Isamu Noguchi: Art Into Life

by Bruce Altshuler

Born in Los Angeles in 1904, sculptor Isamu Noguchi enjoyed a Japanese childhood and an American adolescence. His notion of modern art was forged in the Paris studio of Constantin Brancusi and modified through the technological utopianism of R. Buckminster Fuller. Combined with his experience of the traditional Japanese house and garden, these influences led toward a broadened conception of sculpture as the creation of lived space. This modernist project found early expression in his stage sets for choreographer Martha Graham, and it would lead to a wide range of design activity, from gardens and interiors to fountains and furniture. By the time of his death in 1988, Isamu Noguchi had created a body of work that crossed the boundary between fine and applied art as actively and as regularly as he had traversed international borders.

Noguchi's life was a peripatetic one, and his early development led naturally to a focus on the lived environment, on what he later would call "the sculpture of spaces." When he was two years old his American mother, Leonie Gilmour, brought Isamu to Japan to be near his Japanese father, the poet Yone Noguchi. His Japanese upbringing included an apprenticeship with a traditional carpenter, where Noguchi developed his love for hand tools and natural materials, an affection reinforced during the three to six months that he later would spend as Brancusi's studio assistant. Sent back to Indiana for schooling in 1918, Noguchi lived in the American heartland until moving to New York for pre-medical studies at Columbia University. In New York he soon was drawn to art, a natural facility leading to quick success as an academic sculptor before his conversion to modern art at the galleries of Alfred Stieglitz and J.B. Neumann.

A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927 brought Noguchi to Paris, where good fortune led to his work with Brancusi. Brancusi's honesty to materials and craft, purity of formal reduction, and commitment to a strict economy of means would inform Noguchi's entire career. Equally important was the example of Brancusi's studio, where environmental design was fully integrated with aesthetic practice. In all of this Brancusi provided a modernist model for what Noguchi had seen in Japan.

Noguchi returned to New York in 1929, where he was befriended by the visionary R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller's environmental interests, and his focus on the humanistic use of technology, were critical for Noguchi, who would maintain an abiding faith in the productive employment of scientific discovery. Throughout his career he would embrace new industrial materials in both sculptures and large-scale public projects. Such materials appear regularly from the late thirties with the 18-foot high magnesite Chassis Fountain for the Ford Motor Company building at the New York World's Fair and his 9-ton stainless steel relief for the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center, through the aluminum louvered waterfall wall of 1957-58 at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York, to the futuristic stainless steel 120-foot pylon and computer-controlled fountain that he designed for his Philip A. Hart Plaza in Detroit (1972-79).

In 1930 Noguchi went back to Paris, and from there traveled to the east, spending eight months in China studying brush painting, and then moving on to Japan for another half year. In Kyoto, Noguchi the artist first saw the Zen gardens that would so influence his conception of sculpture as the sculpting of space, and made his early ceramic works under the sway of ancient Haniwa funerary figures.

Noguchi spent the remainder of the 1930's in New York, and it was there that he came to artistic maturity through projects integrating art and design. Noguchi complained in a 1936 article that contemporary sculpture had too little involvement with life and use,(1) and his most important work of that decade intended to redress the balance. Most radical were his unrealized earthworks, including Play Mountain (1933), a terraced mound meant to occupy an entire city block. This playground proposal was rejected with ridicule by New York parks commissioner Robert Moses in 1934, who later would foil other Noguchi designs for city play areas.

Moses had objected to the terraces of Play Mountain as dangerous, and in response Noguchi designed an undulating landscape of biomorphic form, Contoured Playground (1941). The war interrupted its serious consideration, and despite substantial private financing Moses also would prohibit the 1952 Noguchi design for the United Nations Playground. Nor did success come with the collaboration of architect Louis Kahn, with whom he designed five versions of a park for Riverside Drive between 1961 and 1966. Noguchi never would see a playground built in his home city. Even the sculptural pieces of play equipment that he designed for Honolulu's Ala Moana Park in 1939 only were fabricated in 1976 for his Playscapes in the city of Atlanta.(2 ) This concern with play and playfulness also would find exuberant expression in the 9 great fountains that Kenzo Tange asked him to design for Expo '70 in Osaka.

