The Noguchi Museum


The Ceramic Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi

by Bruce Altshuler

(This essay appeared in Isamu Noguchi and Kitaoji Rosanjin, Tokyo: Sezon Museum of Art, 1996)    

Isamu Noguchi worked in ceramics on only three occasions in his long career, and each of these times was as highly charged with emotion as it was with artistic energy.(1) This energy was wholly characteristic of Noguchi, a man constantly in motion who worked simultaneously in many fields.  But the emotion in these instances came from Japan, where all of his ceramic work was created.  For Noguchi's relations with the land of his father were complex ones, and his embrace of this traditional Japanese form was much more than a move to a new medium.  In his ceramic sculpture we see Noguchi reconnect with a cultural heritage from which he was severed at a young age, and with a father from whom he had been painfully distant.  But we also find Noguchi asserting himself as a modern artist, working in new ways with old forms, and situating ancient images and techniques within the art of his time.

 Noguchi's first body of ceramic sculpture was created in Kyoto in 1931.  He recently had returned to Japan for the first time since being sent to the United States for schooling in 1918, and it was a crucial homecoming.  For after traveling the world, and just having spent seven months in Beijing, Noguchi met again the father who he felt had rejected him as a child.  His father, Yonejiro Noguchi, now was a distinguished poet and professor, and the son he confronted in Tokyo was an accomplished artist who had exhibited his sculpture in New York and worked with Constantin Brancusi in Paris.  Their meeting in March that year was a difficult one, but his father helped Isamu by introducing him to a number of important artists.  One of them was sculptor Kotaro Takamura, who before the First World War had issued a manifesto calling for artistic liberation in the Western mode.(2) But Isamu was primarily searching for Asian models, and his focus was ceramics.  While in China he had become interested in T'ang era terra-cotta figures, and he was told that the best forgers of such works were in Japan.  His father suggested that he speak with Jiro Harada, director of the Tokyo National Museum, and Harada gave him the name of Kyoto master potter Jimmatsu Uno.

Although most of Noguchi's ceramic sculpture of 1931 would be done in Kyoto with Uno, he modeled a few pieces in clay during those first two months in Tokyo.  Most important was a portrait head of his father's brother, Totaro Takagi.  In contrast to Yone's coldness, Uncle Takagi treated Isamu with great kindness, and it was in Takagi's house in Nihombashi that Isamu lived while in Tokyo.  Since 1929 Noguchi had been earning his living with his portrait sculpture, and portrait commissions would sustain him through the 1930's.(3) But rarely did he present such an emotionally sensitive treatment of his subject as in this moving image of his benevolent relative.  As opposed to the traditional upright pose of Uncle Takagi, Noguchi's head of the maid who cared for him in Tokyo, Tsuneko-san, was made to rest on its side on a pillow, in the manner of Brancusi's Sleeping Muse.(4) Like Uncle Takagi, this work was modeled in clay and later cast.  The third sculpture that Noguchi remembered making in Tokyo was the figure of the sumo wrestler Tamanishiki, whose powerful stance is vividly realized despite the work's small size.

Noguchi would spend some five months in Kyoto, living in the Higashiyama district in what he describes in his autobiography as "the cottage of a ditchdigger,"(5) an appropriate home for an artist searching for his roots through working in clay.  These modest living quarters immersed Isamu in the traditional mode of Japanese life that he was seeking, distant from the forces of modernization that surrounded him in Tokyo.  His working days were spent with Jimmatsu Uno, who was an expert in celadon glazes.   But in Uno's great climbing kiln, set against the Eastern Mountain, Isamu seems to have primarily created works of terra-cotta.  Few of these pieces survive, but those that are known are elegant figurative images moving toward abstraction.  From Peking Duck, with its long neck emerging from an egg-like body, to The Queen, whose stacked elements evoke the cylindrical figures of ancient Haniwa, Noguchi recovered in clay something of the nature-based abstraction that he had embraced in Brancusi's studio four years before.

