The earliest sculptures probably originated as stones, bones, or pieces of wood that were admired and brought home. They may have resembled human or animal forms or had a texture and weight that felt good to the touch. They also could have been prized for their dualistic or transformational qualities: Certain forms from one view, perhaps, looked human and from another like flora or fauna. Yet they also could be used as tools, weapons, totems, or talismans. A curve might suggest a hip, head, or breast; an indentation, a navel, mouth, or an eye. A pointed stone might be both knife and phallus. The next step – incising and carving to bring those suggestions to life – was only natural.

Walking through the Whitney’s exquisite retrospective of Isamu Noguchi (1904-88),whose abstract sculptures – most often made of wood and stone – feel as primitive, natural, and found as they do carved and modern, I realized that not much has changed since the dawn of sculpture. The impulses that moved the earliest artists were also at the core of what inspired Noguchi. His work, like prehistoric sculpture, awakens a primitive response.

Noguchi was born in Los Angeles to an American mother and a Japanese father. He spent his life straddling both cultures, physically and artistically. Deeply influenced by the Surrealism of Giacometti and the biomorphic abstraction of Arp, Noguchi was a studio assistant to Brancusi in Paris, where he met Calder and Stuart Davis. But though European artists had a hold on Noguchi from the very beginning, he was equally drawn to Asian art, aesthetics, and philosophy. Zen parables and Japanese rock gardens formed his sculpture as much as the lineage back to Greece, Rome, and Egypt; pre-Columbian art; monoliths such as Stonehenge; and prehistoric fertility figures such as the “Venus of Willendorf.”

No other American artist I can think of more successfully merged two distinctly different aesthetics (Eastern and Western) or found the bridge between the art of one culture and another. No American artist more beautifully fused the realms of mineral, vegetal, and animal; ancient and modern; nature and sculpture. Like Calder, David Smith, and Elie Nadelman, Noguchi was a true original who opened doors and blended forms in ways that no American sculptor has before or since.

Noguchi’s sculptures can feel like ceremonial objects imbued with great power. A subtle theatricality permeates everything he did. It is what Martha Graham acknowledged when she asked him to design her dance sets. But there is something missing in the Whitney’s installation of Noguchi that robs this great artist of some of his magic, and the sculptures of some of their primeval life and spirit – their fire. This may have something to do with the fact that, because of the sculptures’ weight, the works had to be positioned over support beams. But the difference can be felt by going to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens, where the artist installed many of the works himself. The sculptures at the Whitney do not retain as much of their individuality, drama, or mystery; their interactions can tend to close down associations rather than open them up, shifting them from the realm of sculpture into that of object.

This does not mean that the Whitney Retrospective, with roughly 90 works, is without insight. In some ways the Whitney is a perfect place for Noguchi. His sculptures bring to life elements of the building – the diagonal incisions and rough-hewn cut of the granite steps, for instance, which feel directly inspired by Noguchi – that otherwise lie dormant. And Noguchi’s three granite works in the sculpture garden, “Bench” (1962), “Indian Dancer” (1965-66), and “Helix of the Endless” (1985), feel right at home, as if they had grown out of its stone floor.

There is also a small gallery, midway through the exhibition that reunites seven sculptures incorporating electric light. It is a rare treat; a hallowed space. It includes masterpieces like “Lunar Infant” (1944), a set of forms – embryonic yet also seedling, helmet, and shell-like in feel – that, lit from within, are suspended in a haunting yet comforting cage-as-womb. These sculptures inspired the later gorgeous paper lanterns he would design, five of which are on view.

Another larger gallery, animated by a grouping of the interlocking, self-supporting sculptures in bronze, wood, slate, marble, and stainless steel pieces, is thrilling. It includes the pink marble “Kouros” (1946). Nearly 10 feet high, the sculpture is an homage to the ancient Greeks, who freed the figure from its base and set it into motion. But it is also an homage to Arp, who freed sculpture from the earth.

There are other masterpieces. “Humpty Dumpty” (1946) is a curving, looping, and hooking set of slate forms that quietly hold together as an oval and then shatter into pieces. “Gregory (Effigy)” (1946) is a biomorphic plane on short legs, penetrated by numerous forms like a dartboard; “Gregory” refers to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who “awoke one morning from uneasy dreams … transformed into a gigantic insect.” Kafka never wanted the insect illustrated, and Noguchi’s form, which suggests human, target, insect, “armor-plated back,” and “uneasy dreams,” explores beautifully the theme of metamorphosis.

Noguchi had it all, and he had it early. The show moves, for the most part, chronologically. The first gallery brings us a mix of Noguchi’s earliest sculptures and works on paper, pieces that are abstract and figurative, or a combination of both. Eleven beautiful, Arp-inspired gouaches, all from 1927-28 and titled “Paris Abstraction,” mingle with Calder and Brancusi-inspired sculptures, a Constructivist homage to Ben Franklin, two Matissean line drawings on scrolls, and three masterful portrait heads in chrome-plated bronze and terracotta.

The early heads, molten and primary in feel, show Noguchi’s lifelong closeness to the earth and its elements. They prefigure even the massive earthworks he would envision a generation before artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, or his spectacular carved balsawood work, “The Cry” (1959), which is in the last gallery at the Whitney. Composed of three simple forms – two sticks and a donut – “The Cry” is wobbly kneed, wounded, and striving; its head becomes a large mouth, sinkhole, and eye, from which the second stick hangs, heavy and precarious, like a severed limb. This masterpiece, whittled just so, is really not much more than a primitive club, doll, or two sticks rubbing together. But the combination, as in all of Noguchi’s work, is fire.