SALEM — “I am not a designer” declared Isamu Noguchi back in 1949, a stiff rejection of minimizing a career that even then was already maximal and rapidly expanding. He was also wrong: Of course he was a designer. In 1948, his iconic N50 Noguchi Table, a kidney of glass balanced on interlocking wooden forms that seemed shaped by the wind itself, had, in its instant iconhood, taken care of that.
What he meant was he was not only a designer — or, in the slightly snooty regard of the burgeoning realm of modern art, just. He may have taken it as a personal slight, but that was hardly the half of it. Noguchi’s aesthetic, like his world view, was expansively resistant to strict categories of any kind. As an artist, an architect, and, yes, a designer, the practical and conceptual ran perpetually alongside each other, inextricable, one and the same. He was never either/or. For Noguchi, it was always both/and.
The slightly-miffed-sounding quote serves as the title for a just-opened exhibition of the artist’s work at the Peabody Essex Museum. Those who know Noguchi get it instantly: a giant of American art who created everything from furniture to kitchen timers to shortwave radios to light fixtures to architecture to public art to parks to playgrounds to master plans for entire urban districts to a massive memorial landform visible from space (phew), he didn’t defy categorization so much as utterly ignore it.
So, it’s probably an inevitable consequence that an attempt to survey his wider career would end up at least a little overstuffed and under-resolved, as this show surely is. Slimmer slices of Noguchi are deeper and richer; at the Clark Art Institute last summer, “Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time,” the multifarious artist’s broad take on the inscrutable and eternal, expressed itself in an array of somber works that also revealed deep personal wounds.
At PEM, the personal yields largely to the practical, and revelation is superseded by a kind of standard Noguchi 101. This show tells you who he was in sometimes fussy detail, at the expense, maybe, of why he matters. The Noguchi nut (that’s me) might find it a lot to wade through. But a Noguchi show can’t help but be beautiful, and even one so overcrowded as this offers moments of real grace.
Happily, one of those moments is right up front. “Song of the Bird,” a two-part sculpture in granite and marble, perches on a plywood plinth in the show’s entry. Made in 1958 for a sculpture garden for Lever House, a high-modern Manhattan skyscraper, the piece speaks the by then familiar language of abstract minimalism at mid-century: One piece is a tower of pinkish granite hewn in sleek, semi-repetitive form; the other, a polished sweep of white marble.
Both gesture toward (or pay homage to) Noguchi’s first mentor, Constantin Brancusi, whose ever-reduced style strived for a form of art that seemed carved less by human hands than by the elements themselves. Noguchi, though, neither had nor sought such context-free essentialism in his work. He made pieces for places, or uses; context was built in to his work. In the case of “Song of the Bird,” he was commissioned by Lever House architect Gordon Bunshaft, who chose him because he was “the sculptor that I knew of in the world who had the requisite knowledge of architecture, of plant material.”
A compliment, surely, in the practical realm of architecture; but in the art world, with its growing priority on decoupling from moment, place, and context, it could feel like a slight. And, Noguchi was starting below ground. His career started in California in the 1930s, where he used his skill as a stone sculptor to pay the bills, making sculptural portraits of Hollywood luminaries like Lillian Gish. Alongside, he was crafting challenging, severe works like “Death,” 1934, a sculpture of a hanged man that he conceived as a criticism of racial terror lynchings in the American South. At the same time, he was creating commercial designs for mass-produced products like a Bakelite timer and clock made for Fisher Scientific in 1932.
It would be hard to imagine a more complex set of competing priorities for any artist, but Noguchi managed them with aplomb. At PEM, the Fisher Scientific clock, squat and curvy, utterly original — the “Hawkeye,” it says on its face — shares a vitrine with his other consumer products: The “Radio Nurse,” a shortwave radio he created in 1937 that looks like it might be a cousin to Darth Vader’s mask. (Its name alludes to how it could be used to listen in on nearby rooms outfitted with a microphone, a very early version of a baby monitor.)
