Ends

Artist Isamu Noguchi (American, 1904 - 1988)

Date1985

MediumSwedish granite

DimensionsOverall: 72 × 72 × 71 1/4 inches (182.88 × 182.88 × 180.98 cm)

Credit LineGift of the Hall Family Foundation

Object numberF99-33/69

Signedlower right corner of element with rust-colored facet of basalt: "i. n. '85"

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

Contemporary Art

Terms

Exhibition History

Isamu Noguchi: Beginnings and Ends, The Pace Gallery, New York, December 3, 1994-January 21, 1995, unnumbered.
Isamu Noguchi: New Acquisitions from the Hall Family Foundation Collection at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 20-June 13, 1999, no cat.

Gallery Label

Ends is made of nine pieces of granite arranged to form a cubic structure. Its richly textured surface, including cylindrical drill-bit voids and smooth pegs, reveals Isamu Noguchi's deep understanding of stone and sculpting techniques. On one of the four sides Noguchi used a traditional Japanese technique. He inserted bamboo into a hole and filled it with water. The expanding bamboo split the massive stone.

Noguchi explained the title: "The black cube is composed of end pieces that are cut away to get at the core of a piece of stone." However, Ends has deeper meaning. Finished three years before Noguchi's death, it is a meditation on mortality. Ends is also a fusion of the geometric, man-made form of a cube with the primal stone of nature.

Provenance

Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc., Long Island City, NY, 1988;
With Pace Wildenstein, New York, by 1998;
Purchased from Pace Wildenstein by the Hall Family Foundation Collection, Kansas City, MO, 1998-1999;
Their gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 1999.

Published References

Isamu Noguchi: Beginnings and Ends, exh. cat. (New York: Pace Wildenstein, 1994), (repro.).

Gareth Jones, “Sculptors on Sculpture: From Morphology to Monument,” Sculpture (March -April,

1995): 39, (repro.), 40.

Margaret Schmitz Rizzo, “Midtown Report,” The Kansas City Star (April 29, 1999), 17.

Alice Thorson, “Moving Sculptures: Museum in an Expansive Mood for Accommodating Architectural

Addition,” The Kansas City Star (August 8, 1999).

Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (Kansas City:

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 232, (repro.).

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