CHRONOLOGY 1904-1931 1904. 17 November, Isamu is born in Los Angeles to the American educationalist and writer, Leonie Gilmour, and the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi 1906. Isamu and Leonie move to Japan where they live with his half-sister Ailes (b.1912) 1918. Isamu is sent to the USA to study at the progressive Interlaken School, Indiana 1922. Begins premedical studies at Columbia University. Works during the summer for Gutzon Borglum, who carved the presidential heads at Mount Rushmore 1924. Isamu is joined by Leonie in New York, who encourages him to attend evening sculpture class. Decides to devote himself to sculpture so leaves Columbia, establishes first studio and changes his surname from Gilmour to Noguchi 1927. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and travels to Paris where he works for Constantin Brancusi and meets many artists, including Alexander Calder 1929. Establishes New York sculpture studio and meets R. Buckminster Fuller and the choreographer Martha Graham 1931. Travels to China where he learns Chinese brush painting with Chi Pai Shi and continues to Tokyo where he first sees Zen gardens and works in ceramic Isamu Noguchi in Paris 1927. Photo Atelier Stone R. Buckminster Fuller with R. Buckminster Fuller 1929 Photo: Isamu Noguchi Isamu Noguchi with The Kiss 1916 by Brancusi Romania c.1981 Herodiade 1944 Photo: Arnold Eagle For further information please purchase the YSP publication of essays, quotes and images priced 5 Exhibition continues in the open air with furniture by Noguchi and others in the Garden Gallery
GALLERY 1 ISAMU NOGUCHI. In 1927, Noguchi was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used for international travel and research, starting in Paris. Robert McAlmon, Constantin Brancusi s biographer, overheard Noguchi expressing admiration for the artist and offered to arrange a meeting, which led to Noguchi working for Brancusi as a studio assistant for six months. Noguchi wrote that Brancusi was part of the spring of modern art in Paris and much of his own work from the time shows a move from direct representation toward abstraction. Leda (1928-85) shares its title with a Brancusi sculpture of 1920, which Noguchi was responsible for polishing during his time with the artist. While in Paris, he began to experiment with working in sheet metal, wanting to create forms that suggested movement and tension. Sail Shape (1928) is made from a single sheet of brass and Noguchi wrote that he may have been inspired to work in this way by childhood memories of paper folding in Japan. Brancusi introduced Noguchi to working with stone and, at this time, direct carving was emerging in Paris as a reaction against formal methods of sculpture making, in which models in clay or wax were reproduced by assistants in bronze or marble. Noguchi absorbed Brancusi s teachings and gained a life-long understanding of the material. In later years, Noguchi developed a technique for splitting hard boulders, such as the granites found in Japan and India, along natural fissures using wooden pegs and water, which were then reassembled. Noguchi returned to New York in 1929, where financial necessity meant that he made less abstract work and established a portrait practice. Through this business Noguchi met several people who were to become life long friends and collaborators including the architect, designer and author R. Buckminster Fuller and the pioneer of modern dance, Martha Graham.Throughout his career, Noguchi created many sets for theatre and dance productions, appreciating the opportunity to see his sculpture come to life and its integral part in the re-enactment of a ritual. From their first collaboration, Frontier in 1935, Noguchi worked with Martha Graham until 1966 on over twenty productions. Herodiade (1944) was described by the artist as the most baroque and specifically sculptural of my sets and consists of three objects designed to evoke the intimate space of a woman s private world. The anthropomorphic elements were stable enough for dancers to stand on and use as extensions of their own bodies, encouraging Noguchi to develop the idea of biomorphic constructions in his pure sculpture practice, a cross-fertilisation that happened often in the artist s career. Throughout the mid to late 1940s Noguchi produced many paper models and worksheets for possible sculptures, which he would enlarge to actual size and use as a pattern for cutting out from slabs of slate or marble, which were readily available in New York at the time. He then constructed the sculptures by slotting the flat sections together using no glue or dowels to hold them in place. This was a method inspired, in part, by Japanese roof design and retains the integrity of the artist s chosen material. Sculptures of this period include Strange Bird (To the Sunflower) (1945), originally constructed in slate and titled in reference to the William Blake poem Ah! Sunflower.