Noguchi's notion of the sculpture of spaces actually first was realized in the stage designs that he created for choreographer Martha Graham. Beginning with the minimal set for Frontier in 1935, which structured the dance space with two lines of rope extending from the upper corners of the proscenium to a simple fence at the back of the stage, Noguchi developed the use of sculptural elements to construct environments for movement and activity. Over the next three decades he would design a total of 28 stage sets, most of them for the Graham company, but also working with Ruth Page, Erick Hawkins, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and the controversial 1955 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear.

Although in 1926 Noguchi had designed a plastic clock, Measured Time, his first widely distributed manufactured product was the elegant bakelite Radio Nurse of 1937. Commissioned by Zenith in the wake of concern over child safety following the Lindburgh kidnapping, this nursery intercom set had two parts --Noguchi's abstracted head-like form of the nurse itself, enclosing a speaker for parental listening, and the metal Guardian Ear, containing a microphone which would pick up sounds in the child's room.(3)

The thirties also saw Noguchi design his first table, a commission for the new home of the president of the Museum of Modern Art, A. Conger Goodyear. A low glass-topped table with articulated rosewood supports, this 1939 work was the first of a series of related designs. The next year Noguchi altered his Goodyear design for a small model of a coffee table that he made for Robsjohn Gibbings, a design that, according to the artist, Gibbings slightly changed and offered as his own in 1942 without Noguchi's permission. In 1944 Noguchi modified the idea that he had presented to Gibbings to illustrate an article by George Nelson entitled "How to Make a Table."(4) The revised design, with its base of two identical elements set at a right angle, derived from a loop of wood cut in two, was put into production in 1947 by the Herman Miller Furniture Company, where Nelson had become director of design. Produced by Herman Miller using a variety of woods from 1947-73, and again since 1984, the biomorphic Noguchi coffee table became one of his most well-known works, and late in his life the artist felt that it was the only instance in which he had been wholly successful in the field of industrial design.

Yet in the 1940's Noguchi created quite a few furniture designs, one of which was so successful that Knoll Associates ended production because of the number of inexpensive imitations. This was the three-legged cylinder lamp, an elegant unity of shade and base. Using an opaque aluminum cylinder, the artist made the first example as a gift for his sister in 1944 or 1945. The Knoll version, which was produced at least until 1954, consisted of translucent plastic mounted on cherrywood legs.(5 ) Like the glass-topped coffee table, which reflected the biomorphic imagery of Noguchi's contemporary sculpture, this lamp coincided with another innovation in his more purely sculptural activity -- his "lunars."

Noguchi initially had envisioned illuminated sculpture in a 1933 design for a Musical Weathervane, a mass-producible object that would sound notes as the wind blew through it. However, it was ten more years before he actually made his first light sculpture. Using magnesite, which he had discovered in his work on the Ford fountain, Noguchi molded undulating forms over hidden electric bulbs. Although most lunars were freestanding -- or freehanging -- sculptures, he created a number of lunars meant to function as lighting fixtures. Three of these were offered by Lightolier in 1952 as limited editions.(6) More dramatically, in 1947-48 Noguchi utilized such surreal constructions for three interior designs: A stairwell wall entitled Lunar Voyage on the art-filled S.S. Argentina, the ceiling of the American Stove Company Building lobby in St. Louis, and the ceiling of a reception area in New-York's Time-Life Building.

The furniture that Noguchi designed in the 1940's, like the lunar interiors, was an offshoot of the more narrow sculptural practice that he embraced during this decade. For in 1942 Noguchi had refocused his energies on studio sculpture, disillusioned from efforts to construct public amenities at the Japanese-American relocation camp in Poston, Arizona, which he had entered voluntarily with hopes of improving the lives of the internees. Back in New York in a studio on MacDougal Alley he created interlocking slab sculptures strongly influenced by Surrealism, work that brought him widespread recognition within the emerging New York School. In addition to the famous coffee table, the other pieces that he designed for Herman Miller during these years also displayed such biomorphism, and a sculptural sensibility oriented toward the individual object. There was the 1944-designed laminated wood "rudder" dinette table with two bent tubular aluminum legs, and its companion stools, which also was manufactured as a coffee table. He designed another three-legged coffee table the next year, this one having a marble top and wooden legs. The surface of each of these tables featured a sunken receptacle for the display of flowers. In 1948 Noguchi designed his only sofa, a free-form padded couch with metal legs, along with a companion bench of similar shape.