Nearby, inevitably, is the N50, the Noguchi coffee table that launched a strain of his career that had left him uncomfortably defined. I don’t know if he resented it so much as he was a victim of his own success, but it casts a shadow even this show seems to dwell within. A sprawling stage set with various iterations of his furniture dominates fully the first half of the exhibition, demanding to be negotiated, while “Remembrance,” a hauntingly gorgeous abstract piece from 1944, composed of smoothly organic forms dangling precariously together, is tucked off to the side in an easily-missed corner.
I get it: From fashion collaborations with Harper’s Bazaar, Mad Men-esque mid-century style icons — his paper Akari light sculptures, dangling everywhere here, remain a totem for design sophisticates everywhere — much of it with a breezy sense of play, Noguchi can be cast as an easy crowd pleaser. He can, in an odd way, blame himself; his inexhaustibly polymathic curiosity is the cause. At the same time as he was creating shortwave radios and sculptural critiques of racial terror, he was designing costumes for modern dance performances (for his then-romantic partner Ruth Page) and stage sets for the great modern choreographer Martha Graham. In 1947, the year he conceived “Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars,” his massive desert landform meant, conceptually, as a pre-memorial to the end of humankind in the aftermath of the atomic bomb, he signed with the Herman Miller company and produced the N50 shortly after.
Being so broadly prolific makes for a messy omnibus exhibition, which this is. Packing in so much of his stuff also makes Noguchi feel a little like a product himself. It also means that important chapters of his life and career end up with short shrift: His work with the Japanese internment camps of the Second World, when he voluntarily interned himself at the Poston War Relocation Center in the Arizona desert to establish arts and recreation programs for the internees, is relegated to a small corner. Among the few elements included here is his 1942 essay for Reader’s Digest, “I Become a Nisei,” or second generation, American-born Japanese (which he strictly wasn’t, with a Japanese father and Irish-American mother). “This is America, the nation of all nationalities,” it begins. “For us to fall into the Fascist line of race bigotry is to defeat our unique personality and strength.” If there’s been a moment where those words carry more weight since they were written, I don’t know it.
But Noguchi was an idealist, despite his occasional departures into darkness. Maybe the show’s greatest strength is in its denouement, where it turns to Noguchi’s devotion to public space, and through it, the public good. He surely faced doubters. In 1986, as the US representative at the Venice Biennale — his show, fittingly, was called “What Is Sculpture?” — critics assailed his lack of devotion to the “purity” of his artistic pursuits; he met them with “Slide Mantra,” a marble swoop of a sculpture fitted with stairs and a working slide well-burnished by countless bottoms by the Biennale’s end.
In the exhibition, a film wraps around the corner of a wall in front of one of his playfully undulating public sculptures, red and shiny, designed for sitting (and you’re invited to as well). Later in his career, Noguchi dedicated himself to public parks and even playgrounds, making explicit his belief that art, or design, or whatever you want to call it, could inflect civic space with play, positivity, and goodness. The film jumps around, from his serene “Jardin Japonais,” for UNESCO world headquarters in Paris, a landscape of soft serenity, to “California Scenario,” a soothing scene of tree and stone in Costa Mesa.
But the peace is broken, joyfully, with the sudden arrival of children, screeching and laughing as they’re doused in water from a steel doughnut of a fountain raining above them. This is Philip A. Hart Plaza in Detroit, designed by Noguchi in 1979 as a salve for a decade of urban decline and suburban flight. In the center of the ailing city, he created an inviting urban playscape, a permanent, physical manifestation of humanity and hope. Maybe Noguchi was right: He wasn’t a designer. He both transcended and defied that label — and any other — in a relentless pursuit of something beyond any of it.
ISAMU NOGUCHI: I AM NOT A DESIGNER
Through Jan. 3. Peabody Essex Museum, 161 Essex St., Salem. 978-745-9500, pem.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com.