For a certain aspirationally discerning consumer, Noguchi is synonymous with the paper lamp: like the Ottolenghi cookbook or the lilting monstera, a dependable signifier of “good taste.” Yet the objects in Noguchi’s New York, on view at the Noguchi Museum through mid-September, are more audacious and, perhaps for that reason, less widely admired. As a young artist in the Depression, Isamu Noguchi asked how his work could be “humanly meaningful,” at once “abstract and socially relevant.” His answer was to knock sculpture off its literal pedestal. Play Mountain (1933), a stepped, two-story pyramid spanning an entire Manhattan block, envisioned children watersliding and sledding amid the city’s commercial hustle.
When Noguchi presented Play Mountain to the city, its headstrong parks commissioner laughed in his face. “Mr. Moses took offense at me,” the sculptor recalled, “thought I was trying to kill people, said a playground had to be tested equipment and that New York City could not afford to test my mountain.” This became something of a pattern. In 1941, Moses rejec…
