Isamu Noguchi inside the "peach pit" of his sculpture, Momo Taro,
during the Storm King Art Center 25th Anniversary Luncheon, April 1985.
Photo by Helaine Messer.
Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese-American artist, sculptor and landscape architect, who fused Eastern and Western influences in his works. His artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. He was associated with the style of Abstract Art. Throughout his innovative work, Noguchi experimented with biomorphic forms to produce unexpected aesthetic combinations.
Background
Noguchi was born in New York City, New York, United States, on December 30, 1988. Isamu Noguchi's parents met when his mother Léonie Gilmour, an American writer, was hired to assist his father Yone Noguchi, a young Japanese poet who was acclaimed in the United States. After his father ended his short-lasting relationship, Yone Noguchi planned to marry The Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes. After proposing to Armes, Yone moved to Japan in late August, settling in Tokyo and awaiting her arrival. However, their engagement was broken after a few months when Ethel Armes learned of Léonie and her newborn son.
In 1906, Yone invited Léonie to come to Tokyo with their son. She at first refused. But growing anti-Japanese sentiment following the Russo-Japanese War eventually made her change her mind. Isamu Noguchi and his mother departed from San Francisco in March 1907. However, Yone Noguchi had married a Japanese woman by the time they arrived, and was mostly absent from his son's childhood.
Education
Isamu Noguchi and his mother, Léonie Gilmour, left Tokyo and moved to Omori in 1910. In 1912 they went to Chigasaki, settling there. The same year, while the two were living in Chigasaki, Noguchi's half-sister, who later became a pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement Ailes Gilmour, was born to Léonie Gilmour and an unknown father. Here, his mother had a house built for the three of them, and nine-year-old Noguchi helped with the construction of his home.
Noguchi's mother encouraged her son's artistic inclinations and put him in charge of their garden, apprenticing him to a local carpenter. However, they moved in December 1917 to an English-speaking community in Yokohama.
In 1918 Noguchi's mother sent him back to the United States for schooling in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. After graduating from high school in Indiana, he left with Dr. Edward Rumely to LaPorte, where he found boarding with a Swedenborgian pastor, Samuel Mack. Noguchi began a student of La Porte High School, completing his studies in 1922. During this period of his life, he was known by the name "Sam Gilmour".
Isamu Noguchi spent a summer of 1922 tutoring the son of sculptor Gutzon Borglum in Connecticut; in exchange, he received training from the future Mount Rushmore sculptor, who asserted that Noguchi was talentless. However, it didn't stop the artist from following his dream, as he wanted to be an artist since he had been young.
Noguchi enrolled in Columbia University as a pre-med student in 1922. In 1924, while still enrolled at Columbia, his mother moved to New York and convinced her son to study sculpture at the Leonardo da Vinci School of Art. Later that same year, Noguchi dropped out of Columbia University to focus on his art full-time. Around this time he also began using his father's surname "Noguchi," rather than his mother's. His academic, figurative sculptures were soon presented in several exhibitions at the da Vinci School, the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
It was at the Leonardo da Vinci School of Art that his talents were recognized and encouraged. Isamu Noguchi also studied at the East Side Art School in New York City, or New York School of the Arts. In 1927 he received a scholarship and moved to Paris, France, where he became an apprentice to abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi who strongly influenced Noguchi's art.
Noguchi travelled to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927 and became Constantin Brâncuși's assistant, despite a language barrier between the two artists (Noguchi barely spoke French, and Brâncuși did not speak English). Brâncuși's New York gallery exhibition the previous year had been extremely influential for the young artist. During his apprentice, Noguchi gained his knowledge in stone sculpture, a medium with which he was unacquainted, though he would later admit that one of Brâncuși's greatest teachings was to appreciate "the value of the moment."
From Constantin Brâncuși, Isamu Noguchi became interested in the idea of leaving the marks of his tools on his sculpture to express a connection between sculptor and material. However, it was only after leaving his teacher's studio that Noguchi began producing his own sculptures.
Initially, many his sculptures echoed the form, themes and materials of his mentor. Isamu Noguchi's sculptures began as simple geometric shapes, but they later transformed and moved towards more organic forms, sometimes combining the two. While in Paris, the artist became part of the Bohemian community, meeting such artists as Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder, and Jules Pascin.
Upon returning to New York in February 1929, Isamu Noguchi had his first solo exhibition at the Eugene Schoen Gallery, which became a failure and none of his works was sold. To earn money, he returned to the representational portrait sculptures, producing busts of well-known painters, including Martha Graham, George Gershwin, and Buckminster Fuller. They garnered positive reviews. After less than a year of portrait sculpture, Isamu Noguchi had earned enough money to continue his trip to Asia.
For the next two years, he travelled to Paris, Beijing and finally Japan. In Kyoto, he first saw the Japanese pottery and Zen gardens as well as haniwa that would greatly influence his oeuvre.