Just as Brancusi's sculptural practice had provided Noguchi with a modernist context for the artistic dispositions that he had developed as a youth in Japan -- a love of hand tools and natural materials, an attraction to simplicity of form and structure, and the impulse to integrate art with the everyday environment -- so traditional Japan now furnished Noguchi with material to further develop his own modernist project.  One of these sources was the Haniwa funerary figure, examples of which Isamu saw in the Kyoto museum.  Unlike Picasso and other European modern artists, who found "primitive" or "archaic" sources in cultures to which they had no real connection, with Haniwa Noguchi discovered such material in his own cultural background.  But more than sources for modernist sculpture, Noguchi found in Kyoto a different kind of artistic entity -- the garden.  For in wandering through the empty temple gardens, which in 1931 had few visitors and were poorly maintained, Noguchi discovered what he would call "an art which was beyond art objects."(6) Back in New York two years later, he proposed his first landscape project, Play Mountain, a work that he identified as "the kernel out of which have grown all my ideas relating sculpture to the earth."(7) The sources of this kernel, however, were such gardens as those of Ryoan-ji and Ginkaku-ji, where the earth itself was a sculptural object, and that object was an environment for human activity.

Noguchi's first opportunity to build a garden environment came in 1950 with his next trip to Japan, a visit that also marked his return to ceramics.  Since leaving Tokyo in October 1931 Isamu Noguchi had established himself as an important figure in the New York School.  His work was extremely diverse, and included stage sets created for the choreographer Martha Graham, innovative furniture designs and architectural interiors, large public sculptures in Mexico City and New York, and more intimate sculptures of wood, stone and metal.  But as a successful artist in the late 1940's Noguchi experienced a personal crisis that caused him to question the value of his current artistic direction.  Seeking a greater significance for sculpture than the creation of aesthetic objects for wealthy collectors, he successfully applied for a grant from the Bollingen Foundation to investigate what sculpture had accomplished in the pre-modern period, when it had played a more productive social and spiritual role in community life.  Noguchi traveled for a year throughout the world -- from the ancient and medieval monuments of Europe to the great temple complexes of Southeast Asia -- searching the past for a more meaningful path in the future.  And in May 1950, almost two decades after his last visit, Isamu arrived in Japan to an enthusiastic welcome as an important contemporary artist.

In post-war Tokyo Noguchi was received warmly by the young artists and architects engaged in reconstructing the nation's culture, and he lectured widely and gave numerous interviews.(8) The press reported on his career and present activities, and both Noguchi's lectures and his more casual remarks were published in Japanese newspapers and art journals.  Isamu had brought along more than thirty photographs of his work -- including images of dance sets, public sculptures, exhibitions of his art, furniture, and sculpture of the 1940's -- and he was asked by the Japan Artists' Federation (Nihon Bijusuka Renmei) to present these in an exhibition.  But Noguchi wanted to show new work along with such images from the past, and for the exhibition he combined elements from his current projects with pieces created specifically for this event.  Sponsored by Mainichi Shimbun, which also had sponsored lectures by Noguchi in Tokyo and Osaka, the exhibition was held August 18-27 in the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Nihonbashi.(9)

The Mitsukoshi exhibition presented all aspects of Noguchi's diverse artistic activity, and the overall impression was of a modernist transformation of traditional Japanese forms.  In addition to the models for a faculty room and garden at Keio University, a memorial to his father that Isamu had been asked to design soon after meeting the architect Yoshiro Taniguchi, it also presented the furniture and pieces of sculpture that Noguchi had created for the project.  Isamu had made the wood furniture in the Industrial Arts Institution, run by Isamu Kenmochi, where he also designed a chair whose back rest and seat were made of woven bamboo strips.  Created for export to the modern design market, but fabricated by traditional basket-making techniques, this chair was displayed (alongside a bench and stool destined for Keio) in front of Isamu's large drawing of a bell, in which he inscribed lines about a ringing bell from one of his father's last poems.  The image of the bronze bell (dotaku) also figured in the most poignant work in the exhibition, Isamu's model for a huge bell tower to memorialize those who had perished in the atomic bomb blast five years before.  (During the summer the Japan Artists' Federation had agreed to support Noguchi's proposal to build this monument in Hiroshima, which was the first of his projects for that city.(10))  Noguchi made the model's bells of terra-cotta, suspending them within tall scaffold-like structures where they would toll mournfully in the wind.  He also employed small terra-cotta elements in an abstract sculptural kakemono designed for use in the kind of tokonoma that he envisioned for the modern home, which was hung in the exhibition along with brackets that Noguchi designed to display the paintings of his new friends Saburo Hasegawa, Hiro Nishida and Sanzuna Inoue.  But the most impressive ceramics were those that Noguchi made for the exhibition during a week of intense activity in Seto.

