Monuments
Barnett
Newman.
There is one dimension, however, that is missing in Oldenburg's
monuments. They delight, astonish, amuse—
but they do not move us. Wholly secular, wedded
to the here and now, they fail to touch our deepest emotions. In our
time, one of the rare monuments successful in this is Broken Obelisk
(fig. 1153)
by
Barnett
Newman
(1905-1970). An artist inspired by profound
religious and philosophical concerns which he struggled throughout his
life to translate into visual form, Newman conceived Broken Obelisk
in 1963
but could not have it executed until four years later,
when he found the right steel fabricator. It consists of a square base
plate beneath a four-sided pyramid whose tip meets and supports that of
the upended broken obelisk.
Obelisks are slender, four-sided pillars of stone erected by the
ancient Egyptians. The Romans brought many of them to Italy; one marks
the center of the colonnaded piazza of St. Peter's (see fig.
754). These gave rise to a
number of later monuments in Europe and America. The two tips in
Newman's sculpture have exactly the same angle
(53
degrees, borrowed from that of the Egyptian pyramids,
which had long fascinated the artist) so that their juncture forms a
perfect X. Why this monument has such power to stir our feelings is
difficult to put into words. Is it the daring juxtaposition of two
age-old shapes that have contrary meanings, the one symbolizing timeless
stability, the other a thrust toward the heavens? Surely, but what if
the obelisk were intact? Would that not reduce the whole to an
improbable balancing feat? The brokenness of the obelisk, then, is
essential to the pathos of the monument. It speaks to us of our
unfulfilled spiritual yearnings, of a quest for the infinite and
universal that persists today as it has for thousands of years.

1153.
Barnett
Newman. Broken
Obelisk. 1963-67.
Steel, height 7.7 m. Rothko Chapel, Houston
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Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman, original name Baruch Newman (born Jan. 29,
1905, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died July 3, 1970, New York
City), American painter whose large, austerely reductionist
canvases influenced the colour-field painters of the 1960s.
The son of Polish immigrants, Newman
studied at New York City’s Art Students League (1922–26) and
at the City College of New York, from which he graduated in
1927. He worked in his father’s clothing business in the
1930s and gradually began painting full-time. With the
painters William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, and Mark
Rothko, he cofounded the school called “Subject of the
Artist” (1948), which held open sessions and lectures for
other artists.
Newman evolved a style of mystical
abstraction in the 1940s and achieved a breakthrough with
the canvas “Onement I” (1948), in which a single stripe of
orange vertically bisects a field of dark red. This
austerely geometric style became his trademark. His
paintings, many of which are quite large, typically consist
of grand, empty fields of saturated colour inflected with
one or more vertical stripes of other colours. Newman’s
first one-man show, held in New York City in 1950, aroused
hostility and incomprehension, but by the late 1950s and
’60s his work had influenced Ad Reinhardt, Clyfford Still,
and such younger artists as Frank Stella and Larry Poons.
Newman’s series of 14 paintings called “Stations of the
Cross,” exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New
York City, in 1966, fully established his reputation.
Encyclopædia
Britannica
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Barnett
Newman. Broken
Obelisk.
Isamu Noguchi.
The search for meaning also preoccupied the
Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi
(1904-1988). Influenced early on by the
Surrealists, as well as by Brancusi, he did not confront Oriental
culture until a prolonged stay in Japan in 1952
that proved decisive to his formation. From then
on, he developed into one of the most diverse sculptors of this century
whose rich imagination fed on both heritages. His role in mediating
between East and West was of incalculable importance. To the Japanese he
introduced modern Western ideas of style; to Americans he rendered
traditional Japanese concepts of art visually comprehensible at a time
when there was a growing fascination with Zen Buddhism. We see this
fusion in his fountain for the John Hancock Insurance Company in New
Orleans (fig. 1154). Like
much of Zen thought, it is an elegantly simple statement of a
paradoxical idea. Atop a grooved column recalling the primitive Doric of
ancient Greece, where the Western sculptural tradition of which Noguchi
felt himself a part originated, sits a "capital" rather like the
wood-beam supports in a Japanese temple. Except for the flat faces on
either side of the capital, the finish has been left rough, out of the
age-old Japanese respect for the natural and unadorned in the crafts. It
gives the fountain a primeval look that emphasizes the stone's origin in
the earth, for which Noguchi acquired an Oriental veneration. The
contrast to the sleek modern lines of the Hancock building could hardly
be greater. Yet the placement of the fountain shows not only a Japanese
sensitivity to space but a fundamental understanding of the logic of
modern architecture that Japanese critics recognized as distinctly
Western.

