Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)

Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, the son of a Japanese father and an American mother. When he was two, writer Leonie Gilmour took him to Japan to rejoin his father, poet Yone Noguchi. Isamu was raised in Japan until age thirteen, when he was sent to America for schooling. After high school in La Porte, Indiana, and two years at Columbia University, Noguchi began his artistic career studying figurative sculpture at the Leonardo Da Vinci School of Art in New York. In 1927 he traveled on a Guggenheim Fellowship to Paris, where he worked with Constantin Brancusi and made his first abstract sculptures of wood, metal, and stone. Returning to New York in 1929, Noguchi supported himself by sculpting portrait heads. That year he met dancer Martha Graham and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller, both of whom would be major influences on his work.

In 1930 Noguchi traveled to China, where he created large ink-brush paintings while studying with the master Ch’i Pai-shih; the following year he visited Japan, where he worked in ceramics in Kyoto. There, Noguchi discovered the Japanese gardens that would move him toward a new conception of sculpture focusing on the earth and the environment. Beginning in 1933 with his design for the unrealized “Play Mountain” for New York City, Noguchi began to think of the earth itself as a sculptural medium, and he continued to design playgrounds, parks, and gardens throughout his life.

It was only with the economic boom following World War II, however, that Noguchi was able to realize his ideas in the landscape. Beginning with his garden for the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1956-58), his landscape projects included gardens for Chase Manhattan Plaza (New York City, 1961-64), IBM Headquarters (Armonk, N.Y., 1964), and the Israel Museum (Jerusalem, 1960-65). In the 1930s Noguchi also began to create large public sculptures, such as “History of Mexico” (Mexico City, 1936), “Ford Fountain” for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and “News” (1938-40) for the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center, New York. His later public sculptures include “Red Cube” (New York City, 1968), “Black Sun” (Seattle Art Museum, 1969), “Landscape of Time” (Seattle, 1975) and “Bolt of Lightning . . . Memorial to Ben Franklin” (Philadelphia, 1980-84).

Although he had abandoned abstract sculpture during the 1930s, Noguchi again embraced abstraction upon returning to New York in 1942 after leaving the Japanese-American relocation camp at Poston, Arizona, which he had voluntarily entered earlier that year. He carved biomorphic sculptures of interlocking elements from thin sheets of slate and marble and experimented with self-illuminated sculptures that he called Lunars. Noguchi arrived in postwar Japan in 1950 after a year of travel on a grant from the Bollingen Foundation and, reintroduced to the culture of his father, embarked on a number of important public projects. These included the creation of two bridges for Peace Park in Hiroshima, and the design of the unrealized “Memorial to the Atomic Dead of Hiroshima”. In Japan, Noguchi also combined traditional and modernist motifs in ceramic and cast-iron sculptures. Returning to America in the 1950s, he worked in new forms, such as bent and folded sheets of aluminum and steel, and carved elegant sculptures of Greek and Italian marble. During the 1960s most of his carving was done in marble in Pietrasanta, Italy, but by 1969 he had built a studio in the village of Mure on the Japanese island of Shikoku. In Mure he created the large sculptures of basalt and granite that were the culmination of his career. Throughout his last decade Noguchi traveled regularly between New York and Japan, continuing to work on both landscape projects and individual stone sculptures. In 1985 he established the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in a factory building and sculpture garden across the street from his studio in Long Island City, New York.

The Balance Stone, 1978

Granite and basalt 10 ¼ x 20 x 11 in. (26 x 50.8 x 27.9 cm)

Inscribed (beneath basalt): I. N.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Thomson; Charles F. Smith Fund; Friends Purchase Fund (1983.53)

In the late 1960s Isamu Noguchi established a studio in Japan on the island of Shikoku, in an area known for stone carving. Noguchi had first visited Shikoku in 1956 in search of stones for his garden at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, and he returned looking for a craftsman to work with him on the monumental granite sculpture “Black Sun” (1969) for the Seattle Art Museum. He was referred to a stonecutter from the village of Mure, Masatoshi Izumi, with whom he developed a working relationship that would last twenty years. Izumi built a studio compound for Noguchi consisting of a large outdoor work yard encircled by a dry-set stone wall, two reconstructed “kuras” (storehouses) for work and display, and an ancient samurai house moved from a nearby town for the artist’s residence. During the last two decades of his life, Noguchi spent about six months each year at Shikoku working with Izumi and his crew of stonecarvers at the dramatic site overlooking the Inland Sea. It is in Mure that he carved the large basalt and granite works, including “The Balance Stone”, that are arguably his greatest sculptural achievement.

