Having resided in the same private collection for over fifty years, Isamu Noguchi’s The Comb displays the essence of the artist’s poetic and deeply spiritual sculptural practice. Carved from a single piece of solid black granite, Noguchi’s form creates a dynamic and dramatic silhouette against whichever backdrop it is placed. Executed in 1962, The Comb also contains elements of Noguchi’s preferred circular forms. “I love stone because it is the most flexible and meaning-impregnated material,” he once said. “The whole world is made of stone. It’s nothing new. It’s as old as the hills. It is our fundament… Stone has a quality of durability. It does not pollute. It merely goes back to earth naturally” (I. Noguchi, quoted by S. Hunter, Isamu Noguchi, New York, 1978, p. 121). Throughout his career Noguchi worked in a number of different materials including wood, slate and marble, and during the late 1960s granite became one of his favorite mediums. After spending time working with Constantin Brâncuşi in Paris in the 1920s, he turned to modernism and abstraction, infusing his highly finished forms with a palpable sense of mystery. As an artist he sought out materials that he felt matched the character of the places with which he felt an affinity. He felt granite evoked nature, the earth, and a sense of longevity. “I have since thought of,” he once said, “…my close embrace of the earth as a seeking after identity with some primal matter beyond personalities and possessions….I wanted something irreducible, an absence of the gimmicky and clever” (I. Noguchi, op. cit., p.257).
The Comb
granite, wood, metal base
1962
Isamu Noguchi
(1904-1988)
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