In order to create ceramics for the exhibition Isamu and his half-brother Michio Noguchi traveled to Seto in Aichi Prefecture, where the potter Hajime Kato provided the artist with materials and facilities.  Here Isamu made at least a dozen pieces, which fall into a number of categories.  Displayed together on the floor of the exhibition were works that employ a kind of surrealist abstraction, such as Skin and Bones, My Mu and Love of Two Boards: mostly hollow forms -- some biomorphic and others rectilinear -- many with punctures and protuberances.  About half of the sculptures on the floor were vase- or vessel-like works that strongly evoke the figure, such as the tall work called Haniwa.  All of these pieces were produced by refining and reworking a sculptural image, rather than by the more spontaneous process that we will see in the ceramics done two years later.  But installed on a shelf  elsewhere were a few works of the latter kind, explicitly figurative sculptures more rough in finish and entirely different in mood.  One of them, The Lovers -- carrot-like figures embracing in the manner of Brancusi's The Kiss -- is quite comical.  But the others are serious in tone, and seem directly related to the nightmare of atomic destruction. 1950's Child  is a haunting vision of  youth, with none of the playfulness that Noguchi generally associated with childhood.  And while the other two figures seem humorous at first glance, viewed in the light of Hiroshima their humor turns to horror, as the Bell Child explodes and the disconnected body parts and umbrella appear to fry in a work called Hot Day, which employs the kind of tortured figuration found in much European sculpture after the war.(11) As he had done in 1931 in Kyoto, in his ceramic works of 1950 Noguchi applied modern sculptural vocabularies that he had brought from the West to indigenous Japanese forms and materials.  Critics, impressed by both the contemporaneity and the Japanese feel of Noguchi's work, responded well to the exhibition.

While ceramic sculpture was only one aspect of Noguchi's display at Mitsukoshi,  ceramics dominated his next exhibition in Japan two years later.  From September 23 through October 19, 1952 in his one-person exhibition at the new Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura -- Japan's first museum devoted to modern and contemporary art -- Noguchi presented a tour de force of 119 ceramic works.(12) Most of these pieces were made on the land of Kitaoji Rosanjin, where Noguchi lived during 1952 with his new wife, actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi.  Created during a period of intense artistic activity that began in May of that year, the works shown at Kamakura constitute Noguchi's last, and his largest, body of ceramic sculpture.

The time that Noguchi spent in Kita Kamakura on Rosanjin's property was unique in his experience, and it yielded a group of sculptures like no other in his career.  Here this urban artist -- who had spent his working life in New York, Paris, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Beijing, Tokyo and Kyoto -- reconnected with nature, recalling fond memories of his Japanese childhood.  Living in a two-hundred year old farmhouse overlooking a beautiful rice field, Noguchi enthusiastically embraced the lifestyle of traditional Japan. But Noguchi also was involved in many projects that directed his gaze outside Rosanjin's secluded valley.  He was engaged in the construction of the two bridges that he had designed for Peace Park in Hiroshima;  he was involved in the design and fabrication of his Akari lamps, an enterprise that had begun in Gifu the previous year; and he was at work on an ambitious proposal for Hiroshima's central memorial for the atomic dead.

From the spring of 1952 on, however, Noguchi's primary activity in Kita Kamakura was ceramic sculpture.  Because the farmhouse was so small he built a new studio alongside the original building, cutting into the adjacent hill to form a packed dirt wall and archaic-looking fireplace in an elegant space that was featured in the international design press.(13) Here, having access to Rosanjin's kiln and to his stock of clay from throughout Japan, Noguchi worked with the earth that he so closely identified with nature.  As he said in an essay written for the Kamakura exhibition, his current work was characterized by "my rediscovery of this intimate nature which I had almost forgotten since childhood. ...to know nature again as an adult, to exhaust one's hands in its earth ... one has to be a potter, or a sculptor, and that also in Japan."(14)