CHRONOLOGY 1932-1949 1933. Designs first large-scale public projects: Monument to the Plow, Play Mountain and Monument to Ben Franklin 1935. First stage design for Martha Graham: Frontier 1936. Works for seven months in Mexico creating a political mural, History of Mexico 1937. First mass-produced object: Radio Nurse, an intercom for Zenith Radio Corporation 1942. Voluntarily enters Poston internment camp, Arizona, for Japanese-Americans 1943. First Lunar sculptures; returns to stone carving and mixed-media sculpture 1944. Designs biomorphic coffee table, manufactured by Herman Miller in 1947 1946. Included in the important exhibition Fourteen Americans at MoMA, New York 1949. Awarded Bollingen Fellowship and begins international research concerning The Environments of Leisure Radio Nurse 1937 Night Journey 1947. Photo: Martha Swope Judith 1950 Photo: Cris Alexander Stephen Acrobat 1947 Photo: Philippe Halsman Model for Sculpture to be Seen from Mars 1947. Photo: Soichi Sunami For further information please purchase the YSP publication of essays, quotes and images priced 5 Exhibition continues in the open air with furniture by Noguchi and others in the Garden Gallery
GALLERY 2 ISAMU NOGUCHI. Several important dance sets are included in Gallery 2 including Night Journey (1947) and Judith (1950) for Martha Graham and Stephen Acrobat for Erick Hawkins (1947). When Noguchi s work is integrated in this manner, rather than being displayed by genre, the cohesion between the artist s various practices is made clear and, in particular, how designs for the stage came to inform sculpture making and design. From the early 1940s to the early 1950s, Noguchi continued to create and exhibit abstract works such as Untitled (1943), Katchina (1943) and Trinity (Triple) (1945). In 1946 he was invited by MoMA, New York, to take part in the important exhibition Fourteen Americans alongside Arshile Gorky, Theodore Roszak and Saul Steinberg. Toward the end of the 1940s, Noguchi published two essays concerning the power of meaningful aesthetic experiences on the human psyche; how objects and environments could improve the lives of individuals and communities. The events of the second World War, including his experiences as a volunteer in an internment camp for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, forever clouded Noguchi s perception of humanity and its progress; war became an ever-present threat that permeated his work. Model for Sculpture to be Seen from Mars (1947), for example, is an unrealised proposal for a work that would survive a nuclear holocaust and be evidence that there had once been life on earth. Noguchi began to work toward creating sculpture which could be of significance to the lives of others, not simply to be shown in galleries and museums: there must be some larger, more noble and more essentially sculptural purpose to sculpture. Inspired both by the constructivist notion of art for social purpose and the new wave of philosophical ideas, notably existentialism, flourishing in both Europe and America, Noguchi sought to develop an aesthetic language that was both deeply personal, yet relevant to many. In 1948 Noguchi was invited to hold his first solo exhibition in New York since 1935, at the Egan Gallery run by Charles Egan for the benefit of artists. Noguchi became ever more depressed at the politics he perceived to surround the art world and was always keen to get away after his exhibitions opened: I felt myself no part of this and wanted no part of it, hoping that art might offer a higher purpose than being a commodity. Noguchi said that if the world were to survive, sculpture had to be an important part of the living experience, not just something for collectors to buy. With the help of a Bollingen Fellowship grant in 1949 he began travelling in order to study The Environments of Leisure: public spaces of religious and social significance around the world. In 1950 he returned to Japan where the artist Hasegawa Saburo helped him to visit and study ancient temples and gardens. Noguchi was keen to reconnect with his Japanese heritage and carried out extensive research on the traditional arts and crafts of Kyoto and was invited by Keio University, where his father taught for many years, to create a memorial. In 1952 he returned to Japan to complete work on the piece, during which time he established a studio and home in Kita Kamakura and began designing and making Akari.
CHRONOLOGY 1950-1968 1950. Arrives in Japan, where he is now well known as an American artist, and exhibits ceramics, furniture and sculpture 1951. Returns from New York to Japan to research the Hiroshima Peace Park commission and creates first Akari lantern designs in Gifu. Meets future wife Yoshiko Yamaguchi 1952. Returns to Japan in the spring and establishes house and studio in Kita Kamakura 1955. Exhibits Akari for first time; creates sets and costumes for the Royal Shakespeare Company s production of King Lear in London 1956. Commissioned to design gardens for the headquarters of UNESCO, Paris 1961. Establishes studio and home in a former factory, Long Island City, New York 1965. Begins first realised playground, Kodomo No Kuni (Children s Land), near Tokyo 1966. Creates last set for Martha Graham s Cortege of Eagles and establishes Akari Foundation in New York 1968. Publishes autobiography A Sculptor s World and creates Red Cube in New York Noguchi making an Akari lamp Photo: Michio Noguchi Isamu Noguchi and Yoshiko Yamaguchi in Chuo Koron Gallery, Japan, 1952-53. Photo: unknown King Lear 1955. Photo: unknown Red Cube 1968, New York Photo: Michio Noguchi For further information please purchase the YSP publication of essays, quotes and images priced 5 Exhibition continues in the open air with furniture by Noguchi and others in the Garden Gallery