Before Noguchi began to work in Mure, most of his carving had been done in marble. Because marble is softer and easier to carve than granite and basalt, these new materials slowed down Noguchi’s pace of carving and focused his attention on stone in a new way. Stone became a symbol of nature, and carving became a metaphor for the human confrontation with the temporal for our intersection with historical, geological, and astronomical time. In this late work Noguchi addressed the kind of metaphysical issues to which he was drawn through physical engagement with a symbolic material rather than by means of referential or narrative imagery.

Focusing on the stone itself, Noguchi often left part of the rock’s surface unworked, revealing where it had been torn from the earth or displaying its rich natural “skin.” He employed different textures chosen from a vocabulary of surface treatments, each of which also had a different color, untouched natural exteriors, areas of small chisel marks, ragged edges where one stone had been broken from another, and smoothly polished surfaces. The colors that he found in basalt are the most striking, with its rusty brown “skin” and deep hue that emerges with polishing, as in “The Balance Stone”.

The Balance Stone has an interesting history, for an earlier incarnation of this sculpture included an additional element sitting in the V on what is currently its uppermost stone. This “balancing” of three elements atop one another is probably what suggested the title, but Noguchi had removed the third part by the time the sculpture was shown in his seventy-fifth birthday exhibition, at New York’s Pace Gallery in 1980. The process was wholly characteristic of his working method, in which he would continue to examine his sculptures and to make changes, even after a piece was considered finished. The resulting two-element sculpture presents a deep polished V at the top, exemplifying what Noguchi called his “investigation on the inside . . . a kind of research into the stone.” (1)

Although Noguchi came to Mure to carve large sculptures of granite and basalt, he underwent back surgery in 1978 and was temporarily unable to work at that scale. While convalescing he began to create smaller pieces, often taking as his material the egg-shaped stones of Agi granite on which local stoneworkers practiced their chisel marks. The Balance Stone dates from this period, but its ovoid element is of basalt. Where he did not leave the natural skin untouched, Noguchi used power tools to cut and polish, freely employing new technology along with the traditional chisel and hammer.

This conjunction of apparent opposites suggests another meaning of the title “The Balance Stone”, a sculpture that balances the organic and the geometric, the ancient and the modern, and the hand and the machine as effectively as it does one element atop the other. It thus alludes to a central aspect of Noguchi’s career, which held such oppositions in tension and drew energy from contrasting impulses. More than a formal feature of his sculpture, the omnipresence of oppositions is tied to Noguchi’s mixed ethnicity, being American and Japanese. Never feeling entirely at home in either culture and experiencing racial intolerance in both, Noguchi sought a kind of resolution in a peripatetic internationalism. The notion of balance was crucial to his course, both in issues of national identity and in his work, which juggled landscape, interior, and theater design with sculptural practice. “The Balance Stone” is more than a fine small sculpture of the artist’s last decade, for it can be taken as a symbol of the balancing of the psychological and artistic forces that generated his oeuvre.

BJA

Bibliography:

Isamu Noguchi, “A Sculptor’s World” (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Sam Hunter, “Isamu Noguchi” (New York: Abbeville Press, 1978); Isamu Noguchi, “The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987); Dore Ashton, “Noguchi: East and West” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); Bruce Altshuler, “Isamu Noguchi” (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994); Bruce Altshuler and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, eds., “Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).

NOTES:

. Noguchi, quoted in Sam Hunter, “Isamu Noguchi,” in “Isamu Noguchi: Seventy-fifth Birthday Exhibition”, exhib. cat. (New York: Andre Emmerich Gallery and Pace Gallery, 1980), n.p.