a palpable sense of unconscious nature residing in the material. After years of studied reflection, Noguchi finally reached an epiphany: “the natural boulders of hard stone—basalt, granite, and the like—which I now use are a congealment of time. They are old. But are they as old as sculpture? One day about thirty years ago I split one. Eventually I was able to make it mine, a ‘sculpture’ of my time and forever. I called it Myō. These are private sculptures, a dialogue between myself and the primary matter of the universe. A meditation, if you will, that carries me on and on one step after another” (I. Noguchi, op. cit., pp. 11-12).
Myo (sometimes Romanized as Myō) is the site where Noguchi is finally “unlocking the stone” (I. Noguchi, quoted in M. Sheffield, “Perfecting the Perfect: Noguchi’s Personal Style,” Artforum, vol. 18, no. 8, April 1980, p. 71). Of seismic importance to Noguchi’s oeuvre, Myo ushers in the last and greatest period in the artist’s career. As Margaret Sheffield writes in her influential early article on the artist, “In 1966... Noguchi finished Myo, a work begun in 1957. This was the first work where Noguchi subtly altered a massive block of granite, leaving a quality of the rough and unfinished. One of the artist’s most personal works, Myo is pivotal in terms of his stylistic development” (M. Sheffield, op. cit., p. 70). In 1957, Noguchi discovered a large block of Kurama granite, a sacred type of stone used in Kyoto for the stepping stone which leads from the house into the garden, symbolizing the entry from the artificial into the natural worlds. This symbolism, recalling the artist’s earlier appreciation of stone’s ability to draw him out from the artificial present and into the natural realm, holds broad significance to Noguchi’s artistic universe.
The artist described breaking the stone monolith into six interlocking fragments to form Myo as “an act of blasphemy. I then waited five years before I could decide what to do with it. Breaking the stone gives you possibilities to exploit you wouldn’t get from carving alone. You get the natural gift of the stone itself” (I. Noguchi, quoted in op. cit., p. 70). This breaking or shattering allowed him to incorporate both raw nature—or what he considered the perfectly unperfected—into his artwork in tandem his cautious sculptural interventions. Noguchi envisioned this breaking and reworking of the stone as a “cosmic fracture” carrying forward the primal energy inherent to the medium. “I see the act of breaking stone as leading to an act of reconciliation,” Noguchi elucidated to Margaret Sheffield. “When you break a stone you introduce an element of accident. Like the first bang of creation. Something has to go wrong, like the break, in order to start the creative process going. The work I do after is a readjustment of that which is wrong. Eventually eternal balance resumes. The work and nature eventually settle down again in harmony” (I. Noguchi, quoted in op. cit., p. 69). The perfectly poised balance Noguchi achieves here between the natural and the cosmic recalls that achieved by Giovanni Bellini in his Saint Francis in Ecstasy, where the saint finds spiritual ecstasy standing in the midst of the broken rocks and cliff faces of Mount La Verna. For Noguchi, the first fracture of Myo leads to reconciliation, just as for Bellini, St. Francis's stigmata reconcile him to his spiritual surroundings.
Myo offered to Noguchi a long-sought aesthetic and temporal realization, reconnecting the artist’s present to deep geological time. “I had come to think that the deeper meaning of sculpture had to be sought in the working of hard stone.” Noguchi recalled. “Through this might be revealed its quality of enduring” (I. Noguchi, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, op. cit., p. 20). His nine years meditating on Myo’s form, lasting nearly a decade “not for labor but for inadequacy of my imagination,” provided the needed insight, that “the evidence of geologic time was its link to our world’s creation” (I. Noguchi, ibid., p. 20).
Myo’s subtle articulation of edge and surface and its gently curved planes convey the primal energy which Noguchi felt was held within his primeval medium. Leaving some surfaces unaltered, the artist carefully smoothed others and chiseled the two central recessions into the monolith. The upper cavity, at the meeting point of four of the work’s elements, offers a narrow slit slicing completely through the sculpture, allowing a glimmer of light to pass. The lower, shallower cavity bears further evidence of chisel marks, demonstrating Noguchi’s desire to install a sharper plane, creating a more defined edge between the two bottommost elements. Noguchi’s edges are a site of incredible importance, completing his sculptures and imbuing them with potent charges. Dore Ashton tellingly describes how “any edge of Noguchi’s forms is always incredibly vibrant—it is never a cut and dried right angle and never a sharp intrusion of the continuity-in-the-round of his form” (D. Ashton, “Isamu Noguchi,” Art and Architecture, vol. 80, June 1963, p. 6).
Noguchi’s subtle interventions follow his desire to bridge Western and Eastern conceptions of geometry, aesthetics, and space. Myo demonstrates his appreciation of asymmetry and imperfection garnered from Japanese aesthetics, where the notion of wabi-sabi emphasizes an appreciation of a subdued, austere beauty which is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. The artist’s emphasis on his medium’s connection to the natural world recalls Shintoism’s belief in living spirits inhabiting stones. Meanwhile, Myo’s status as a freestanding work of art and its monumental scale are particularly Western. With Myo, Noguchi affirms the goal he set for himself at the age of twenty-one “to view nature through nature’s eyes” (I. Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, New York, 1968, p. 16).
The title Myo, with myriad meanings in Japanese—evoking the sense of the wonderous, the mystic, the sublime, and the mysterious—celebrates Noguchi’s attainment into another realm of artistic understanding. His careful, yearslong process of selection and then breaking his stone parallels the time-honored Japanese tradition of Suiseki, ascertaining particular qualities out of found stones on the basis of their shape, color, and surface. Just prior to embarking upon this work, Noguchi completed his celebrated commission for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, creating a Japanese garden with carved hard stones. In the midst of pondering Myo, Noguchi also accepted and completed another celebrated garden, the Chase Manhattan Plaza Garden, commissioned by Chase Manhattan chairman and chief executive David Rockefeller. This garden isolated certain natural symbols which expressed discrete philosophical ideas, recalling historic Japanese gardens, including Ruoyan-ji (1499) and Daitokuji Temple (1509-13), both in Kyoto.
Shortly after its execution, Myo was included in Noguchi’s seminal retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which enshrined the artist as one of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century. Myo remained in Noguchi’s personal collection until 1980, when another member of the Rockefeller family, Blanchette Rockefeller, was gifted the sculpture by her children. Myo has remained with the Rockefeller family ever since, a remarkable distillation of Noguchi’s unique aesthetic. “A ‘sculpture’ of my time and forever,” Myo is one of Noguchi’s most important and intimate sculptures, providing endless insights into his creative imagination and inaugurating his late works which carried Noguchi “on and on one step after another.”