The Healing Power of Art |
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........