Can art heal trauma?

On the seventh floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan, there is a haunting sculpture by an artist whose name is less well-known than it should be. The piece, titled Humpty Dumpty, is a delicate construction. It stands a hair shy of five feet tall and is a bit over one-and-a-half feet wide. Made of nine interlocking pieces of gray ribbon slate, it feels as though a small push would completely wreck it. Humpty Dumpty stands on three legs, but it looks two-dimensional. It has an ovoid shape, and it juts upwards like a flat rocket ship. Its name invokes the old nursery rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the Kings horses

And all the Kings men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

The artist is Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), a sculptor once revered not only for his busts of mid-twentieth-century celebrities but also for his murals, fountains, stage sets, and even appliance and furniture designs (his intercom for Zenith and three-legged chair for the Herman Miller Furniture Company both went into mass production).

Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, the son of a white American mother and a Japanese father. From humble beginnings, he rose dramatically in the art world. He traveled the world and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Award. Then, in December 1941, he discovered that he was “the enemy.”

After Pearl Harbor was attacked, the federal........

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