Art: Stone Crazy

One sunny day in 1945, a young kamikaze pilot named Masayuki Nagare was taking time off from war. As he strolled down the runway at the Japanese naval airbase on Kyushu, he idly picked up a stone. With the age-old Japanese reverence for the texture and shape of stone, he felt it in his hand and found an overwhelming sense of tranquility, an “odd composure” at a time when squadron after squadron of his buddies, with ceremonial samurai swords stowed in the cockpits of their Zeroes, roared off on one-way missions to Okinawa. From then on, he always carried a stone with him. Stones have led him to a charmed life: World War II ended before his name came up for a suicide sortie, and now, at the age of 40, Nagare is Japan’s foremost sculptor (see opposite page).

Within the lifetime that he nearly did not have, Nagare has become a cult. A robust, prolific artist, he is a perfect idol, with the handsomely chiseled features of a Kabuki actor. He is a loner who despises the city’s chatter and works in an isolated village called Aji, 360 miles from Tokyo. But there is not a trace about him of the dainty refinement long associated with Japanese art. “Think of what the ancient Egyptians did or even the Romans,” says the maker of monuments, regretting the current shrunken scale of sculpture.

“Nosedive.” A Kyoto banker’s son, Nagare was so brash from the beginning that his father packed him off to a Zen temple to meditate. While there, Nagare was entranced by an aging master swordsmith, who ritualistically tempered keen blades for samurai swords, as good for beholding as for beheading. For four years, Nagare took classes at night in order to devote days as an apprentice to the old swordsmith, learning lessons about the taut contours and precision polish that eventually cropped up in his sculpture.

After the war, for almost seven years Nagare roamed the Japanese countryside aimlessly, haunted by his dead kamikaze comrades. Then he snapped out of it and put his hand to shaping stone, at first with small success.

By the Ton. Five years ago, the wife of the late architect Eero Saarinen bought one of Nagare’s works. Soon foreign admirers—Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, Architects Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer and Minoru Yamasaki—boosted him until he had more buyers in the U.S. than in Japan. When he finally caught on in his native land, he became the rage so rapidly that he had to hide from acclaim. When Yamasaki asked how to reach him, Nagare replied, “You can’t. I move from farmhouse to farmhouse out in the country to run away from Japanese architects who want me to do sculpture for their buildings.”

Nonetheless, he does it—by the ton. This summer alone, he polished off 14 new bronze and stone sculptures for his first one-man show in the U.S., opening at Manhattan’s Staempfli Gallery in November. With a team of masons, he completed 1,100 sq. yds. of sculptured stones weighing 600 tons, to serve as walls for the Japanese pavilion at next year’s New York World’s Fair. Next week, with his wife Mutsuko, he flies to the U.S. to assemble this weighty work. He calls it Stone Crazy.

Please Touch. “Stones must register the mind of nature more than anything else,” says Nagare, and through them he enters into a dialogue with nature: “We Orientals seem more apt at it than Westerners.” At his exhibitions, he posts signs reading PLEASE TOUCH. “I’m afraid the sensuous joys of touch have been far too long confined to boudoirs,” says he. So he polishes his sculpture mirror-smooth with grindstones, sometimes for months on end.

Though one of the Nagare trademarks is a smooth finish, he leaves a link with nature in his sculpture. His technique is called ware hada, or broken texture, whereby some surfaces retain the original texture of the raw rock as it broke naturally in the mountains. When he cannot obtain it, he drills holes, fills them with water, and puts the stones outdoors in freezing weather to split by themselves. This textural contrast is vital to Nagare: “You have to have male and female. Like anything else under the sun, you have to have light and shadow, movement and stillness, or even violence and peace.”

In his need for peace, Nagare hopes during his U.S. trip to find a site in California overlooking the Pacific to build a memorial in stone to U.S. and Japanese aviators. “Far too many of us died in the war,” he often observes. “I often feel I have to work even harder for the sake of carrying the work load they would have carried if alive today.”