[2] Before making it, Noguchi had seen a picture of the body after the lynching of George Hughes in 1930, which had been widely published in the northern Black press.
[4] Despite having smoothed over details of the body to give it a more abstract form, it was one of several items whose gruesome realism reviewers of the NAACP exhibition found shocking.
[6] Edward Alden Jewell of The New York Times considered it disastrously realistic, evoking extreme horror at the agony of a lynching, and more sensational than of actual artistic value.
The reviewer for The Christian Century put it more mildly, saying that if the purpose of art was to magnify its materials, then Death "hits the mark" and "intensifies the horror of a lynching".
[7] Previously a supporter of Noguchi, McBride had occasionally used descriptions such as "wily" and "semi-oriental" for him, but for Death he was more direct, saying that "this gruesome study of a lynching with a contorted figure dangling from an actual rope, may be like a photograph from which it was made, but as a work of art it is a little Japanese mistake".