In Kita Kamakura Noguchi was both potter and sculptor.  About half of the works in his exhibition were flatware, tea bowls and vases -- all cited in the brochure as "Ceramics" -- and the rest were listed under the general heading as "Sculpture."  But as the critic Shuzo Takiguchi said in a contemporary discussion of the show, "Noguchi is firing his ceramics as sculptures. ...he seeks in his pottery the possibilities of the various idioms of modern sculpture."(15) This sculptural use of traditional ceramic techniques was a powerful influence on those potters who saw the exhibition, such as the progressive ceramist Kazuo Yagi, who attributed his own artistic liberation to an encounter with Noguchi's work in Kamakura.(16)

Yagi's response to this work points to a lesser known aspect of Noguchi's international influence.  The standard view takes Noguchi to be a conduit of Japanese aesthetic attitudes and artistic forms to America, and from his earliest years as an artist he had aspired to play this role.  In his 1927 application for the Guggenheim fellowship that took him to Paris, Noguchi wrote that he hoped to become "an interpreter of the East to the West," seeking to achieve with sculpture what his father had done through poetry.(17) Through the 1940's his primary way of doing this was the integration of art in the environment by means of playground projects, stage sets and furniture design.  But just as Noguchi had brought something of Asia to America -- and he would continue to do so for the next three decades, increasingly through his freestanding sculptures -- during the early 1950's his influence also worked powerfully in the opposite direction.  For despite the fact that Noguchi was actively embracing Japanese forms in much of his ceramic work, his way of doing so was that of a New York School artist of the Fifties.  In the mode of the Western avant-gardist, freed from the constraints of tradition to create unique images that expressed an original vision, Noguchi set an example for the Japanese artists who came to see his work.   

But as much as viewing Noguchi's ceramic sculpture liberated others, working at Kita Kamakura was a liberating experience for Isamu himself.  For the hints given in the pieces at Mitsukoshi here explode in all directions, from rough platters and primitivistic figurines to large abstract forms and dramatic evocations of the body.  The sense of personal freedom in these works is palpable, and -- living a kind of edenic existence with his beautiful new wife -- Noguchi let go of much that had governed his previous work.  To a surprising extent he freed himself of his prior artistic vocabulary, for only a small percentage of the Kamakura pieces utilize the imagery of Noguchi's earlier sculpture.  More important, however, is his freedom of process, both his rejection of the use of maquettes that had governed his work of the late Forties and his embrace of the spontaneity of ceramic construction and modeling.  This spontaneity of process grounds much of the exuberance of his Kamakura ceramics, which also display a degree of playfulness unique in Noguchi's oeuvre.(18) Here Noguchi worked with the malleability of the clay, exploiting the speed with which new shapes can be fashioned and transformed, and freely drawing on the wet surfaces.  The unforeseen effects of gravity on the unfired forms, and the accidental consequences of the firing process itself, added to the spontaneous feel of the work.  In Kita Kamakura his material and process elicited a creative exhilaration that took full advantage of Isamu's natural facility as an artist.

From his earliest years Noguchi had displayed such artistic facility, mastering difficult techniques in short order.(19) This natural talent, combined with his exquisite taste, made the Japanese ceramic medium a perfect vehicle for him.  Central to this tradition is the importance accorded rustic unglazed ceramics in the tea ceremony, beginning with the adoption of rough farmware as water vessels by the medieval tea masters (an interesting analog of Western "found object" sculpture).  Noguchi was well aware of the details and aesthetic values of the tea ceremony, and nearby he had access to tea ceremony wares in Rosanjin's collection.  In such ceramic wares imperfect execution and unretouched surfaces were signs of freedom and strength, and accidents of firing in the high temperature kiln were welcome.  Noguchi was ideally suited to succeed in such a medium, able both to work quickly in a sensuous material and to select the most striking pieces that came out of the firing process.  We might say that here Isamu's emotional and artistic spontaneity collaborated with the inherent spontaneity and fortuitous events of Nature.  And ironically, it was by embracing this indigenous Japanese form that Noguchi first employed something like the gestural methods that characterized the contemporary painting of his friends in the New York School, taking advantage of the often unforeseen results of an improvisational process.  He would not do so again until the rough stone works of his last two decades.

