by Bruce Altshuler

In the spring of 1951 Isamu Noguchi visited Gifu Prefecture to see the famous cormorant fishing in the Nagara River. The sculptor was on his way to Hiroshima to discuss a commission to design railings for two bridges into the city's new Peace Park.(1) These bridges, along with his garden and landscape designs, stand at one pole of Noguchi's integration of the fine and applied arts. In contrast to such public works, however, are the intimate furnishings that the artist created for the home. It was in Gifu on that visit, inspired by the lanterns illuminating the night fishing on the Nagara, that Noguchi sketched the first of his most well-known works of this kind -- the mulberry paper and bamboo lamps that he called Akari.

The creation of Akari represents both continuity and a new beginning within Noguchi's work. As light sculptures Akari develop the sculptural use of illumination that Noguchi had first proposed in 1933 for his unrealized Musical Weathervane, and that he had brought to fruition with his Lunar sculptures and interiors during the next decade. As home furnishings Akari extend the domestic application of sculptural principles that Noguchi had advanced with his biomorphic furniture of the 1940s. But those first Akari also stand at the beginning of Noguchi's reintegration with Japan, an essential element of his attempt to establish some sort of Japanese identity in the land of his father. The history of Akari is one of technical and sculptural development, but it also is part of Noguchi's reclaiming a cultural heritage that he would merge with Western modernism. The culmination of this process was to be the great basalt and granite sculptures of the artist's last years.

Son of Japanese poet Yonejiro (Yone) Noguchi and American writer Leonie Gilmour, Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904, taken to Tokyo when he was two, and sent back to the United States for schooling at age thirteen. Before 1950 he had returned to Japan only once, a 1931 visit of eight months, when the young artist initially saw the Zen gardens, Noh drama and ancient Haniwa sculpture that would be so important to his future work. But during the next two decades Noguchi worked wholly in Western idioms in New York, first the political figuration of the 1930s and then the biomorphic abstraction of European Surrealism. It was in this latter mode that Noguchi achieved distinction as a member of the developing New York School. After a personal crisis precipitated by the suicide of his friend Arshile Gorky, and by his own art world success, in 1949 Noguchi applied for a fellowship from the Bollingen Foundation to study the meaning of sculpture in the pre-modern world. Disenchanted with art objects created for the aesthetic satisfaction of the wealthy, he sought in the great public spaces of the ancient and medieval world an art that expressed deeper values and served a more constructive social purpose.

After traveling through Europe and Southeast Asia, in May 1950 Noguchi arrived in Japan. Welcomed as an eminent representative of the modern movement, he fell in with the young artists and architects engaged in building a new cultural life out of the ashes of the war. The first of his projects was a quite personal one, a faculty room and garden commissioned in memory of his father at Keio University in Tokyo, where Yone Noguchi had taught for forty years. Isamu's feelings toward his father were mixed -- anger at childhood rejection and at Yone's coolness during Isamu's 1931 visit, but also a craving for acceptance from this poet who always represented the artist to his distant child. The Keio University commission gave Noguchi a chance to claim this acceptance, at least in a symbolic manner, and to retrieve his Japanese identity as Yone's son. In this effort he embraced traditional elements of Japanese design, setting them within the modern mode of architect Yoshiro Taniguchi's reconstruction of the university building known as Shin Banraisha (New Building of Welcome). One of these elements was bent wood magemono construction, the method used to make dumpling steamers, which Noguchi employed to fabricate the lamp he designed to hang over his long oval table. As would be the case with Akari, the harsh electric light was diffused by the handmade paper known as washi.

During August 1950 Noguchi worked on the furnishings for his father's memorial room at the Industrial Arts Institute in Tokyo, run by Isamu Kenmochi. Kenmochi sought to utilize craft techniques and materials to create modern objects for the postwar economy, and Noguchi's first design of this kind was a chair whose bulbous back and seat were woven in the manner of traditional bamboo baskets (zaru). While this chair never went beyond the prototype stage, with Akari Noguchi would realize Kenmochi's goal of creating a successful product for export by combining modern design with the indigenous craft forms of Japan.(2)