GALLERY 3 ISAMU NOGUCHI. In 1930 Noguchi spent eight months in Peking (Beijing) where he made Chinese Girl (Girl Reclining on Elbow) (1930) and many beautiful brush drawings after tutelage with the master painter Chi Pai Shi. He went on to stay with members of his Japanese family in Tokyo and his time in the Far East became one of prolific learning and making. While in Japan, he made the portraits Uncle Takagi (Portrait of my Uncle) (1931), Tsuneko-san (Head of a Japanese Girl) (1931) of the maid who worked in the house, and a figurine of the strongest sumo wrestler in Japan, Tamanishiki (The Wrestler) (Sumo) (1931). After the completion of several projects in various locations around the world, including the UNESCO garden in Paris, Noguchi returned to New York in 1958. His experience of places and cultures led him to equate certain materials with specific geographic locations: he found that carving stone in Japan and Italy came naturally whereas it seemed absurd to me to be working with rocks and stones in New York, where walls and steel are our horizon and our landscape is that of boxes piled high in the air. Inspired by his industrial surroundings in the USA, Noguchi began to work with sheet aluminium, which he could source cheaply from the Aluminium Company of America. Working with his friend, Edison Price, Noguchi developed techniques of bending the material in such a way as to give the work solidity. He insisted that each be made from a single sheet of metal, referencing the ship-brass works he made in Paris in the 1920s. Noh Musicians (1958); Solar (1958); and Folded Torso (1958) were all made at this time in his makeshift studio housed within Edison Price s factory. As well as associating certain places with different media, Noguchi used material to express themes within his work. In 1959, he experimented with balsa, as he had on previous occasions in creating stage sets. Balsa is a notoriously soft wood and was used by the artist in a series of sculpture from 1959 to 1962, which explored a personal and often melancholic discourse; the fragile material becoming a metaphor for vulnerability. Noguchi wrote that he felt weight added meaning to weightlessness and later cast some of these balsa works in bronze, including Mortality (1959): hanging weight is where bronze functions. Our pendulous and precarious existence is shaped by gravity. In 1962, the American Academy in Rome invited Noguchi to work in their studios. While there, Noguchi began to make sculpture to sit directly on the floor, subverting the traditional notion of pieces for plinth display, including This Earth This Passage (1962): I formed it of clay with my feet; then it was cast in bronze. This piece related to my 1931 experience in Japan when I was working in Kyoto at the pottery place of Uno Jin Matsu. I was working for myself, but he allowed me to work there to make terracottas. To do these terracottas, we got a large quantity of earth from a nearby brook; then I prepared it by kneading it with my feet. This process recalls that period. With clay I was making something emerge out of the earth in the same way a mound would. In bronze it has become an art object you might say. Seen and Unseen (1962) is also of this period and shares its title with a book of poetry published by his father, Yone Noguchi, in 1897.
CHRONOLOGY 1970-1988 1970. Realises nine fountains for Expo 70, Osaka, Japan 1974. Acquires building across from Long Island studio for display and storage 1980. The Akari Foundation becomes the Isamu Noguchi Foundation 1981. Buys land near to his New York studio and begins to design The Noguchi Museum with Shoji Sadao 1983. The Noguchi Museum opens to visitors by appointment; construction begins on a garden at the artist s studio in Mure, Shikoku, Japan with Masatoshi Izumi 1985. Official opening of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, New York 1986. Represents the United States at the Venice Biennale 1988. Creates master plan of 400 acre Sapporo Park, Japan Dies 30 December, New York The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, Mure Noguchi requested that half his ashes be placed in this stone at Mure, Japan, and the remainder be in New York. For further information please purchase the YSP publication of essays, quotes and images priced 5 Exhibition continues in the open air and Garden Gallery
GALLERY 4 ISAMU NOGUCHI. During the creation of the UNESCO garden in Paris between 1956 and 1958, Noguchi visited and brought many stones from Japan, writing later that the experience was his beginning lesson in the use of stone. From the mid 1960s this became his primary material and he acknowledged that they say in Japan that the end interest of old men is stone. An increasing understanding of Zen and the philosophy of Zen garden design prompted Noguchi to consider the spirit of each stone he used and to search of the deeper meaning of sculpture through physically working very hard granites: I love the use of stone, because it is the most meaning-impregnated material. The whole world is made of stone. Stone is a direct link to the heart of the matter a molecular link. When I tap it I get an echo of that which we are. Then, the whole universe has resonance. Noguchi felt not only a universal and profound affinity with stone, but also believed that organic material communicated on a human level: it seems to me that the natural mediums of wood and stone, alive before man was, have the greater capacity to comfort us with the reality of our being. Noguchi split, carved and worked sculptures from single boulders, such as the rusted granites recovered from a shallow, inland Japanese sea that include Sculpture Finding (1979) and Age (1979), sited in the Underground Gallery gardens. The search for the correct stone became an integral part of the conceptual process and he preferred it to be quarried using manual methods, believing any unintentional breakages to be an act of fate that often informed the final sculpture. Every stage of the carving process was of significance and is reflected in the titles of some work, such as Whet Stone (1970), which has both smooth and unfinished surfaces and takes its name from the stones used to sharpen tools for carving. Works of this period also begin to reflect the artist s understanding of placement and combination of elements, such as Small Torso (1958); Core Piece No.1 (1974); and Core Piece No.2 (1974). Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Noguchi worked on landscapes of the mind, such as Double Red Mountain (1969); Black Hills (1970); and Landscape Sculpture (1970). Japanese Zen gardens often utilise a very small amount of space but suggest a vast landscape through considered arrangements and relationships with the scenery beyond, which relates to the Zen concept of experiencing the infinite through physical suggestion. Although such notions informed Noguchi s practice it is important to remember that he did not subscribe to one particular philosophy, artistic community or culture. Rather, the significant body of works left by Noguchi for public appreciation reflect his belief that we are the landscape of all we have seen.