Noguchi, Isamu

Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor's World

Description: In my long experience as an intimate witness of Noguchi's work, I believe that whatever the external entities of his coordinate translating may be, they represent a faithful manifest of the intellectual and harmonic being, Noguchi. In my estimation, the evoluting array and extraordinary breadth of his conceptioning realizations document a comprehensive artist without peer in our time. --R. Buckminster Fuller A Sculptor's World is the long-awaited reprint of Isamu Noguchi's 1968 autobiography. It remains Noguchi's most comprehensive statement about the art that brought him international acclaim. Told in words and images, A Sculptor's World is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the life and work of this seminal artist or a general interest in the art of sculpture. Also reprinted in this volume is the original foreword to the book by R. Buckminster Fuller, from which the above quote is taken.

Isamu Noguchi (Modern Masters Series)

Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi

"Let the East learn from Western civilization. Let the West learn from the Eastern culture. In the world of freedom, we naturally create a relationship to each other."-Isamu Noguchi, in an address to the staff at the Industrial Arts Research Institute inTokyo

Isamu Kenmochi (19121971) was one of the pioneers of industrial design in Japan. Postwar Japanese artists struggled to create their own original industrial products. Kenmochi sought to establish Japanese modern design while reinventing traditional techniques and materials. Like many Japanese artists of his generation, Kenmochi was inspired by Isamu Noguchi (19041988), a pivotal figure in twentieth century sculpture and design. Through Noguchi's influence and subsequent introductions to creative masters such as Alexander Girard, Walter Gropius, George Nelson, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Kenmochi traveled abroad and collected furniture, household products, and thousands of color slides documenting American and European design, which he brought back to Japan to share with contemporaries in the field.

Noguchi and Kenmochi first met at the architect Kenzo Tange's office at Tokyo University on June 24, 1950. In August of that year, Noguchi spent two weeks teaching with Kenmochi at the Industrial Arts Research Institute in Tokyo. Basing his approach on Japanese design traditions, Noguchi persuaded the artists at the institute to look beyond the mere exotic. The ideology they developed came to be known as Japanese Modern, or Japonica Design.

Bonnie Rychlak is curator and director of collections at the Noguchi Museum in New York. An artist herself, Rychlak worked as Isamu Noguchi's assistant until his death in 1988, and is a leading authority on Noguchi's life and art.

Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth

Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) is renowned for his stone and bronze sculpture, his gardenlike installations in public spaces, and his furniture designs. Far less familiar, but no less important, is Noguchi's work in clay, which he executed in three intensive sessions in 1931, 1950, and 1952, all during visits to Japan. The pieces included in this elegant volume and the accompanying exhibition comprise the first major museum presentation of Isamu Noguchi's ceramics and the introduction of the work of major postwar Japanese ceramic artists with whom Noguchi collaborated or interacted. Supported by four linked essays and opulently illustrated in full color and black and white, Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics highlights the sculptor's struggles with cultural identity and his experimentation with the conflicts between modernity and tradition.
Noguchi's sculptures in the medium of clay reveal informal, spontaneous, and humorous aspects not visible in less flexible media such as bronze or stone. Through clay, Noguchi probed unresolved personal issues surrounding his ambiguous cultural identity as the son of a Japanese father and American mother. Because Noguchi made his ceramics in Japan, his work also creates links to a diversity of approaches within the ceramic world of Japan. These range from traditionalists such as Kitaoji Rosanjin and the Living National Treasure designates, to primitivists exemplified by Okamoto Taro and Tsuji Shindo, to avant-garde experimentalists led by the Sodeisha group. An understanding of the nature and scope of the concerns Noguchi expressed through clay is crucial to understanding his work as a whole, and consideration of Japanese ceramic artists in the 1950s reveals a largely unknown genre of modern Japanese art.
Copublished with the Smithsonian Institution

The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders

Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two cultures.

His personal struggles--as well as his many personal triumphs--are vividly chronicled in The Life of Isamu Noguchi, the first full-length biography of this remarkable artist. Published in connection with the centennial of the artist's birth, the book draws on Noguchi's letters, his reminiscences, and interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his youth, his creativity, and his relationships.

During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he befriended Alexander Calder and worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, he became an ardent advocate for abstract sculpture.

Noguchi's private life was no less passionate than his artistic career. The book describes his romances with many women, among them the dancer Ruth Page, the painter Frida Kahlo, and the writer Anaïs Nin.

Despite his fame, Noguchi always felt himself an outsider. "With my double nationality and my double upbringing, where was my home?" he once wrote. "Where were my affections? Where my identity?" Never entirely comfortable in the New York art world, he inevitably returned to his father's homeland, where he had spent a troubled childhood. This prize-winning biography, first published in Japanese, traces Isamu Noguchi's lifelong journey across these artistic and cultural borders in search of his personal identity.

Best of Friends: Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller

Best of Friends: Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller looks closely at the vital friendship and collaboration between Buckminster Fuller, an icon of modern creative and scientific thought, and Isamu Noguchi, one of the of twentieth century's most acclaimed sculptors and designers. This profusely illustrated book includes images of models, sculptures, drawings, and documentary photographs revealing the two men's ongoing discourse and shared ideas, providing a window into the humanistic, utopian perspective that informed not only the work of Fuller and Noguchi but much of the art and architecture of the era in which they worked.