Isamu Noguchi returned to New York in 1931, amidst the Great Depression, and became involved in the social and labour activism of the 1930s. He hoped to sell his newly produced sculptures and brush paintings from Asia. In spite of the fact that very few were sold, Noguchi regarded this one-man exhibition (which began in February 1932 and toured Chicago, the west coast, and Honolulu) as his "most successful." In New York, he found few clients for his portrait busts there and also executed designs for workers' memorials, public art projects and political works.
Meanwhile, Noguchi also designed sets for dance and theatre performances, notably for modern dance choreographer Martha Graham, with whom he collaborated for several decades. He also became very interested in the application of art to lived environments and created proposals for several outdoor spaces, playgrounds, and other public projects.
In January 1933 Isamu Noguchi worked in Chicago in collaboration with Santiago Martínez Delgado on a mural for Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition. He moved to London in June hoping to find more work, but returned in December.
Noguchi began submitting his first designs for public spaces and monuments to the Public Works of Art Program in February 1934. One of these designs, a monument to Benjamin Franklin, remained unfulfilled for decades. Another his design, a gigantic pyramidal earthwork entitled Monument to the American Plow, was in a like manner rejected, and his "sculptural landscape" of a playground, Play Mountain, was personally rejected by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.
He resumed to support himself by sculpting portrait busts. In early 1935, after another one-man show, the New York Sun's Henry McBride labelled Noguchi's Death, depicting a lynched African-American, as "a little Japanese mistake." The same year Isamu Noguchi produced the set for Frontier, the first of many set designs for Martha Graham.
Following the further rejection of his designs, Isamu Noguchi left for Hollywood, where he again worked as a portrait sculptor to make money for his trip to Mexico. It was here that Noguchi was chosen to design his first public work, a relief mural for the Abelardo Rodriguez market in Mexico City. The 20-meter-long History as Seen from Mexico in 1936 was extremely political and socially conscious, featuring such modern symbols as the Nazi swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the equation E = mc².
Noguchi moved back to New York in 1937. He produced the design of the Zenith Radio Nurse, the iconic original baby monitor that is now held in many museum collections, Isamu Noguchi's first serious design commission which he called "my only strictly industrial design."
He again returned to portrait busts and executed two sculptures. The first was a fountain built of automobile parts for the Ford Motor Company's exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair; his second sculpture, a nine-ton stainless steel bas-relief entitled News, was installed near the entrance to the Associated Press building at the Rockefeller Center in April 1940. Noguchi left on a cross-country road trip with Arshile Gorky, an Armenian-American painter and his friend, and Gorky's fiancée in July 1941, eventually separating from them going to Hollywood.
At around 1940s, when the artist returned to New York, Isamu Noguchi began to create his freestanding sculptures, many of which were based on the biomorphic forms of Surrealist art. The most famous of these assembled-slab sculptures, Kouros, was first presented at a September 1946 exhibition, helping to cement his place in the New York art scene. Biomorphism also infused his furniture designs, such as his iconic Noguchi table that was mass-produced in 1947 and is still popular today. Isamu Noguchi also developed a relationship with Knoll, a design firm that produces office systems, seating, files and storage, tables and desks, textiles, and accessories for the office, home, and higher education settings; he produced designs of furniture and lamps.
Also in the 1940s, Noguchi started creating sculptures with light, entitled Lunars, which also employed biomorphic shapes. His Akari lamps of 1951 continued his experiments using electric light as a central sculptural element. He produced such sculptures for the rest of his career and included illumination in some of his public and environmental sculptures. Post-war construction growth in the 1950s and 1960s gave Noguchi a chance to design numerous international public projects, many of which were focused around gardens.
In 1962 Noguchi spent much time in Italy, becoming an artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. Later on, while still in Italy, Isamu Noguchi began to create his banded marble works, for which he used a post-tension technique involving a tightened, internal metal rod holding the multicoloured pieces together.
Noguchi launched his Void series in 1970. During the later years of his career, he continued creating public sculptures, fountains gardens, and playgrounds for international sites. For his late sculptural works, he primarily used stone, some of these sculptures were left unpolished, in their natural state. In 1981 he began working on the design of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York; it was opened in 1985.
Isamu Noguchi became an outstanding sculptor and designer of the 20th-century. His sculptures, fountains, and gardens are focal points in major cities of the United States and worldwide. He gained prominence and acclaim, leaving his large-scale works in many of the world's major cities.
Noguchi received the Logan Medal of the arts (Art Institute of Chicago) in 1963; the Gold Medal from the Architectural League of New York in 1965; the Brandeis Creative Arts Award in 1966; the Gold Medal from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977.
Isamu Noguchi was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to the Arts in 1982; the Kyoto Prize in Arts 1986; the National Medal of Arts in 1987; and the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government in 1988.
The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, which opened in Long Island City, New York, in 1985, includes an outdoor sculpture garden and a collection of some 500 sculptures, models, and photographs. It is devoted to the preservation, documentation, presentation, and interpretation of the work of Isamu Noguchi.
In 2004 the U.S. Postal Service issued a 37-cent stamp honouring Noguchi.