All of these pieces were quite simple in design, but Noguchi pushed biomorphism into the baroque with a black chess table originally made for an exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1945 or 1947. (7) For the Julien Levy chess show Noguchi also created a set of clear plastic chessmen, but the table alone was manufactured by Herman Miller. The chess table top rotated on its base of two intersecting curvaceous forms, and the board positions were indicated by alternating red and yellow inset plastic circles. Turning the top exposed two hidden pockets for chessmen, although a promotional photograph oddly presented the piece as a sewing table, with yarn and pin cushion stored below.

In 1948 Noguchi designed an immense laminated wooden table as a commission for William A.M. Burden, at thirteen feet long his largest piece of furniture. Before the war, in 1941, he had done another solid laminated table for the entrance hall of the apartment of architect Philip Goodwin. Involving great craftsmanship and effort, these pieces were inappropriate for mass manufacture and they remained unique creations.

After a successful exhibition of his forties sculpture at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1949, and following the suicide of his friend Arshile Gorky, Noguchi experienced a personal crisis. Questioning the validity of the purely aesthetic object, and reconsidering his earlier, broader conception of sculpture as the spatial structuring of the lived environment, he applied to the Bollingen Foundation for a travel grant to study what he called "leisure." It was after surveying the world history of large-scale sculpture, from the menhirs of ancient Britain to the temples of Cambodia, that Noguchi returned to Japan in 1950.

In Japan Noguchi was welcomed as a successful modernist, and he fell in with the young architects and artists who would revive the country's contemporary culture after the war. Noguchi designed a memorial room and garden dedicated to his father at Keio University, including built-in and freestanding furniture, and he proposed a large memorial bell tower to the victims of Hiroshima. His bell tower models led the next year to Kenzo Tange's asking him to design sculptural railings for two bridges into Hiroshima's Peace Park, which were completed in 1952. Their success elicited a request for a more ambitious proposal, the Memorial to the Atomic Dead, which at the last moment was rejected by the park committee because of Noguchi's American citizenship.

It was on the way to Hiroshima in 1951 that Noguchi first visited the town of Gifu, known for its manufacture of umbrellas and lanterns from mulberry bark paper. Having heard of his design work, the mayor asked Noguchi to create contemporary lamps using the traditional paper and bamboo construction. That evening he sketched his first two Akari light sculptures, extending his earlier lunars in a very different form.(8) Noguchi would develop new designs regularly for over three decades, initially shown and sold in Japan, but by 1954 exported and exhibited internationally. Currently there are over one hundred models available, still manufactured in Gifu by the firm that began production in the early fifties.

The year before his visit to Gifu, Noguchi designed another object for export -- a chair with woven bamboo seat and back rest. These elements were to be fabricated in Japan, shipped to the United States, and attached to a bent metal frame manufactured in America. Exhibited in Noguchi's 1950 Tokyo exhibition at the Mitsukoshi Department Store -- along with his Hiroshima tower models, Keio University designs and ceramic sculpture -- this chair never got beyond the prototype stage.(9) But in the United States during the fifties Noguchi designed a number of pieces of furniture that were produced, beginning with his metal wire and wood rocking stools for Knoll Associates. Designed about 1953 and manufactured the following year in a larger and a smaller version, these playful objects metamorphosed into a small table that was advertised as a companion to Harry Bertoia's wire children's chair. On his own initiative, in 1957 Hans Knoll had the small table enlarged to full size.(10) Noguchi's last piece of furniture was the small Prismatic Table of 1957, a faceted aluminum piece designed for Alcoa in black, but advertised as available with multi-color, interchangeable elements.

From the fifties on, however, Noguchi's focus in design was the sculpture of spaces, his earlier ambitions revived by what he had seen on his Bollingen travels. And at the heart of this work was the garden. His first garden was built in 1951, for the Tokyo building of Reader's Digest. It was here that he initially worked with traditional Japanese gardeners, introducing the artist to attitudes toward stone that would play an important role in his later work, both in his gardens and in individual sculptures. This experience was to be especially useful in Paris for his work on gardens for the UNESCO headquarters (1956-58), after he convinced Marcel Breuer to extend his initial commission for a Delegates' Patio into a larger area. Assisted by a Japanese master gardener, Noguchi created a Jardin Japonais with a structure of biomorphic curves, using stones and plants that he selected and brought from Japan. Appropriately enough for Paris, much of the seating alluded to the simple forms of Brancusi.

