Noguchi Museum Launches Digital Catalogue Raisonné of Artist's Work

Written by Howard Knollwood Saturday, 19 November 2011 22:02

LONG ISLAND CITY, N.Y.- The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum (The Noguchi Museum) today—the 107th anniversary of the artist's birth—launched The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné, posting the first installment on the Museum's website: http://catalogue.noguchi.org. An ongoing digital publication, the catalogue raisonné presents comprehensive information on all categories of Noguchi's practice, encompassing sculptures, drawings, models, architectural spaces, stage sets, and manufactured designs, as well as a chronology, bibliography, and list of exhibitions. Access to the publication—one of the first catalogues raisonnés to be published digitally—is free of charge.

Isamu Noguchi is a well respected Japanese-American sculptor who has created fountains and gardens which are the focal points in some major cities. He attended the East Side Art School in Paris  where he was awarded a scholarship to go to Paris as an apprentice to the abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Brancusi was a strong influence in Noguchi's art because he felt that the art form he used was well suited for him. His form of art suggest that nature with one another in their surroundings. Noguchi's work was greatly inspired by European surrealism and abstraction which is art that demonstrates the imaginations while using distortion in it and does not resemble any object.

Noguchi Museum Director Jenny Dixon states, "The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné, a longtime project, is an enormous achievement, bringing together traditional scholarship with contemporary technology to create a rich, flexible publication that will serve scholars, curators, collectors, and the interested public for years to come."


Digital publication of the catalogue will not only make it more accessible to the public than a traditional book would be, but will also enable the Museum to post partial entries on artworks, exhibitions, and literature, identifying them as "research pending," thereby providing scholars and the public with available information while research continues. In addition to the many other benefits of digital technology, such as searching, linking, zooming in on images, and so on, users of the catalogue raisonné will be able to make use of such personalized tools as bookmarking and, ultimately, creating slide shows and saving searches.

The first installment of The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné includes complete entries for more than 300 artworks and partial entries on more than 1,000 others for which research is in progress. In addition to making ongoing structural improvements to the site and enhancing content over the next several months, the Museum will post new "chapters" on November 17 of every year through 2018.

Upon its completion, the publication will comprise complete entries on over 4,000 artworks, in addition to exhibitions and publications, and will be the first comprehensive record of the life and work of Noguchi, updating and considerably expanding upon the 1980 catalogue of sculpture by Nancy Grove and Diane Botnick (Garland). It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, arts professionals, and collectors of Noguchi’s work. Shaina D. Larrivee is the project manager for The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné.

"Everything is sculpture," said Isamu Noguchi. "Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture."

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