The sixty ceramic works marked as "Sculptures" in the Kamakura exhibition  brochure display a striking range of imagery.  There are abstract pieces that evoke traditional Japanese forms (War, Atomic Man) and abstractions that evoke the body (Mrs. White, Ghost, Child's Dream, Torso).  There are clay slab structures that shelter tiny figures (Buson, The Apartment) and a landscape with abstract topographic elements (A World I Did Not Make).  The largest, most dramatic work is the tall totemic sculpture Even the Centipede, and the smallest pieces are beads formed by twists of clay, reminiscent of prehistoric magatama.(20) These beads seem to transform into four bulbous primitivistic forms, which Noguchi called Beginnings, which in turn metamorphose into three Venus of Willendorf-like figurines, each of which he named Mother Goddess.  There are surrealist abstractions (Tiger, Fishbone) and images of animals, some highly abstracted (The Elephant) and others coarsely direct (Cat).  There also are very personal depictions of Noguchi and his family, done in a rough, almost cartoon-like style: his wife (Yoshiko-san); the newlywed couple sleeping on their tatami (Marriage); and his sleeping brother Michio, who also stayed on Rosanjin's property during much of this period (Bachelor, also called A Cold Sleep).

Among the exhibition's functional works, designated "Ceramics,"  there are many pieces that also are readily viewed as sculptures.  A number of the dishes have the shape and features of a human face, with one Bizen ware displaying a geometric nose, eyes, and lips very much like those of the artist's 1947 earthwork project Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars.(21) Many of Noguchi's vases, such as Lonely Tower, appear as fully sculptural objects, to which plants or flowers seem an unnecessary embellishment.   Two of these are monumental in scale, and employ contrasting sculptural vocabularies:  Large Square Vase sets surrealist elements within a geometric structure derived from Brancusi's Endless Column, and an untitled tall column dripping green Oribe glaze has the stacked cylindrical construction of ancient Haniwa.  Noguchi's Three-Legged Vase also uses the biomorphic imagery of his earlier surrealist sculpture, and the helmet-like form of the ceramic sculpture War is echoed in the exhibition's Cage Vase.  Other of the "Ceramics" are functional wares with sculptural decorative elements, constituting a kind of transition from the more sculptural vessels to Noguchi's simpler dishes and bowls.  What the exhibition seemed to display, then, is a continuum of objects, ranging from the wholly sculptural to the more purely functional.

But another component of this exhibition suggests a more unified view of Noguchi's ceramic work.  This is the display of Akari lamps, the first models of which Noguchi had designed the previous year while visiting Gifu Prefecture.(22) By the time of the Kamakura exhibition a number of these mulberry bark paper and bamboo lamps were in commercial production, and negotiations were underway for their American distribution.  Updating the traditional Gifu-chochin to create what would become a classic of modern design, Noguchi made objects that blur the distinction between the sculptural and the functional.  Or, perhaps more accurately, with Akari this distinction itself is called into question.  For the functionality of these objects is a sculptural one, employing light as a material to create a certain quality of the surrounding space.  Noguchi often insisted that Akari are light sculptures, and by this he meant more than that their shapes are aesthetically interesting.  Akari form a part of what Noguchi called "the sculpture of spaces," his expanded conception of sculpture as the creation of the lived environment.  Just as, for Noguchi, sculpture includes gardens as well as freestanding figures, so functional objects are sculptural if their presence and use have aesthetic consequences for the environment of everyday life.  Seen in this light all of the Kamakura ceramics are of a piece, functioning sculpturally apart from their particular utilitarian roles.

There are two ways, then, of looking at Noguchi's ceramics, and each identifies the significance of this work from a different perspective.  For the Japanese artists and artisans who saw his Mitsukoshi and Kamakura exhibitions, Noguchi served as a model both by employing traditional techniques to create modernist sculpture and by bringing sculptural principles to bear on functional wares.  In terms of the Western modernist tradition, however, Noguchi's ceramics were part of a general program that breaks down the distinction between the functional and the sculptural. Noguchi thus both uses the functional-sculptural distinction and strives to subvert it, and this situation points to the important role that duality plays within his work.

