Isamu Noguchi (1904 -1988) was an American-Japanese artist, set and furniture designer, and landscape architect. While his formative years in New York and later in the Parisian studio of Constantin Brâncuși focused on the figurative representation within sculpture, his family and friendship circle, combined with travels and natural curiosity, soon carved the way to explorations within abstract forms. His works can be found in museums worldwide, while the majority of his oeuvre is held at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York (which he established).
LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: Isamu Noguchi was born into a creative family: – his mother, Léonie Gilmour, was an author, and his father, Yonejirō Noguchi, was a poet and essayist. While his half-sister, Ailes Gilmour, was a dancer. His first expression of creativity was gardening and carpentry, encouraged by his mother during his childhood in Japan. At one point, she also encouraged his studies in botany to become a forester. Perhaps we could discuss the upbringing that fuelled his many curiosities.
MATTHEW KIRSCH: Noguchi was raised by a single mother who worked various jobs to support the household – from teaching English to selling trinkets in the seaside town they lived in for a period. They made several moves within the general vicinity of Tokyo, Yokohama, and Chigasaki in the ten or so years of Noguchi’s childhood spent in Japan. Leonie’s perseverance, adaptability, and independence certainly shaped Isamu throughout his experience as a biracial child in Japan, shuttling from school to school. They enjoyed a close relationship in those years, and Leonie was the most formative influence on his education. Noguchi always spoke about his interest in Greek mythology from Leonie’s reading those stories to him as a child; decades later, those stories became references and allusions in his sculpture. And whenever Leonie decided to have a home built for the family in Chigasaki when Isamu was about 10, she hired a carpenter on the basis that part of the job would be teaching Isamu carpentry.
LŠ: Up until his teenage years (he traveled to Interlaken at age 13), he lived in Japan, and then he moved back to the States due to schooling in Indiana. He was encouraged by people around him to pursue medicine as a profession, yet during his student times at Columbia, he met influential figures such as dancer Michio Itō, who urged him to reconsider art. Whose influence do you see as instrumental in Noguchi’s focus on art?
MK: Well, during the period Noguchi studied at Columbia, Leonie returned to the United States with his sister Ailes in tow, and they moved to what is now the East Village in New York. Leonie appreciated Noguchi’s benefactor from Indiana, Edward Rumely, for seeing to Isamu’s continued education but disagreed with the trajectory. Leonie truly believed that Noguchi’s destiny was to follow in his father’s footsteps as an artist. When she discovered an art school in her neighborhood, the Leonardo da Vinci School, and noticed that they offered sculpture classes, she encouraged Isamu to attend. He did so very reluctantly, but his prodigious abilities were apparent very quickly to the school’s founder, his teacher, Onorio Ruotolo. Ruotolo did what he could to encourage Isamu, waiving any fees at the school, letting Isamu use his studio, then giving him a job as his studio assistant when Isamu outpaced the school’s curriculum. I think it was a combination of Leonie and Ruotolo’s interventions that made Isamu recognize his own talents and, eventually, to abandon Columbia to pursue sculpture. Noguchi, of course, grew bored with the academic sculpture that Ruotolo trained him in and repaid all of his support by going in the opposite direction, becoming interested in avant-garde sculpture. Noguchi’s restlessness and these sudden changes in direction became a pattern in his practice.
LŠ: If I am not mistaken, his half-sister danced for the Martha Graham Company.
MK: Yes, Ailes took classes with Graham and was a dancer with the company for a short time; Leonie did some work as a seamstress for the company, if I remember correctly.
LŠ: After dropping out of university, he met many gallerists and artists, such as Alfred Stieglitz and J.B. Neumann. They also encouraged him to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship – how do you see the friendship and influence of the older generation of artists on the young Noguchi?
MK: Noguchi talked about New York’s 1920s art world as small; all the artists knew each other. There weren’t many galleries showing the new currents of art from Europe or the American artists who responded to them, so Noguchi was able to keep up with what was going on fairly easily. Noguchi was a listener and eager to learn (this is how he came to know Buckminster Fuller later), which was probably remarkable in itself in New York’s small avant-garde circles.
LŠ: Going back to Noguchi’s Parisian period when the young artist worked in Brâncuși’s atelier –could we revisit how/if the guidance of the famed sculptor manifested in the work of Noguchi?
MK: Noguchi was receptive to the gospel that Brancusi taught – the respect for materials and tools, allowing the forms he made to be dictated by the nature of the material itself, dedicating himself to the task at hand, never considering any work to be practice for something yet to come – this is the cumulative influence Brancusi had on Noguchi.
Brancusi’s individuality within the Parisian avant-garde was also a lesson for Noguchi; he was worldly but in touch with his Romanian roots. I think Brancusi’s example ultimately caused Noguchi to become kind of self-conscious about Brancusi’s influence on his art by 1928 so he tried to find his own path when he left Paris. Even though Brancusi certainly had some formal influence on Noguchi’s work, I think it really only came out occasionally. After Brancusi died in the late 1950s, Noguchi paid homage to Brancusi – maybe a little more freely than before – with a group of Greek marble sculptures he made for a show at Stable Gallery in 1958.