Among his public sculptures is the famous Red Cube, now installed in a Manhattan plaza. Noguchi achieved great fame critical success during the last two decades of his life; among his other accolades, the Whitney Museum and Walker Art Center organized retrospectives of his work in 1968 and 1978, respectively, and Noguchi was chosen to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1986.
Today, his art pieces can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, after the anti-Japanese sentiment became energized in the United States, Noguchi became actively involved in politics. In response to these changes in the country, Noguchi formed "Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy". He and other group leaders wrote to influential officials, protesting against the 100,000 Japanese Americans interned. Isamu Noguchi later attended the hearings but had little effect on their outcome.
Noguchi later helped produce a documentary of the internment, but left California before its coming out. He planned to prove Japanese-American loyalty by helping the war effort. However, when other governmental departments turned him down, he met with John Collier, head of the Office of Indian Affairs, who advised him to go to the internment camp located on an Indian reservation in Poston, Arizona, to promote arts and crafts and community, where he became the only voluntary internee.
He spent a couple of months in the camp, with the goal of improving the lives of the people encarcerated. However, the budget for his projects was cut, and his paperwork to be released got lost. Isamu Noguchi pleaded for release and ultimately spent a total of 7 unproductive months in the camp.
Views
The key concept informing Noguchi’s oeuvre was his passionate, career-long desire to create art the public could use in everyday life. He realized this goal by creating mass-produced furniture and lamps; public projects such as gardens, playgrounds and fountains; theatrical set designs; and sculptural manipulations of the natural landscape.
Besides, Isamu Noguchi wanted to attract attention to the dichotomies, inherent part of many of his works: he merged geometric and organic forms, found value in both positive and negative space, and created works that challenged the boundaries of design and art.
Quotations:
"Sculpture can be a vital force in our everyday life if projected into communal usefulness."
"Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture."
"To limit yourself to a particular style may make you an expert of that particular viewpoint or school, but I do not wish to belong to any school. I am always learning, always discovering."
"The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature... But I am also a sculptor of the West. I place my mark and do not hide."
Membership
Isamu Noguchi was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1962. In 1971 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1962
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
1971
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Michael Brenson: "[Isamu Noguchi] was marked by an Asian esthetic that believed in a link among all the arts, and he was constantly searching for ways to bring them together."
Interests
Artists
Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró
Connections
Isamu Noguchi met Frida Kahlo in 1936 and had a brief but passionate affair with her. The two remained friends until her death in 1954. Noguchi also had a romantic relationship with Nayantara Pandit, the niece of Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru, however, their relationship failed.
Noguchi was briefly married to the ethnic-Japanese icon of Chinese song and cinema Yoshiko Ōtaka between 1951 and 1956.
Father:
Yone Noguchi
Yonejirō Noguchi, or Yone Noguchi, (1875-1947) was a prominent Japanese writer of poetry, essays, fiction, and literary criticism in both English and Japanese.
Mother:
Léonie Gilmour
Léonie Gilmour (1873-1933) was an American educator, editor, and journalist. Léonie Gilmour was the lover and editor of the writer Yone Noguchi.
half-sister:
Ailes Gilmour
Ailes Gilmour (1912-1993) was a Japanese-born American dancer. She became one of the young pioneers of the American Modern Dance movement of the 1930s and one of the first members of Martha Graham's dance company.
ex-girlfriend:
Nayantara Pandit
Nayantara Sahgal (born in 1927) is an Indian writer who creates her works in English. She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel, Rich Like Us (1985), by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.
ex-wife:
Yoshiko Ōtaka
Yoshiko Yamaguchi (1920-2014), also known as Yoshiko Ōtaka, was a Chinese-born Japanese actress and singer. She made a career in China, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States.
Frida Kahlo de Rivera (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter best known for her uncompromising and brilliantly coloured self-portraits that deal with such themes as identity, the human body, and death. Although she denied the connection, she was often identified as a Surrealist.
Friend:
Gutzon Borglum
John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (1867-1941), Gutzon Borglum, was an American artist and sculptor. He was associated with his creation of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota, as well as other public works of art, including a bust of Abraham Lincoln now held in the United States Capitol Crypt in Washington, D.C.
References
The Noguchi Museum - A Portrait
This is the only book that focuses on the unique dynamic between the museum's artworks, architecture, and visitors and the museum celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2015, coinciding with publication.
2015
Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design
"Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design" celebrates Noguchi's legacy by chronicling the exhibition of over 75 of his works into a series of dramatic installations conceptualized by renowned theater designer and artist Robert Wilson.
2002
Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi
In this remarkable biography of the elusive artist, Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchi's creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature.
2015
Isamu Noguchi
Inspects the artistic development of the Japanese-American abstract sculptor, focusing on the influences of his visits to Paris and the Orient, his set designs for Martha Graham, and his experiments in landscape and garden design.
1978
Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern
Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern brings together more than eighty works, from six decades, which reveal how the ancient world shaped this inspirational artist’s vision for the future.
