France – Villeneuve-d’Ascq
“Overcoming the art of objects”: this was the design of the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) to whom the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Villeneuve d’Ascq (Lille metropolis) dedicates a retrospective – after the Barbican Center in London, the Ludwig Museum in cologne and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
Famous for his washi paper lamps on bamboo structures, mixing with traditional Japanese art the most contemporary forms (the Akari lamps were produced from 1952), the former assistant of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi has constantly erased the boundaries between art, design, and sculpture, but also architecture, dance, and calligraphy.
“I never agreed with the idea that sculptures are only sculptures,” confided the one who, since 1926, created theatre masks for one of the masters of “modern dance,” Michio Ito, and who, for nearly thirty years, participated in the creation of the costumes and sets of the great choreographer Martha Graham. Martha used them as symbolic or gestural tools. They were an extension of her body.”
It is thus as an adept of “total art” that the designer sculptor considered his formal research, freed from any naturalistic mimicry, tirelessly seeking to “expand the possibilities of sculpture,” developing his art on the scale of the object and the domestic space but also of the moving body and the landscape.
For example, in 1946, during her show Cave of the Heart, Martha Graham came to live, move, and transform in the fascinating Spider Dress bristled with brass threads from a Bronze Snake (Spider Dress and Serpent).
Until July 2
LaM
www.musee-lam.fr