Apart from UNESCO, Noguchi's gardens rarely were Japanese in feel, and it primarily was under the patronage of corporate America that he would realize his ideas in the public arena. In particular, it was the support of Gordon Bunshaft, chief architect of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, that initially involved Noguchi in the post-war construction boom. Beginning in 1952 with two unrealized garden designs for the new Lever Brothers Building on Park Avenue, Bunshaft engaged Noguchi as designer of outdoor spaces, expanding the limited role that sculptors, and the sculptural consciousness, ordinarily play in architectural projects. Their first successful collaboration was a series of gardens for the Connecticut General Insurance Company headquarters (1956-57), followed by the white marble sunken garden for Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (1960-64), a purist space structured by three symbolic forms. Simultaneously, Noguchi created another sunken garden with Bunshaft, a circular water garden of large Japanese river stones set on an undulating landscape, for New York's Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza (1961-64). Like Zen contemplation gardens, neither of these spaces can be entered, but both can be viewed on two levels: From above by the public, and alongside the garden floor by those working in the building below. Noguchi's last project with Skidmore was a 1964 pair of gardens for the IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York. In mirrored interior courtyards, Noguchi opposed a garden of plantings and uncarved stones with a garden of the future, populated by objects representing the achievements of modern science.

In all, Isamu Noguchi would create twenty gardens, plazas, and playgrounds. In mood they range from the quiet California Scenario (1980), whose symbolic elements represent the topography of the state of his birth, to Hart Plaza's 8 urban acres in Detroit, a modern "environment of leisure" on scale with the public monuments of the ancient world that Noguchi sought to update. But the project that seemed most important to him was the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden in Jerusalem (1960-65). Here he constructed five immense retaining walls on a hill alongside the Israel Museum, great curves that choreograph visual and bodily movement. A vast earth sculpture as well as a designed space for human activity, this garden in Israel was especially meaningful to an artist who saw his own situation as analogous to that of the Jews, wandering for years in search of a homeland.

That journey, as we have seen, took Noguchi between east and west, engendering a dialogue between fine art and the world of everyday use. Western modernism reinforced the aesthetic of Japan, and prompted utopian ambitions that would direct him toward the creation of the lived environment. Here design work -- playgrounds and gardens, stage sets, interiors, home furnishings -- was part of a unified artistic project, the sculpture of spaces. Toward the end of his life, even as he came to focus on carving the great works of granite and basalt that mark his final achievement, Noguchi was moving earth and setting stones for a garden at his studio in Japan. For it was space that most engaged Noguchi, as a sculptor and as a designer, the space of human experience and of human aspiration.

Notes

(1.) Isamu Noguchi, "What is the Matter with Sculpture?", Art Front, No. 16, September-October 1936, p.13-14.

(2.) These playground equipment designs were published in the "Design Decade" issue of The Architectural Forum, October, 1940.

(3.) The press at the time states that the president of Zenith Radio Corporation, Commander E.F. McDonald, Jr., developed this intercom to listen in on his daughter's room on the yacht where they lived, and commissioned Noguchi to design "a device which will be simple, beautiful and at the same time distinctively different from any inter-communicating set or radio now in use." ("Radio Nurse," Modern Plastics, June 1938, p.94.) Also see "Zenith's Radio Nurse," Radio News, June 1938, p.30.

(4.) Noguchi relates this story in his autobiography, A Sculptor's World (1968), p.26, with the three table designs shown in plates 184, 188, and 189. Research has failed to locate the George Nelson article that Noguchi mentions.

(5.) On the cylinder lamp, see Martin Eidelberg, ed., Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), pp.125-126.

(6.) "Merchandise Cues," Interiors, April 1952, p.132. This article mentions four Noguchi designs displayed by Lightolier at the Decorator's Gallery, but the fourth seems to have been a more minimal, Japanese-style table lamp of oiled paper and metal, which was illustrated in the previous issue of the magazine (March 1952, p.144). For these designs, and Noguchi prototypes of other lamps, see "New Shapes for Lighting," Life, March 10, 1952, pp.114-117.

(7.) For an account of this table, see Eidelberg, pp.107-108.

(8.) For Noguchi's own account, see Isamu Noguchi, "Japanese Akari Lamps," Craft Horizons, October 1954, pp.16-18. Also see Eidelberg, pp.126-127.

(9.) Noguchi designed a number of other pieces that remain unique prototypes: A set of six perfume bottles (c.1940-41), a sterling silver table setting (1956), and a pair of white porcelain teacups and saucers (c.1950-60).

(10.) On the wire stools and tables, see Eidelberg, pp.215-216.