Like Philip Guston and other artists working in the '30s, Noguchi had a keen social consciousness, though he never explicitly allied himself to any particular political ideology. In the 1940s, he would speak out against the United States' internment of Japanese-Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the '30s, Noguchi reacted to American bias and violence against blacks with a powerful artistic statement. Death (Lynched Figure) is startling in its brutal pathos. Yet what makes it more than a profoundly moving political expression is its attitude toward civilized society. Noguchi identifies human suffering with the destruction of civilized values. In this work, as in Noguchi's spectrum of materials, life and civilized artifice are synonymous. The figure dangling so violently from the rope is both a plainly extinguished life and a highly refined esthetic construction, consisting of Cubist- and futuristlike geometric planes and angles. In this moment, both humanity and its works are being extinguished. And such a respect for civilized values amounts to an inversion of the modernists' habitual association of civilization with life-denying forces.