The Noguchi Museum, dedicated as it is to the work of a single artist, has almost as much in common with a Romanesque cathedral or a Japanese garden as it does with a traditional museum. Originally founded and installed in 1985 by Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) — who created sculpture, drawings, photographs, set designs, furniture, lighting fixtures, architecture, gardens, and playground equipment — the museum is an evolving organism that allows for us to live with the artist’s work over time and for his vision to sink in gradually. Here, curator takes on the role of caretaker and clergy; art, nature, and visitor all play essential parts, and the environment as a whole transcends its individual masterpieces.

Having visited the Noguchi Museum, and having seen the marvelous 2004 Whitney retrospective of the artist’s work, you may think that you know Noguchi well enough. But it is through return visits to the museum’s beautiful installations of its permanent collection and through its engaging temporary exhibits, such as this summer’s “Survey of Paris Abstractions” and “Isamu Noguchi, 18 Drawings and 18 Photographs: a Limited Edition Artist’s Book,” that the fullness of Noguchi’s vision truly expands, takes hold, and takes flight.

Currently on view at the museum are Noguchi’s dance set designs for Martha Graham’s “Herodiade,” “Judith,” and “Cave of the Heart,” as well as sets for the Edwin Hawkins Dance Company’s “Stephen Acrobat” and “John Brown,” a sculpturally spare, leaning configuration of sticks that, at one end, supports a hangman’s noose. Also among the recent acquisitions are models for playground equipment that Noguchi designed in 1940 for Ala Moana Park, in Hawaii. The project was never realized and the models, thought to be lost since 1942, are being exhibited for the first time. Small, charming, delicate maquettes, in red, black, and white, they include a gracefully sweeping spiral slide, a skeletal jungle gym, and a teeter-totter, all of which, as with the artist’s furniture and lighting fixtures, bridge functional object with sculpture. The teeter-totter resembles a two-bowled spoon and the jungle gym sports hanging rings, a totemic tower, and vertebrae. Certainly the forms are among the most sculptural and evocative playground equipment ever envisioned, but, sadly, they would never pass today’s safety standards.

“Isamu Noguchi, 18 Drawings and 18 Photographs” is an exhibit of the limited edition book of the same title. Donated to the museum by Lady Elena Foster, founder and publisher of Ivory Press, which has created the portfolio, it is a large-scale, three-volume handcrafted book of the artist’s photographs and drawings created between 1949 and 1956 while he traveled the world — from Italy to Egypt to India to Nepal to Japan — on a Bollingen Foundation grant. Written by Pico Iyer and Bonnie Rychlak, and chosen from thousands of negatives and hundreds of drawings, it presents us with yet another side of Noguchi: the traveler who sees the world sculpturally. We get charged juxtapositions in photographs that pair the artist’s wife with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a man with a large totem pole, and a boy with oversized masks. We see vestiges of Noguchi’s oeuvre everywhere in the images: In a photograph of men working a handmade well, the well looks very much like one of Noguchi’s leaning stick sculptures.

The same holds true for the spectacular show “Survey of Paris Abstractions,” which, curated by Carl Riddle with input from Ms. Rychlak, is much more direct, almost to a fault, in the connections it lays out for us. In 1926, the 21-year-old Noguchi saw an exhibition of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures in New York: “I was transfixed by his vision,” wrote Noguchi, and so he applied for a Guggenheim fellowship to go to Paris. There, in 1927, he became Brancusi’s studio assistant. “Survey of Paris Abstractions” comprises about 30 gouache drawings and six surviving sculptures in metal and wood that the artist created while in Paris between 1927 and 1928, as well as a large grouping of later masterful sculptures, furniture, lighting fixtures, and architectural models.

The beautiful black-and-whiteon-cream-paper drawings, obviously influenced by Alexander Calder and Jean Arp, as well as the Russian Constructivists, are biomorphic, linear, and architectonic abstractions that resemble woodcuts. Noguchi appears to have drawn the forms and then filled them in with black or white. The color, which moves between density and line, is often striated across the forms, shifting flat plane into volume. Extremely adept at warping the ground plane with contour, linear spatial arabesque, and volume, it is clear that Noguchi was interested in constructing space within the flatness. Fascinated with creating tension in the plane, he was thinking pictorially as well as sculpturally.

Thedrawingspresentuswiththe bare bones and sculptural modules — the artistic vocabulary — of the artist. They are generally paired in the show with photographs of lost sculptures or with sculptures or other creations by Noguchi. Most of the visual connections in the pairings are self-evident. And the visual comminglings between drawings and objects in the show are enthralling. However, the comparisons can only be taken so far. If the drawings, as they are often presented here, are considered only as earlier two-dimensional plans for three-dimensional forms, then they risk becoming reduced to illustrations or architectural renderings: They begin to lose their integrity not only as individual works but, more importantly, as Noguchi’s working vocabulary of visual forces.

A drawing of a three-quarter sphere (all the drawings are from 1927–28 and are untitled) is paired with the photographs of “Sphere Section” (1927) and “Section Cut From Sphere” (c. 1927–28). The sculptures, now lost, are striking and strikingly similar to the drawing; clearly, there are connections. But, as with many of the pairings in the exhibit, relationships between artworks, more familial than planned, ultimately give way to each work’s individuality. To get the most out of this wonderful, insightful show, it is essential, ultimately, to let go of the exhibit’s curatorial intelligence and to ride the artist’s wing.

Until September 2 (9-01 33rd Road at Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens, 718-204-7088).