Simultaneously utilizing apparently contrary forms (e.g. organic and geometric, modernist and traditional) and maintaining a dialectical tension between seemingly conflicting impulses (e.g. spiritual and scientific, utopian and pragmatic), Noguchi's oeuvre as a whole is filled with such contrasts.  While this multiple, open-ended approach allowed Noguchi more aesthetic options, it was not the product of artistic strategizing.  Rather, the pattern issued from a personal history structured by oppositions rather than unities -- emotional conflict between an American mother and a Japanese father, a Japanese childhood and American adolescence, experience of racial intolerance in both Japan and America. This background -- especially early feelings of isolation and parental rejection -- is important in considering Noguchi's life and work in Kamakura, where he pursued a cultural identity that seems intended, in a symbolic way, to gain him the paternal acceptance that he was denied in youth.

The technical features of the Kamakura ceramics are especially interesting in light of this effort to associate his work with Japanese culture while retaining his status as a modern artist.(23) The exhibition brochure divides the works into two main categories -- "Sculpture" and "Ceramics" -- and each of these categories is further divided into groups by traditional ceramic style classifications:  Bizen-style, Seto-style (both "white earth" and "red earth"), Shigaraki-style, Karatsu-style and Kasama-style.  Although the shapes of these pieces rarely are traditional, they manifest the characteristics of traditional wares in terms of accepted stylistic designations.   Noguchi's strategy, unconscious though it may have been, was to identify himself with Japanese aesthetic traditions through stylistic parameters while maintaining his modernism through the hybrid imagery that he deployed.  Working on Rosanjin's land and with his clays and kiln -- and traveling with Rosanjin to Imbe to create Bizen-style pieces at the kiln of Kanashige Toyo --  Noguchi both embraced the tradition of Momoyama period tea ceremony wares and sought to extend the Western avant-garde tradition.  But as the reaction to his Kamakura exhibition would suggest, it was not so easy for Isamu to have his cake and eat it too.

Although there were many positive responses to Noguchi's 1952 exhibition, there seems to have been significant distress at Isamu's attempt to work in the Japanese mode.(24) To some his work looked too Japanese to be Japanese, and to others his use of local idioms appeared superficial and arbitrary.  Rather than reveal the emergence of Isamu's  Japanese essence, for a number of critics his work displayed just the opposite -- a Western fascination with exotic old Japan.(25) Such a response was extremely painful for Noguchi, who had embarked on his Kamakura ceramics the month after his proposal for the Memorial to the Atomic Dead of Hiroshima was rejected because he was an American.  He had achieved great acclaim in 1950 as a foreign modern artist visiting the land of his father, but things became more difficult as he sought a place for himself within contemporary Japanese culture.  Although Noguchi would remain involved in Japanese projects -- such as the development and production of Akari, the fabrication of a series of cast iron sculptures, and the procurement of stones for his UNESCO garden in Paris -- he did not seriously work in Japan again until the late Sixties.

When Noguchi did return to Japan it was to work in stone on the island of Shikoku, where he established a studio and eventually would work for six months every year until his death.  His interest in ceramics had waned -- perhaps associating this medium with painful memories of his broken marriage and the difficult reception of his work in 1952 -- and he now pursued a connection with Japan through the carving of granite and basalt.  Here again Noguchi's focus was on nature, on the earth, and -- despite the obdurate character of his materials -- he once again began to work spontaneously in a manner analogous to the gestural painting of his New York School contemporaries.(26) As in his 1952 ceramic work he took advantage of the results of chance and accident, collaborating with nature to create the great stone sculptures that culminated his career.

 Noguchi seems to have done only a single ceramic work after leaving Kamakura, a prototype for a cup and saucer that never was put into commercial production. While this cup offers all the sleekness of modern design, it actually is based on an old Japanese terra-cotta cup that Noguchi owned.  Throughout his career Noguchi felt free to appropriate imagery from both art works and cultural artifacts, and in most cases his models were publicly known objects embraced in an undisguised manner.  But this cup is different in being derived from a secret source, an obscure item in the artist's personal collection, and in this it symbolizes a central aspect of Noguchi's ceramics.  For while Noguchi was a public figure he also was a very private person, and the internal factors that drove his activity in Japan were hidden behind a modernist ideology endorsing the transformation of local sources.  Noguchi's ceramic sculptures are as rich as they are in large part because of this psychological pressure, his need to reconnect with an absent father merging with his great artistic facility and long sculptural experience.  And alongside the house of Rosanjin in 1952 this combination worked in a particularly dynamic way, creating a body of sculpture that uniquely fused Western modernism with the world of tea, and with the earth.

