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If Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) hadn’t been a designer, his work as a sculptor would mostly be forgettable. His work shows both a beautiful sensitivity to materials and an informed awareness of other artists of his time – Brâncusi (for whom Noguchi briefly worked), Picasso, Duchamp, Calder, Max Ernst. It is polished and well composed. But his sculptures lack urgency. They don’t make you think that they were a matter of life or death to their creator. Noguchi’s abilities as a sculptor makes his lack of real design inventiveness more excusable. He wasn’t a pioneer of new production techniques in the ways that Charles and Ray Eames were, nor did he grapple with the challenges of mass manufacture. His most famous pieces were lampshades, in which traditional Japanese crafts were adapted to make both perfect spheres and the freeform shapes of mid-century Western abstract art. Also a coffee table that became, through no fault of Noguchi, an interior design cliche – a three-edged sheet of glass, curved at the corners, that rests almost casually on a wooden support that looks like a scaled-down monumental sculpture.

The shapes of these domestic objects would have been less convincing and more arbitrary if he hadn’t explored them first in sculpture. You get pieces such as the Akari BB3-33S light of 1952-4, whose paper and bamboo shade recalls the horns of a Picasso minotaur, and is fixed on top of a slender metal pole that rises from a dense metal base. There might be something of a Giacometti standing figure in its precarious skinniness. There’s a hint of the weird versions of nature that Noguchi and other artists found in a universe reconceived by Albert Einstein. The light certainly explores his fascination with weight and lightness. He designed play structures for children and water features and gardens for World Fairs and corporate headquarters. He flourished in a space made possible by postwar abstract art. Because it was nonspecific in its meanings but communicated a general aura of enlightenment and higher things, it could equally well serve the international institutions and corporations and museums who commissioned his work. His pronouncements could be bland, using terms such as ‘nature’, ‘mankind’ and ‘space’ somewhat loosely and interchangeably.

So, if you like hanging out in high-end lighting shops, the Barbican art gallery is the best place for you to visit right now. Paper lampshades are everywhere, from tall wavy ones on the floor to deluxe versions of the spherical lantern shades you can buy anywhere. Beautifully spaced, warm with glowing light, artfully ornamented with objects in stone, ceramics and bronze; this survey of the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi is a must for design buffs, and a total bore for anyone in search of real art. There is no punch to it, no emotional or psychic energy, just a gentle progress of clever but harmless creations. Noguchi’s smooth creations failed to occupy my mind beyond my presence in the rooms they were placed. It was as if they had no reality at all.

In films that you can watch while sitting on his own furniture, Noguchi comes across as a nice and creative man. In one clip he sits on a piece of playground equipment he designed and chats to his mentor, the architect Buckminster Fuller. Playgrounds were a lifelong interest, a utopian social space that satisfied Noguchi’s belief in the life-enhancing power of sculpture. Born in the US in 1904, but raised partly in Japan, he trained in cabinet-making before seeking out the pioneer of abstraction, Constantin Brâncuși, in his Paris studio and beginning his own art career in 1920s New York. Brâncuși’s radically simplified forms inspired him. Then Fuller showed him how abstract art can serve society. And that’s the trajectory you can see for yourself on the gallery’s upper floor where his development is neatly narrated. Noguchi’s first sculptures are manifestly Brâncuși-like, such as his 1928 piece, Globular, which echoes the Paris master’s curvy, art deco metallic allure. And this sets the pattern, for Noguchi was an all too faithful pupil of the pioneer modernists. In this, he is typical of artists in New York and London in the 1920s and 30s – the real edge of modern art was in continental Europe. And despite my hopes, Noguchi fails to brilliantly blend Western and Japanese ideas in a global modernism all of his own. I think that’s what the curators want to believe he’s doing. But instead, he emerges as the New York equivalent of Henry Moore or Ben Nicholson, producing beautiful but completely tame abstractions derived in a muted way from hardcore European originals. Thus, a roomful of biomorphic, surrealistic figures are timid imitations of much more disturbing sculptures by Picasso and Giacometti.

What struck me most is how nice these objects would look in a smart luxury house or apartment. Noguchi makes you see the history of modern art in a new, and disappointing, way. We love to picture modernism in the 20th century as a story of revolution and resistance, from the Dadaists defying the first world war to Picasso chucking paint into fascism’s face. But Noguchi reveals the cosier side of modern art: producing a new kind of abstract elegance to decorate the homes of the rich. Some will see his readiness to move from pure to applied art, his facility for beautifying a room, as radical. That’s probably why this exhibition is on now: because Noguchi can be seen as a “utopian” and “progressive” artist who sought to give sculpture a social function. But was the Bakelite baby monitor Noguchi designed in 1937 really radical? I can’t imagine the starved post-Great Depression Americans were hungry for stylish tech. And they probably didn’t need the streamlined car he modelled for Fuller, either.

In fairness, it is not as if Noguchi ignored the gravity of the times in which he lived. His Death (Lynched Figure)of 1934 is a protest against the racist murders of black people. As the son of a Japanese father and an Irish American mother, he felt the conflicts of the 20th century more than most. In 1942, he voluntarily interned himself in a bleak camp in the 120-degree heat of Arizona, where west coast Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated, even though New Yorkers like himself were exempt. The World is a Foxhole (I Am a Foxhole) of 1942-43 strives to communicate the hope and despair of a dug-in soldier, with a flag flying from a spindly pole over a black hollowed-out base. After the war he visited Hiroshima, where he proposed a memorial to the victims of the atomic bomb. Yet he found it hard to translate his anger and fear into his objects. His indulgence in shape and surface won – The World is a Foxhole ends up looking like an engagingly wacky golf-course feature. Or he would trip over his desire to be serious, and produce his worst work, ponderous and mawkish. Sometimes you read a caption and wish you hadn’t, as the object in question gave more pleasure before you knew what message it was meant to impart.

Noguchi’s heart was in the right place: he campaigned against racism and fascism in the 30s. But his love of a nice shape in a well-structured space made him helplessly aesthetic and high-class. His works didn’t communicate anger or pain. Out of his experience of an Arizona internment camp for Japanese Americans during the second world war came his 1945 wall relief My Arizona with a jolly red plastic panel over part of its ridged yet harmonious white surface. It would be great in a high-end kitchen. It certainly isn’t anxious. Even his design for a memorial to the Hiroshima dead strikes me as too graceful. After the war, he spent more time in Japan, and hit on his most ingenious connection of traditions when he worked with a lantern-making firm to create his Akari light sculptures. They’re probably his biggest legacy but a design classic is not the same thing as a great work of art. I was more interested the rugged columns of the Barbican, which at least have some brutal beauty.

Much of Noguchi’s appeal lies in his in-betweenness; his ability to move between sculpture, furniture and gardens, not to mention stage sets for the ballets of Martha Graham. If you look only at any one aspect you lose something of the whole. Among the pleasures of the Barbican show are the views you get into and across its central hall, populated with a menagerie of curious forms, an array of asteroids and UFOs as heavy as granite and as light as paper. Some are art, some are design, not that Noguchi was too concerned with the difference. “I am not a designer,” he himself said. “All my work, tables as well as sculptures, are conceived as fundamental problems of form.” This is a touch sententious. In my opinion, someone who designs furniture is a designer, not an artist. Despite his attempts at portraying the horrors of war and nuclear catastrophe, in the end the thing that unites his output is not any profound meaning but the joy of making.