Architect Shoji Sadao collaborated with both Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi on many important projects throughout their careers, and served as executive director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc., from 1991 to 2003.

Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor

The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum

Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design

Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space

Two entirely disparate aspects of our present zeitgeist--the embrace of multicultural complexity in place of its former suppression, and the current elision of landscape design with "real" sculpture and art--might seem to be as adolescent as our own postmodern age. Both, however, were fully embodied in the work of the great Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi (1904-88), which as early as the 1930s was finding reconciliation in cultural rootlessness, and eroding the line between landscape and sculpture. Ana Maria Torres's handsome, erudite, and broad-ranging study of Noguchi's public works drives these two points home. Complete with a wealth of black-and-white photographs of both his completed works and models of his unrealized ones, the book prompts us to consider from new angles some of the unique accomplishments of this very enterprising artist who incorporated elements of ancient outdoor sites into exterior work that provided an uncannily fitting complement to the very midcentury-modern architecture that it was commissioned to accompany.

Here, more than 75 projects are presented and considered; they are divided into seven chapters (each of which focuses on a subsection of Noguchi's vast output, including playgrounds; "earthworks"; gardens, plazas, and parks; memorials; fountains; interiors; and public sculptures) and engrossingly narrated by Torres. Each chapter is kick-started by a Noguchi excerpt about the work in question. The thematic organization of the book means that we keep bouncing back to the 1930s just when we are familiarizing ourselves with the projects and artistic preoccupations of Noguchi's final decade. But that format also underscores how his style and ambitions evolved in a uniquely personal manner, even as they seem to reflect perfectly the spirit of their particular age.

The exciting work that is included here is almost too vast and varied to be summarized, although a small sampling of highlights might include Noguchi's gardens for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, for which he convinced architects Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Bernard Zehrfuss to relocate a mobile of Alexander Calder in order for him to expand on his own ideas (needless to say that Calder was not pleased); the famous sunken garden for Yale University's Beinecke Library, with its three bold marble sculptures--of a pyramid, a ring, and a cube--and marble paving work that was inspired by that of Michelangelo's Piazza del Campidoglio, which Noguchi adored; the massive pylon water fountain and sprawling circular plaza that he designed for downtown Detroit from 1971-79, much to the delight of legendary mayor Coleman Young, who prompted him to design a subterranean amphitheater just beneath it for the city's annual Ethnical Festival; and, three years before his death, the garden of the Domon Ken Museum of Photography in Sakata, Japan: an enclosed court of water that runs over four stone terraces, with a single granite pillar rising up near the center--surely one of the most serenely beautiful vistas in modern architecture, even as reproduced here (as are all of the photos, somewhat unfortunately) in laconic black and white.

There is some less monumental work here that fascinates and delights, too, including the boldly biomorphic and drop-dead mod undulating ceilings that Noguchi designed for St. Louis's American Stove Company building (1948) and Rockefeller Center's Time-Life Building (1947, now shamefully destroyed), plus potentially terrific unrealized work, such as plans that he devised in the 1960s (with beloved collaborator Louis Kahn) for a playground for New York's Riverside Park.

There is one thing that this very satisfying retrospective makes clear about Noguchi: instead of letting the contradictions of his own ancestry undermine his work, he used them to his advantage in a way that--for all of the diverse global influences of his oeuvre--struck this reviewer as quite distinctly and resourcefully American. --Timothy Murphy

Sculptor, garden designer, and architect, Isamu Noguchi throughout his long career designed exterior and interior spaces that deftly bring together influences from various disciplines. His conception of a "sculpture of space"—his most significant contribution to modern sculpture—was fundamental to these designs. Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space is the first comprehensive study of Noguchi's public works, including playgrounds, earthworks, gardens, parks, plazas, memorials, interior design, fountains, and sculptures.

Noguchi moved between disciplines with ease, approaching landscapes from the point of view of an artist and seeking the absolute integration of sculpture, space, and building. An intricate system of material, aesthetic, cultural, and even mythic interconnections characterizes all of his works. Artist Constantin Brancusi, choreographer Martha Graham, and visionary thinker Buckminster Fuller were important early influences. The ancient environments of leisure and ritual and the ceremonial spaces of past cultures—the Samrat Yantra Observatory in India, the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, Egyptian pyramids, Zen mediation gardens—served as important and enduring sources of inspiration. Noguchi's Japanese-American heritage—and his ongoing exploration of this dual identity—also infused his designs with a unique understanding of both Eastern and Western traditions.

More than seventy-five projects are presented in archival photographs—many showing Noguchi's beautiful bronze and plaster models—as well as plans and other drawings created especially for this book. Among the major works are the sunken gardens at Yale University's Beinecke Library in New Haven, Connecticut, and at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York (both in collaboration with Gordon Bunshaft of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill); the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden in Jerusalem; the Jardin Japonais and Patio des Délégués at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris; five proposals for the Riverside Drive playground in New York (in collaboration with architect Louis I. Kahn); nine fountains for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan; Tengoku at the Sogetsu Flower Arranging School in Tokyo; Red Cube at the Marine Midland Bank Plaza in New York; Black Sun at the Seattle Art Museum; and his own Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York.