Noguchi was prompted to renew this endeavor by the mayor of Gifu City, whom he met on that first visit in 1951. Knowing of Noguchi's design work and artistic reputation, the mayor appealed to him to help revive the paper lantern industry by creating new lamps for the American and European markets. Located about eighteen miles north of Nagoya, Gifu City was a major center for the production of mulberry bark paper and bamboo umbrellas and lanterns. (Over half of the paper lanterns produced in Japan are still made there.) These industries were supplied by the nearby paper making area of Mino, long known for its high quality mulberry paper, Mino-gami. Utilizing a spiral rather than a hoop skeleton, the egg-shaped folding paper lanterns (chochin) of Gifu were decorated with finely painted flowers and grasses. But after the war a cheap variety of souvenir lantern had been developed for export, a phenomenon that Noguchi observed with chagrin. Seeking to reclaim from such degeneration the elegance and simplicity of the traditional lantern, he conceived his first two Akari that initial night in Gifu.

Noguchi's redesign of the traditional Gifu-chochin looked back to tradition and forward to more modern design. For the collapsible spiral structure on which the paper was glued, Noguchi rejected the wire used for cheap exports and returned to the thin strips of bamboo that had been employed previously. But he replaced candles with electric bulbs, and created an internal metal armature that allowed his lamps to assume a variety of sculptural forms without an obtrusive frame. The overall shape of Akari also faced in two directions. His early models evoked the historical antecedent of the traditional Gifu lantern, but they were very much of the 1950s. Graceful forms that employed the popular biomorphism of the period, and a growing number of lamps using reductive geometrical imagery, they combined the simplicity of the Japanese aesthetic with the look of sophisticated international design.

An extension of Noguchi's use of light as a sculptural medium in his Lunars, Akari also displayed the artist's developing sculptural concerns. Certain shapes would appear in paper as well as in stone -- an homage to the Endless Column of Brancusi, with whom Noguchi apprenticed in Paris in 1927; a twisted rhomboid column evoking the double helix of molecular biology; a tall form with a biomorphic bulge. Yet these lanterns were sculptural in a deeper sense, being, for Noguchi, physical expressions of metaphysical concepts. The name Akari means light as illumination, but Noguchi also viewed their essence as light in the sense of weightlessness. For him, their very nature "questions materiality, and is consonant with our appreciation today of the less thingness of things, the less encumbered perceptions."(3)

Once Noguchi visited Gifu and conceived of Akari, events began to move quickly. He was introduced to Tameshiro Ozeki, whose family firm had been an important maker of Gifu-chochin since the Meiji period, and four Akari prototypes were fabricated. These prototypes arrived in New York in August, and Noguchi was pleased with the results. He returned to Gifu in October to work on additional designs and discuss business arrangements, and by 1952 Ozeki and Company was engaged in commercial production of Akari. Initially it was thought that Akari also would be produced by other members of the Gifu Lantern Makers' Association, but after imitation Akari began to appear Noguchi decided to use Ozeki alone. For more than three decades he would work closely with this firm, their collaboration resulting in a line of lamps that eventually included over one hundred models. In Gifu today Akari are still produced by hand by the Ozeki family company, run by Tameshiro's son Hidetaro, in the manner that Noguchi first observed in 1951.

The fabrication of Akari follows the traditional process of the Gifu lantern makers, which begins with the construction of a multi-part wooden mold that defines the overall shape of the end product. Very thin pieces of bamboo are wound in a spiral around this form -- for some models in the tight uniform style of the traditional Gifu-chochin and for others in a looser, more irregular pattern. Strips of Mino paper then are glued lengthwise onto the bamboo structure. Once the glue is dry and the shape set, the internal mold is disassembled and removed. The result is a strong paper form that can be collapsed and packed in a flat box for shipping. Also fitting nicely into this box is Noguchi's primary technical innovation for Akari, an interlocking skeletal wire support: an internal armature that extends the paper lantern to full form, and a three- or four-legged base above which the light sculpture seems to float. In 1953 in Japan, and in 1954 in the U.S., Noguchi applied for a patent for this "Stretcher and Support for Japanese Lanterns," and by 1956 the patent was granted in both countries.

Noguchi's career was punctuated by intense periods of highly productive artistic activity, and this certainly was the case during the first year that Akari were manufactured. For much of 1952 he lived in the countryside of Kita Kamakura with his new wife, actress Yoshiko (Shirley) Yamaguchi. The couple had been lent a two hundred year old farmhouse by the eminent potter Kitaoji Rosanjin, and here Noguchi embraced the life of traditional Japan in a beautiful rice valley. After constructing a studio that combined the archaic and the elegant in his characteristic fashion, Noguchi worked on numerous projects, including the dramatic Memorial to the Atomic Dead for Hiroshima (a design that eventually would be rejected because Noguchi was an American), an impressive body of ceramic sculpture, and a large group of new Akari. He filled his residence with these light sculptures, and included a range of Akari designs in his exhibition at the new Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, a show primarily devoted to one hundred and nineteen Noguchi ceramic works. There also would be a large exhibition of Akari at the Chuo-Koron Gallery in Tokyo, whose interior Noguchi had designed.

