Isamu-san & Shirley Too

In Japan, where tradition is nine-tenths of art, Western-style abstractions are often greeted with polite blank stares. But last week in the seaside city of Kamakura, 25 miles from Tokyo, art lovers were treated to some modernism that no one wanted to ignore. On view were more than 130 aggressively new objects, everything from paper lanterns and delicate ceramics to wildly abstract sculpture: a 10-ft.-high Centipede, something that looked like Humpty Dumpty with horns and a tail but was called Mister One Man, and something labeled Myself, which showed an almost featureless face topped by six pieces of whisk-broom straw.

Kissing: U.S.-Style. Japanese art lovers might wonder about Centipede and Mister One Man, but they knew the balding artist of Myself. His name: Isamu Noguchi, famed California-born Japanese-American sculptor, who had been to Japan three times since the war preaching modern art. Noguchi's beautiful wife, Shirley Yamaguchi, is just as much a celebrity as the sculptor himself. One of Japan's top movie stars, Shirley met Noguchi on a 1950 trip to the U.S. (to pick up Hollywood pointers, among other things, on how to kiss for the camera, U.S.-style). On their third date, he asked her to marry him. "I didn't know they did these things so fast in America," she remembers; she put him off. A year later, on Noguchi's third trip to Japan, she said "I do."

Shirley-san and Isamu-san made a good team. Living in a 200-year-old, thatched-roof farmhouse near Tokyo, Noguchi started spreading his modern ideas with lots of help from his wife. Earlier, he had turned out abstract designs for the railings on two new bridges for Hiroshima: one was a sweeping single line with a half sphere rising at each end; the other, shaped like a long, low boat. In both, Noguchi wanted to symbolize the city leaving the past for a new and better life. But the symbolism was lost on most Japanese. "The A-bomb," said one, "wasn't abstract, you know."

Kimonos with Zippers. Noguchi thinks he is getting closer to what Japan can appreciate in modern art. "Through Shirley," he says, "I can understand emotionally what Japanese dislike." Aside from pure sculpture, he takes familiar objects and gives them an up-to-date twist. Instead of bulky old-style kimonos, Shirley wears formfitting, Noguchi-designed robes with Zipper fasteners. He asked himself why Japanese lanterns should always be made in the same century-old shapes; Noguchi's paper lanterns are modeled into crescents, cubes and other shapes. Says Noguchi: "Tradition is all well and fine, but it must be adapted to modern times."

One Japanese tradition Noguchi has been reworking is that of the 1,500-year-old clay statuette (haniwa). He hopes that the sight of these and other old favorites in new styles will help bring the Japanese around to modern art.

It may take some doing. Packing up their exhibition in Kamakura last week (for a further display in Manhattan this winter), Noguchi and his wife had no idea whether the show was a success or a flop. "Japanese in general still prefer the traditional," said Shirley. But the crowds were big and the critics seemed to be getting the idea. When one Japanese professor said that he thought all Noguchi's work looked like doughnuts, the art critic for Tokyo's Yomiuri Shimbun rapped back: "I urge him to see this show, because even doughnuts make good art."

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