1154. Isamu Noguchi. Fountain tor the John Hancock
Insurance Company, New Orleans.
1961-62. Granite, 4.88 m
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Isamu Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi, (born Nov. 17, 1904, Los Angeles, Calif.,
U.S.—died Dec. 30, 1988, New York, N.Y.), American sculptor
and designer, one of the strongest advocates of the
expressive power of organic abstract shapes in 20th-century
American sculpture.
Noguchi spent his early years in Japan,
and, after studying in New York City with Onorio Ruotolo in
1923, he became Constantin Brancusi’s assistant for two
years in Paris. There he met Alberto Giacometti and
Alexander Calder and became an enthusiast of abstract
sculpture. He was also influenced by the Surrealist works of
Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Noguchi’s first exhibition was
in New York City in 1929.
Much of his work, such as his “Bird C(MU)”
(1952–58), consists of elegantly abstracted, rounded forms
in highly polished stone. Such works as “Euripides” (1966)
employ massive blocks of stone, brutally gouged and
hammered. To his terra-cotta and stone sculptures Noguchi
brought some of the spirit and mystery of early art,
principally Japanese earthenware, which he studied under the
Japanese potter Uno Jinmatsu on his first trip to Japan made
in 1930–31.
Noguchi, who had premedical training at
Columbia University, sensed the interrelatedness of bone and
rock forms, the comparative anatomy of existence, as seen in
his “Kouros” (1945). On another trip to Japan, in 1949,
Noguchi experienced a turning point in his aesthetic
development: he discovered “oneness with stone.” The
importance to him of a closeness to nature was apparent in
his roofless studio.
Recognizing the appropriateness of
sculptural shapes for architecture, he created a work in low
relief (1938) for the Associated Press Building in New York
City and designed a fountain for the Ford Pavilion at the
New York World’s Fair of 1939. He also made many important
contributions toward the aesthetic reshaping of physical
environment. His garden for the United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris
(1958), his playground in Hawaii, his furniture designs, and
his fountain for the Detroit Civic Center Plaza (1975) won
international praise. Noguchi also designed sculptural
gardens for the Chase Manhattan Bank and the John Hancock
Building, both in New York City, and stage sets for Martha
Graham, George Balanchine, and Merce Cunningham. In 1982 he
was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding
lifelong contribution to the arts. In 1985 Noguchi opened
the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, N.Y.
The museum and outdoor sculpture garden contain some 500
sculptures, models, and photographs.
Encyclopædia Britannica
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Isamu Noguchi. Red Cube

Isamu Noguchi. Heimar, 1968, at the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden,
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

Isamu Noguchi. The Cry, 1959.
Kroller-Muller Museum Sculpture Park, Otterlo, Netherlands

Isamu Noguchi. Untitled.

Isamu Noguchi. Black Slide Mantra. 1986
Maya Lin.
Part of the problem confronting the monument maker in our era is
that, unlike a century ago, there is so little worth commemorating in
the first place—no event,
no cause unites our fragmented world, despite the momentous changes
going on everywhere—and no
artistic vocabulary that we readily agree on. It is all the more ironic
that the memorial to American soldiers killed in Vietnam should turn out
to be not an embarrassing reminder of one of the most bitterly divisive
chapters in recent history, but eloquent testimony to the universal
tragedy of war (fig. 1155).
Designed by Maya Lin (born 1959),
it casts a spell on all those who see it. What is its secret? The very
simplicity of the architectural form and its setting are disarming. By
comparison, all other war memorials of recent times seem trite and
needlessly elaborate, especially those incorporating realistic figures.
It evokes a solemn mood while precluding the inflated rhetoric that mars
most memorials. The triangular shape, although embedded in tradition and
fraught with historical connotations (compare fig.
915), permits viewers to form
their own associations because of its abstractness. Moreover, the
reflective quality of the polished granite draws the viewer into the
work. Yet these attributes alone cannot account for the extraordinary
impact. Like Labrouste before her,
Lin seized on the simple but brilliant idea of
inscribing names—thousands
of them—whose cumulative
effect is to bring home the full enormity of the tragedy with awesome
power. This device does not tell the story either, since names inscribed
on walls or tombs rarely move us, least of all those of people we never
knew. In the end, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is that rare
instance of perfect consonance between form and idea. So unique is this
achievement that no artist has been able to duplicate its success.