Although the first Akari were completely white forms -- modified Gifu-chochin stripped of floral motifs -- photographs of these early exhibitions show lamps decorated in color with geometrical and biomorphic patterns, and even one model with ideographic characters. Here Noguchi's modernist sensibility had run up against a feature of Japanese tradition that he did not anticipate, the association of white lanterns with funerals and death. This was pointed out to him in Tokyo by the sales manager of the Takashimaya Department Store in Nihonbashi, the first place to sell Akari.(4) Few of these decorated models were exported, however, for the attraction of Akari in the international market was its clean modern imagery, employing old craft traditions in a wholly contemporary way.

Since Noguchi had developed Akari for this foreign market, immediately upon returning to New York in the summer of 1951 he began to seek an American distributor. He already was discussing with Lightolier the production of new versions in plastic of his biomorphic Lunar forms, and he reported to the Gifu City department of commerce and industry that there was immediate interest in the lanterns he had designed in Japan.(5 ) But when Lightolier did not meet his expectations on the initial project, Noguchi found another venue. This was Bonniers at 605 Madison Avenue, New York's leading showcase for international modern design, with whom he signed an exclusive U.S. distribution agreement in May 1953. Bonniers agreed to pay for the registration of the Akari trademark -- adjacent circular and crescent shapes, symbols of the sun and the moon, designed by Isamu's half-brother, Michio Noguchi -- and in April 1955 they presented the first New York Akari exhibition. European distribution was arranged through Wohnbedarf AG, Zurich, beginning in 1954, and Akari took its place within the expanding world of postwar interior design. By the early sixties Akari were being sold in Central and South America.

As Akari became successful a number of imitations began to appear on the market, and in the late fifties and early sixties this was a significant concern for Noguchi and for his distributors. The artist already had experienced in the 1940s the harm that pirated lamps could do, when Knoll ceased production of his successful cylinder table lamp due to the widespread appearance of inexpensive copies. With Akari the main culprit was the Tomoshibi Lamp line produced by another Gifu company, one of whose advertisements actually showed two knock-offs in the Zen garden of Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto. Noguchi and Ozeki successfully brought legal action in Japan against the rival manufacturer, and they pressured foreign outlets not to carry imitation Akari. But the problem remained to haunt this high-quality, hand-made product, which readily could be under-sold by cheap replicas.

A more profound problem for Noguchi was internal, an ambivalence concerning the role of the artist as designer. In Japan Noguchi worked within a context that accepted the unity of fine and functional art, a culture in which a tea bowl could be considered as great a creation as a brush painting. But back in New York his reputation as a sculptor suffered from a longstanding involvement with design, from early dance sets and furniture to postwar architectural and landscape projects. For the artists of the New York School, a collaborative design project like Akari -- involving interaction with fabricators, mass production and commercial marketing -- lacked the aesthetic (and existential) integrity of the artist struggling alone in the studio with his unique creation. The sculptural qualities of Noguchi's lamps were appreciated, but their functional and commercial aspects were seen to compromise their status as objects of art. He tried to deflect this attitude when he first showed Akari in a New York art gallery. In his December 4, 1968-January 4, 1969 exhibition "Shapes of Light" at the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery, particular lamps were presented as sculptural multiples, in signed editions of five. But Noguchi felt that he was taken less seriously as a sculptor because of the increasing popularity of Akari, and his sensitivity on this matter led to the cancellation of an Akari exhibition at Bloomingdale's in spring 1969. By the next year, however, Noguchi had relented, and there was a Bloomingdale's display in April 1970.

Noguchi's situation here was a particularly ironic one, for he was the only artist of the early New York School whose work actually maintained the social orientation of the 1930s that had been essential to the formation of the group. Through his interior design and landscape projects, Noguchi continued to insist that art play a productive role in everyday life. In the utopian spirit of modernist design he once referred to Akari as "elegant people's art," and for much of their history these lamps were quite inexpensive.(6) Despite unavoidable price increases, however, it is remarkable that one still can purchase a seven-foot tall sculpture by a major artist for only a few hundred dollars, albeit in an unlimited edition.

