2004 37c Isamu Noguchi: Figure

This stamp was one of five issued to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles in 1904 to an American writer and a Japanese poet. Noguchi split much of his childhood between Japan and the United States, eventually studying briefly at Columbia University before an evening sculpture class redirected his path entirely. He went on to work in Paris under sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and his career came to encompass an unusually wide range of forms, including portrait busts, public plazas, playgrounds, furniture, and stage sets for choreographer Martha Graham.

This particular stamp features Figure, a sculpture Noguchi conceived in 1945 and later cast in bronze, created during a period when wartime metal shortages pushed him toward marble and slate as more readily available materials. Working from graph paper studies traced directly onto stone, Noguchi built the piece around his ongoing interest in reducing form to its essential elements while remaining attentive to the surrounding space a sculpture occupied. The work emerged from a stretch of the mid-1940s in which Noguchi's art turned increasingly inward, grappling with what he described as the adjustment of the human psyche to a world reshaped by war.

Designer Derry Noyes brought together five representative works for this stamp pane, pairing Figure with Noguchi's Akari 25N, Margaret La Farge Osborn, Black Sun, and Mother and Child. The selvage featured a 1952 photograph of Noguchi alongside his own words, "Everything is sculpture." Together, the set offered a survey of an artist whose restless experimentation carried him from spare, reductive stone figures like this one to sweeping public commissions, tracing the full range of a career built on constant reinvention.