Notes

(1) In this essay I do not discuss Noguchi's early academic work done with Onorio Ruotolo, both because these are student sculptures and because they were forms made in clay for casting in another medium.

(2) For Takamura and Noguchi's response to him, see Dore Ashton,Noguchi East and West (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp.37-39.

(3) For Noguchi's work in this area, see Nancy Grove, Isamu Noguchi:Portrait Sculpture (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1989).

(4) Grove, p.58.

(5) Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (NY: Harper  Row, 1968),p. 21.

(6) Quoted in Ashton, p.42.

(7) Noguchi, p.22.

(8) For an account of Noguchi's 1950 visit, see Bert Winther,Isamu Noguchi: Conflicts of Japanese Culture in the Early Postwar Years(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1993), pp.130ff.

(9) Noguchi initially resisted the idea of exhibiting in a department store, but he agreed after learning that in Japan such a venue was a prestigious one.

(10) Winther, p.138.

(11) More literally, Michio Noguchi relates Hot Day to the extreme heat of that summer. Interview with Michio Noguchi, December 1, 1995.

(12) The exhibition brochure lists 120 objects, all of which are ceramic works except a single sculpture of cast iron, Celebration.

(13) Photographs and descriptions of Noguchi's studio were published in "Isamu Noguchi: Projects in Japan," Arts and Architecture,October 1952, pp.24-26; "Noguchi in Kamakura," Interiors, November1952, pp.116-121, 171-172; Betty Pepis, "Artist at Home," NewYork Times Magazine, August 31, 1952, pp.26-27.

(14) "Introduction to Noguchi," in Bruce Altshuler and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, eds., Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations (NewYork: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p.101.

(15) Shuzo Takiguchi, "A Strange Journey (Isamu Noguchi)," in Noguchi (Tokyo: Bijutso Shuppan-Sha, 1953), n.p. (First published as "Fantastic Travel of Art: An Essay on Isamu Noguchi,"Mizue, Number 568 (December 1952), pp.20-31.

(16) For Noguchi's influence on Yagi, see Winther, pp.298-301.

(17) "Guggenheim Proposal," in Altshuler and Apostolos-Cappadona,eds., p.17.

(18) When Noguchi exhibited his ceramics from Kamakura in New York at the Stable Gallery in 1954, reviewers noted the dramatic contrast with his earlier stone sculpture, Fairfield Porter remarking on their having "the spontaneous and improvisational character of sketches" ("Isamu Noguchi," review, Artnews, December 1954), and Hilton Kramer speaking of the work's "high unseriousness" and its "revealing a less frigid and more expressive sensibility" than expected ("Noguchi," review, Art Digest, December 1, 1954).

(19)Perhaps the most striking examples of this facility are Noguchi's ink brush paintings done in Beijing in 1930 after only a few months of study with the master of this medium, Chi Pai Shih.

(20) On the relation between Noguchi's ceramic beads and prehistoric Japanese magatama, see Winther, pp.224-225.

(21) First entitled Memorial to Man, this project suggests Noguchi's pessimistic view of man's future in the atomic age, for the huge earthwork face, whose pyramidal nose was to be one mile long, was meant to inform extraterrestrials that -- before the nuclear destruction of the human race-- a civilized life form once had existed on the planet.

(22) For the history of Akari see Bruce Altshuler, "The Akari Light Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi," in Quiet Light: An Installation of Isamu Noguchi's Akari Light Sculptures by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien (New York: Gallery at Takashimaya, 1994).

(23) For information on and discussion of the technical aspects of Noguchi's ceramics, I thank Pamela Vandiver of the Smithsonian Institution.

(24 )In this discussion of the Japanese critical response to Noguchi in 1952-53 I rely on the pioneering research of Bert Winther (Winther, pp.264-275).

 (25) An exoticist reading of things Japanese is no longer limited to evocations of traditional Japan, but extends to high-tech multi-media works.See, for example, Yuko Hasegawa's comments on the Japanese pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennial, in "Last Words on the Biennial: Two Choices," Flash Art, December 1995, p.74.

(26 ) For an account of Noguchi's working methods in his late stone sculpture, see Bruce Altshuler, Isamu Noguchi (New York: AbbevillePress, 1994), pp. 96-98, 109-111.