LŠ: A turn to figurative art also came from his economic situation, where he created busts of people around him, like Buckminster Fuller, to earn a living.
MK: When Noguchi returned to New York in 1929, he exhibited some of the works made in Paris, but he didn’t manage to attract any sales or critical notice. He was unsure of his direction since he already felt that this new work came not from himself but from outside influences. So, he ended up returning to what he knew, figurative sculpture. Making portraits, head-busting as he called it, was a useful avenue for Noguchi in a pinch, not only in terms of earning money on these commissions but also as a way of meeting people. Within the framework of making portraits, Noguchi would sometimes experiment with different materials, including wood and, in the case of Fuller, chrome-plated bronze.
LŠ: Also, a period when he starts working with stone directly.
MK: Noguchi only really made one marble sculpture in the 1920s. His real exposure to stone happened a little later, in the 1930s, and even then, he was too broke to afford stone outside of portrait commissions. Noguchi was in the same boat as many other New York artists in the 1930s, broke and competing for commissions from the different incarnations of the Works Progress Administration. He talked about this period in his life when he, like many artists in New York, was involved with different activist causes and progressive politics. He later explained that there was a restrictive view of what artists could do in this atmosphere – art was seen as having to be for noble and moral intentions. In line with that, certain sculptors believed that one had to work with stone, the most noble material, and to do direct carving or else, as I remember Noguchi saying in an interview, “you were a sonuvabitch.” In one of his many short-term studio situations throughout the 1930s, he rented part of his studio to a sculptor named Ahron Ben-Shmuel, who Noguchi credited with teaching him how to work with hard stone.
LŠ: Following his return from Paris to New York in 1929, he met futurist Buckminster Fuller shortly after.
MK: It could have been Brancusi or Stuart Davis who told Noguchi that he should seek out a cafe in Greenwich Village run by a Romanian woman named Romany Marie. Romany Marie was this beloved figure who was kind to artists, writers, and intellectuals and kept them fed so long as they held her cafe interesting. Buckminster Fuller was one of her regulars, and he was known to give long, extemporaneous talks there. Noguchi just so happened to be one of those artists keen to learn and asked Fuller questions, which is how they struck up a friendship.
There was only about a 9-10 year age gap between the two, but I think at the beginning Noguchi saw him as a sort of wise uncle. They were both broke, and Noguchi talked about how they figured out an arrangement to stay for free in unoccupied hotel rooms, where they’d set up shop and work on their projects. I’m sure it was a precarious lifestyle, but it’s almost funny to think about how these two intellects outsmarted the Depression in a way.
Noguchi eventually helped Fuller visualize his concept for the Dymaxion Car by creating plaster models for him. They ended up coordinating their exhibitions in Boston and Chicago and making road trips together. Fuller was already thinking about making low-cost housing a reality for large populations. The impact on Noguchi was to get him to think about art that had broader social implications.
LŠ: In 1930, Noguchi departed on a big trip to Asia. His first destination was supposed to be Japan, but there was difficult communication with his father, and he stopped in China first (in Beijing). How have his travels impacted his work?
MK: Noguchi always characterized himself as self-taught, an eternal student. He claimed that he never really had a proper education and that it was only by reading, visiting museums, and traveling that he ever learned about art or history. If you look at his 1949-50 itinerary for the trip he took through Western Europe, Egypt, India, and Indonesia on a Bollingen Foundation grant, a lot of what he saw overlaps with UNESCO’s World Heritage sites a few years before that concept even existed. On this trip, he visited different public spaces – plazas, temples, cathedrals, and other places where sculpture was intimately related to architecture and space. What he saw in his travels became part of a mental store he’d continually draw from.
He also had incredible luck – and maybe a bit of guile – during his travels that put him in the right place at the right time to meet some of the greatest artists and thinkers of his time. He was generally perceptive and receptive, which carried over to his practice. When he traveled, he responded to whatever materials and resources were available to him as an artist.
LŠ: 1930 was an exciting year for him because, first, it opened his practice in very different ways. His focus on drawing and ceramics is prominent. How and when does the shift occur?
MK: It occurred by happenstance, really. At some point during the eight months Noguchi stayed in Peking/Beijing, he got to know a Japanese businessman named Sotokichi Katsuizumi, who was also an art collector. When Katsuizumi invited Noguchi to see his collection, he had numerous scrolls by a painter, poet, and teacher named Qi Baishi, whose work floored Noguchi. Similar to the incredible luck Noguchi had in meeting Brancusi within a short time of getting to Paris in 1927, Katsuizumi knew Qi Baishi and took Isamu to meet him. We don’t know the exact circumstances – whether Noguchi got lessons in ink brush painting from Qi Baishi for one day, one week, or one month. Still, Noguchi must have made some impression on Qi Baishi as the older artist made personal inscriptions on his drawings that Noguchi later took home with him. Qi Baishi even carved a stamp on a chop that he gave to Noguchi (which we still have in the collection).
