Isamu Noguchi

• Born: November 17, 1904
• Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
• Died: December 30, 1988
• Place of death: New York, New York

Artist, architect

Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi was an abstract and surrealist sculptor and a pioneer in the design of sculpture gardens. Noguchi was born in the United States and traveled frequently abroad, spending time in Europe, Asia, and Mexico and learning from many prominent twentieth-century artists including Diego Rivera and Constantin Brancusi. Noguchi gained international fame for his public art installations in cities including New York City, Chicago, Paris, and Tokyo. Later in life, Noguchi focused on building sculpture parks that blended Asian and Western aesthetic elements.

Born: November 17, 1904; Pasadena, California

Died: December 30, 1988; New York, New York

Full name: Isamu Noguchi

Birth name: Isamu Gilmour

Area of achievement: Art

Early Life

Isamu Noguchi was born Isamu Gilmour in Los Angeles in 1904. His mother, Léonie Gilmour, was an Irish American writer, teacher, and editor, and his father, Yonejiro “Yone” Noguchi, was a Japanese poet and art expert. Noguchi’s parents were separated at the time of his birth, and his father left for Tokyo that same year and would remain largely absent from his son’s life.

In 1906, Léonie Gilmour moved to Tokyo with her son. They lived in Chigasaki, where Noguchi attended both Japanese and Jesuit schools. When his mother remodeled the family’s house in Chigasaki, she put her son in charge of designing the gardens. Later in life, Noguchi’s memories of these gardens would inspire many of his outdoor sculptural designs.

In 1918, Noguchi’s mother sent him to attend Interlaken School, a boarding school in Rolling Prairie, Indiana that she had read about in a National Geographic article. Soon afterward, Noguchi moved to LaPorte, Indiana, to attend high school and live with the family of a Swedenborgian minister. As Noguchi developed a strong interest in sculpture and painting, one of his contacts arranged for him to have an apprenticeship with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor famous for the faces of US presidents carved into Mount Rushmore. Borglum discouraged Noguchi from pursuing sculpture as a career, so Noguchi traveled to New York, where he enrolled in Columbia University as a premedical student.

Life’s Work

While attending Columbia, Noguchi enrolled in sculpture classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in New York City’s Lower East Side. The school’s founder, Onorio Ruotolo, became Noguchi’s mentor, immediately recognizing the young sculptor’s talent. Noguchi became Ruotolo’s apprentice and eventually quit Columbia and his job as a waiter. Ruotolo’s encouragement, training, and support convinced Noguchi to pursue sculpture as a career, but the friendship between the two men became strained after Noguchi threw some of his mentor’s friends out of the studio Ruotolo was letting him use. After getting his own studio in New York City, Noguchi turned to abstract sculpture, inspired by the work of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.

In 1927, Noguchi successfully applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to Paris, where he worked as Brancusi’s apprentice for seven months. From Brancusi, Noguchi learned about stone sculpture and perfected his technique for working with tools. However, Noguchi ultimately felt he was too influenced by Brancusi’s style and eventually made an effort to distance himself from the techniques of his mentor.

Noguchi returned to New York in 1929 and earned a living by selling portrait sculptures and in the local art market. The following year, he returned to Paris and then made his way to Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Noguchi stayed in China for eight months studying calligraphy and Chinese painting and then traveled to Japan where he was briefly reunited with his father and spent several months studying Japanese clay sculpture and gardening techniques.

Noguchi returned to the United States in 1930, touring with a one-man show of paintings and sculptures from his time in Asia. The economic depression hindered Noguchi’s efforts to sell his artwork, but he did manage to achieve a high-profile job making set pieces for choreographer and dancer Martha Graham, who became one of Noguchi’s strongest supporters throughout his career.

In 1933, Noguchi traveled to Mexico in search of a more favorable economic environment, where befriended and worked with well-known sculptor Diego Rivera and painter Frida Kahlo. Rivera supervised Noguchi’s first high-profile public installation, a seventy-two-foot concrete relief mural representing aspects of Mexican history. The following year, Noguchi returned to the United States where he received contracts for other prominent public works, including a ten-ton steel sculpture for the Associated Press building at New York City’s Rockefeller Center, intended to symbolize the freedom of the press.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment spread across the country. Noguchi attempted to counter this increase in racism and prejudice in a variety of ways. Many Japanese refugees who arrived in the United States during this period were detained in internment camps in an effort to contain potential spies. Noguchi volunteered to live at an internment camp in Poston, Arizona, where he worked as an artistic director, introducing Japanese evacuees to painting and sculpture. A few months later, Noguchi wanted to leave the camp, but was told that he would need permission to leave. Noguchi eventually received permission to take a temporary leave but never returned to the camp. After this, he was officially named a suspicious person, placed under observation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and even threatened with deportation. Though officials initially wanted to arrest him, the American Civil Liberties Union intervened on Noguchi’s behalf and prevented him from being further detained.

Noguchi returned to New York and set up a new working space in Greenwich Village. Here Noguchi began working with surrealist sculpture and developed a unique sculptural approach using interlocking slabs of materials such as marble. In the late 1940s, Noguchi began marketing furniture designs through the Herman Miller company of Zeeland, Michigan. Noguchi’s furniture designs included the now famous “Noguchi table,” a minimalist structure that features a tripod of wood supporting a transparent glass surface. Noguchi produced a number of other designs for the industrial market, including some for lamps and chairs.

By the late 1940s, Noguchi was one of the most famous sculptors in the world and had completed high-profile installations in many prominent cities. In 1949, Noguchi traveled to Japan where another phase of his artistic career began: the designing and implementing of sculptural gardens. Noguchi designed the gardens for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, although his design was rejected, and he created a garden and memorial to his father at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. In the 1960s, Noguchi designed a sculpture garden for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

In the 1980s, Noguchi opened the Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, Queens. The museum houses an indoor, open-air sculpture park surrounded by ten galleries. Around the same time, he worked to establish the Noguchi Foundation, an organization supporting the care of his sculptures and related works by other artists. Noguchi died in 1988, at the age of eighty-four.

Significance

Noguchi played an important role in the evolution of sculpture, taking part in both the abstract and surrealist movements as they developed. Over the years, he installed public works in Japan, Europe, and the United States. Additionally, Noguchi’s work with outdoor exhibitions and sculptural parks were part of his commitment to creating art with a social function. Critics and biographers have noted Noguchi’s ability to recreate the meditative serenity of Japanese Zen gardens in his sculptural parks.

Though many of his works contain overt political and social themes, Noguchi was also a student of design and bridged the gap between artistic and industrial production, helping to usher in a new era of interior design. From the 1960s through the 1980s, his work met with an enthusiastic audience as US audiences grew more appreciative of the Asian artistic aesthetic.

Bibliography

Duus, Masayu, and Peter Duus. The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Print. Offers a biography of Noguchi with a focus on his intercultural heritage and the role it played in his work.

Tiger, Caroline. Isamu Noguchi.New York: Chelsea House, 2007. Print. Presents a biography of Noguchi and an analysis of his work and legacy.

Torres, Ana Maria. Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space. New York: Monacelli, 2000. Print.