While Akari are functional, in that they provide light for living, they do so primarily in an environmental way, illuminating whole spaces rather than supplying focussed light for particular activities. In thus affecting the quality and structure of the surrounding space, Akari exemplify Noguchi's expanded conception of sculpture -- they are part of what he called the sculpture of spaces. Influenced by his experience of Zen gardens, Noh stage sets and the Japanese home -- and by time spent in Paris in Brancusi's studio environment -- Noguchi came to see sculpture as more than the portable, freestanding object of aesthetic appreciation. He developed this view in the leftist 1930s, and among its first expressions was his 1933 proposal for Play Mountain, the sculpting of a New York City block into a terraced pyramid for public use. Rejected with sarcasm by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who would foil plan after plan for Noguchi playgrounds in New York, Play Mountain, Noguchi later wrote, "was the kernel out of which have grown all my ideas relating sculpture to the earth."(7) Beginning in the fifties these ideas led to the construction of more than twenty major landscape projects, work that Noguchi carried on with great determination alongside his carving and fabricating of more standard sculptural objects. The first instantiation of the sculpture of spaces, however, was on the stage, with his 1935 set for Martha Graham's Frontier. Over the next half century, in twenty-seven stage sets and in striking interior spaces, and in fountains, plazas and gardens, Noguchi reoriented sculpture toward the creation of the lived environment, evolving a new conception of what sculpture could be. Merging social and aesthetic aspiration, this notion of sculpture enters the home with Akari.

Assembling its various strands, the story of Akari brings together the fundamental themes of Noguchi's life and career. Inspired by an old Japanese craft form, and employing traditional materials and methods of manufacture, the creation of Akari established a connection with the land of the father who had spurned him. Thus attempting to heal psychic wounds, at the same time Noguchi was able to assist in Japanese economic reconstruction and help a threatened craft industry. In New York, as a commercial and collaborative product, Akari was a source of friction with a community of artists tied to a narrow conception of artistic creation and the artwork, and within which Noguchi struggled for acceptance. But like his landscape and interior design projects, the development of Akari was part of Noguchi's expanding conception of sculpture, a view of sculpture that focused on the creation of spatial environments. In this Noguchi recalled the utopian spirit of modernism at the same time as he departed from its more formalist intrepretation.

Apart from theoretical and biographical considerations, however, the fundamental facts about Akari are experiential, a consequence of the beautiful craftsmanship and materials, the warm light cast through handmade paper, the floating sculptural forms. Like the beauty of falling leaves and the cherry blossom, their quality is, Noguchi wrote, "poetic, ephemeral, and tentative." The image might be Japanese, but what he created was sought "not as something oriental but as something we need."(8 ) Product of psychological exigency, social concern and aesthetic innovation, the Akari light sculpture is, in the end, deeply satisfying of human needs. Noguchi's favorite observation about Akari speaks to this point, and sounds a poignant note for this man who said that he could feel at home anywhere because he was at home nowhere: All that you require to start a home are a room, a tatami, and Akari.

Notes

(1.) On occasion Noguchi also stated that he first went to Gifu en route to Kyoto.

(2.) Concerning Noguchi's use of traditional craft forms and the importance of Kenmochi, on broader issues of identity as they relate to his work in Japan in the 1950's, and on Noguchi's reception by the Japanese during this period, I have learned much from the research of Bert Winther. See Bert Winther, Isamu Noguchi: Conflicts of Japanese culture in the early postwar years (Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I, 1992).

(3.) Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p.33

(4.) Winther, pp.285-286.

(5.) For these updated Lunars, see "New Shapes for Lighting: Sculptor's Lamps are Dim, Decorative," Life, March 10, 1952, pp.114-117, and "Lightolier's Light Fantastics," Interiors, April 1952, p.132. The Life article also shows two Akari-type lamps, which seem to be prototypes that were not put into production.

(6.) John Christensen, "In an Artist's Light," Sunday Star-Bulletin (Honolulu), October 1, 1978, p.C-12. As an example of the affordable nature of Akari, when Bonniers introduced the cube-like model 3X in 1964 the cost was $6.95.

(7.) A Sculptor's World, p.22.

(8.) A Sculptor's World, p.33.