Noguchi also became interested in porcelain ceramics while he was in China, and he learned that some of the works he liked best were forgeries made by artists in Japan. So, when he inevitably made his way to Japan in 1931, he sought out ceramicists who specialized in forgeries. He stayed in Kyoto for a while, apprenticed with a ceramicist named Jinmatsu Uno, and made his first terracotta sculptures. The funny thing is that these were sort of self-contained, short-term experiences in both cases. When he returned to New York, he moved on to new processes and new materials. He never really returned to ink brush painting, and it was only when he returned to Japan in 1950 that Noguchi picked up where he left off on ceramics. It was about keeping his mind and hands active. Both of these avenues taught Noguchi to work with concentration, quickness, and assuredness. You can’t fix a bad brushstroke, and there’s only so much you can do to adjust a three-dimensional form in clay in real-time before starting over completely. This absolutely translates to stone-carving if you think about it. One bad stroke from a chisel can kill a sculpture in progress.
LŠ: Was he in touch with the members of the Mingei movement?
MK: Noguchi knew of Yanagi Sōetsu and Mingei, but I’m not certain that he had any direct contact. I seem to remember that Rosanjin, who hosted Noguchi on his property for a period, may have been on bad terms with Yanagi. Noguchi was certainly simpatico with Yanagi in the sense that he felt traditional materials and processes were worth studying and adapting. The Akari were certainly in tune with that.
LŠ: He was also in touch with the members of the Gutai Art Association.
Noguchi had some pretty remarkable access to Japan’s avant-garde when he returned for a visit in 1950 and got to know artists, photographers, architects, and critics. He struck up a friendship with a painter, poet, and critic named Saburo Hasegawa, who seemed to know everyone. Hasegawa was part of numerous avant-garde groups from the 1930s on, and he’d known Jirō Yoshihara for many years, so he would have introduced the two. Noguchi and Yoshihara were at least acquaintances, if not friends.
LŠ: How and when did Noguchi enter the field of furniture design?
MK: Noguchi had already created some industrial designs beginning in the 1930s, including an outer casing for a kitchen timer called Measured Time and then a shell for Zenith Corporation’s baby monitor, the Radio Nurse. Similar to the portrait busts, these jobs supported him during lean times, and Noguchi viewed them as creative challenges. Soon after, he created unique tables for two different MoMA trustees; the second of those, a table for A. Conger Goodyear with a glass top and a wood base, became a sort of seed of an idea for what would become Noguchi’s well-known glass top coffee table produced by Herman Miller. A glass table top set on top of splayed wooden props was a concept that coincided with the sculptures he was making in his studio in the mid-1940s, composed of sheets of marble, slate, and wood that were shaped to slot and join together without nails or other fasteners. This sort of exchange brought Noguchi’s sculptural thinking into the home’s everyday environment.
LŠ: How was the Noguchi Museum formed?
MK: After establishing his studio in a prefab building he purchased in Long Island City in 1961, Noguchi worked across the street from a then-vacant factory building with its own walled-in courtyard space. Up to a certain point, he was content with short-term associations he enjoyed with different galleries in New York. However, he had sculptures on consignment with these galleries as he wasn’t really keen to sell many since, for one, it changed his tax status. But mainly, he had trouble parting with sculptures, many of which he considered personal milestones. (Shades of Brancusi.) While these arrangements with galleries became a little convoluted, he purchased the factory building on Vernon Boulevard to store sculptures hanging out in the backrooms of these galleries or other storage spaces. He slowly did a light renovation of the building with his collaborator Shoji Sadao, keeping the basic feel and integrity of the setting. They also cleaned up the courtyard space. He arranged constellations of sculptures in the building and the reclaimed garden, and eventually, he started inviting visiting friends to come out for visits; he’d serve them lunch and give them a tour.
Meanwhile, Noguchi was also receiving many requests from museums to consider giving them gifts. In Noguchi’s experience, many of his works that were either purchased or gifted to museum collections ended up sitting in their storage spaces, which was disappointing for Noguchi. So Noguchi started giving real consideration to the future of his sculptures and gradually concluded that they only had real significance as a total body of work. He also achieved some late-in-life financial stability through the project commissions he took on and through Akari sales. So eventually, he decided to work toward opening his space to the public. Noguchi purchased the corner plot adjoining the factory building and a maintenance garage and worked with Sadao to create an entrance building with a sheltered open-air gallery with floating galleries above.
The museum opened to the public in 1985, at first seasonally from April through October. In its first few years, one could visit the museum, and you might see Noguchi in the galleries. After Noguchi passed away in 1988, the Foundation began to sort out his affairs. Shoji Sadao played a big role in that and completed some of Noguchi’s outstanding public projects. Though some changes were made to the building to accommodate visitors in the early 2000s, it still has the feel of the factory building that Noguchi appreciated, and the arrangement of the sculptures on the first floor, the garden, and the floating galleries are pretty much as Noguchi left them.