1155.
Maya Lin. Vietnam Veterans
Memorial. 1982. Black
granite, length 152
m. The Mall, Washington. D.C.
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Maya Lin
Maya Lin, (born Oct. 5, 1959, Athens, Ohio, U.S.), American
architect and sculptor concerned with environmental themes
who is best known for her design of the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The daughter of
intellectuals who had fled China in 1948, Lin received a
bachelor’s degree in 1981 from Yale University in New Haven,
Conn., where she studied architecture and sculpture. During
her senior year she entered a nationwide competition
sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to create a
design for a monument honouring those who had served and
died in that war. Lin’s award-winning design consisted of a
polished black granite V-shaped wall inscribed with the
names of the approximately 58,000 men and women who were
killed or missing in action. This minimal plan was in sharp
contrast to the traditional format for a memorial, which
usually included figurative, heroic sculpture. The design
aroused a great deal of controversy, reflecting the lack of
resolution of the national conflicts over the war, as well
as the lack of consensus over what constituted an
appropriate memorial at the end of the 20th century.
Eventually, a compromise was reached with the commissioning
of a traditional statue depicting three servicemen with a
flag to stand at the entrance to the memorial. After Lin’s
monument was dedicated on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on
Veterans Day in 1982, however, it became a popular and
affecting tourist attraction. In 2005 the American Institute
of Architects conferred upon the monument its 25-Year Award,
given to a structure that has proved its worth over time.
Lin sought anonymity by
returning to academia, beginning graduate studies in
architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. In
early 1983 she left Harvard to work for a Boston architect,
and in 1986 she completed a master’s degree in architecture
at Yale. In 1988 Lin agreed to design a monument for the
civil rights movement on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law
Center. Her design consisted of two elements: a curved black
granite wall inscribed with a quotation from Martin Luther
King, Jr., and a 12-foot- (3.7-metre-) diameter disk bearing
the dates of the major events of the civil rights era and
the names of 40 people who were martyrs to the cause. Water
flows gently over both parts of the memorial. The Civil
Rights Memorial was dedicated in Montgomery, Ala., in
November 1989.
In an attempt to avoid
being typecast as a builder of memorials, Lin in the 1990s
shifted her attention to other forms of art and
architecture. Many of her artworks, from small sculptures
displayed in galleries to large environmental installations,
took their inspiration from the natural features and
landscape of the Earth. In a series of “wave fields” (The
Wave Field [1995] in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Flutter [2005] in
Miami; and Storm King Wavefield [2009] in Mountainville,
N.Y.), for instance, she reshaped grass-covered terrain to
resemble undulating ocean waves. In 2000 Lin was
commissioned to create a series of seven art installations
along the Columbia River to honour the bicentennial of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition. These pieces—which ranged in
size and scale from a fish-cleaning table inscribed with the
Chinook origin story to a pedestrian bridge spanning a state
highway—examined the historical impact of the expedition on
the native peoples and on the land of the Pacific Northwest.
Lin’s interest in environmentalism reached its apotheosis
with the multimedia project What Is Missing? (begun 2009),
an exploration of the growing threats to biodiversity that
she referred to as her “final memorial.”
Among Lin’s other
large-scale works are Topo (1991), a topiary park in
Charlotte, N.C., created in collaboration with landscape
architect Henry F. Arnold; The Women’s Table (1993), a
sculpture commemorating the coeducation of women at Yale;
and Groundswell (1993), an installation of 43 tons of glass
pebbles at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.
Her architectural achievements, which were noted for their
emphasis on sustainability, include designs for the Langston
Hughes Library (1999), a converted barn in Clinton, Tenn.,
and for the Museum of Chinese in America (2009) in New York
City. In 1995 the feature-length film Maya Lin: A Strong
Clear Vision (1994), written and directed by Freida Lee
Mock, won the Oscar for best documentary. Lin was awarded
the National Medal of Arts in 2009.
Encyclopædia Britannica
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Maya Lin. The Wave Field. 1995

Maya Lin.
Ariel view of the circle of stones that forms part of the Peace Chapel

Maya Lin. Systematic Landscape
Henry Art Gallery Seattle, Washington

Maya Lin. Systematic Landscape
Henry Art Gallery Seattle, Washington

Maya Lin. Systematic Landscape
Henry Art Gallery Seattle, Washington
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