Isamu Noguchi:
Early Drawings from Paris and Beijing

by Bruce Altshuler

(This article appeared in DRAWING: The International Review Published by The Drawing Society, Vol. XVI, No. 4, November-December 1994)

In December 1927, Isamu Noguchi wrote to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation of the studies in sculptural outline that he recently had completed.(1) With the foundation's support he had been working in Paris since the previous April, on the first leg of a proposed three-year plan of study intended to prepare him for his chosen role as interpreter of the East to the West through sculpture.(2) Applying for his Guggenheim fellowship at twenty-two years of age, the young man expressed his desire to fulfill his heritage by accomplishing in another medium what his father, poet Yone Noguchi, had done with words. With great good fortune, soon after arriving in Paris, Noguchi came to work with another powerful father figure, whose influence would pervade the remainder of his long career. With the imagery and aesthetic principles of Constantin Brancusi, Noguchi made his first foray into abstraction.

The studies to which Noguchi referred were matte black and white gouache drawings, hard-edged images in which a number of the sculptures that he soon would create are shown in section. Of the twenty-four abstract sculptures that Noguchi is known to have done in Paris before his departure in the spring of 1929, drawings exist that closely relate to half of these works. Altogether, sixty-three abstract gouache drawings from Noguchi's time in Paris are known.(3) Displaying a broad range of imagery, these drawings form a chronicle of the artistic world that the young American entered as he sought a place within the precincts of the modern.

The most striking influence on these drawings, naturally, is that of Brancusi. It was seeing Brancusi's work at the Brummer Gallery in New York in December 1926, in an exhibition arranged by Marcel Duchamp, that converted Noguchi to abstraction after his dramatic early success as an academic sculptor. And the five-month apprenticeship that Noguchi spent as a studio assistant to Brancusi confirmed his aspirations. Noguchi was introduced to Brancusi by writer Robert McAlmon within weeks of arriving in Paris on March 30, 1927, and until the July collapse of Brancusi's studio floor Noguchi worked alongside the Romanian master each morning. Here he learned to cut and dress marble and French cathedral stone, to handle the axe and the saw with which Brancusi worked in wood, and to lovingly polish bronzes by hand. He also embraced aesthetic attitudes that would remain with him throughout his career -- an honesty to process and structure, a commitment to simplicity of form, and a belief in the integration of sculpture with the lived environment. Most obviously these modernist imperatives reinforced his recent rejection of academic sculpture, with its reliance on the casting of forms perfected through modeling in clay. But more significantly, what Noguchi saw with Brancusi refit in modernist garb the aesthetic dispositions that he had developed as a youth in Japan, where for a brief period he was informally apprenticed by his American mother to a traditional carpenter.(4) At 8 Impasse Ronsin Noguchi's early love of hand tools, of natural materials, and of simple methods of construction were transformed into modernist tenets.

It was only after Noguchi left Brancusi in the fall of 1927 that he began working on his own sculptures, and Brancusi's influence is more than apparent in many of the gouache preparatory drawings. Unlike most drawings done for sculpture, however, these images bear no relationship to sketches. They are hard-edged opaque forms, all centered on uniformly-sized sheets of paper. Here we find images reminiscent of Brancusi's bases, and silhouettes of Brancusi-like sculptures. Of this group of drawings there are some that present the same forms that Noguchi would expand into three dimensions, others that would be modified in sculptural realization, and many that never were to be used in sculptures. But in all of these drawings Brancusi's influence extends beyond the shapes employed, for in their strength, clarity and use of simplified forms they encapsulate the ethos that Noguchi found with his first modernist mentor.

Another prominent aspect of these drawings is their mix of the organic and the geometric, of the curvaceous and the rectilinear. In his Guggenheim fellowship proposal Noguchi spoke of his desire to view nature through nature's eyes, and many of his drawings display the organic forms of the botanical and zoological texts that he collected at the time: leaf- and egg-like shapes, an elegant branch-like image evoking the sensuous line of Modigliani, and even the suggestion of internal organs known from his earlier pre-medical studies. In distinct contrast, however, are drawings that employ a kind of constructivist imagery, planar images of open line and drawings that combine these with flat rectilinear shapes. Such images would move into three dimensions by means of wire sculptures, and in works of interlocking sheets of brass that look forward to Noguchi's interlocking Surreal forms of the 1940s. In these drawings we see the influence of other aspects of European modernism upon which Noguchi came in Paris, in particular that of the Russian and Eastern European Constructivists. But we also can find a source closer to home, for one drawing presents something very much like the planar background of Stuart Davis's Eggbeater series, examples of which Davis had brought with him to Paris and that Noguchi in all likelihood would have seen there.(5)

This disposition simultaneously to employ contrasting formal sources, and to move in divergent directions, would remain characteristic of Noguchi's work for the rest of his life. To some degree this dialectical mode is rooted in Noguchi's personal history and mixed ethnicity, a background structured by oppositions rather than unities: emotional conflict between a Japanese father and an American mother, a Japanese childhood and an American adolescence, experiences of racial intolerance in both Japan and America. As Noguchi followed his developing interests and influences, however, apparent conflicts would have a way of being overcome, and what in 1928 were conflicting tendencies toward the natural and the geometric would be synthesized in 1929 when he came under the sway of the visionary R. Buckminster Fuller.

In addition to the influences of Brancusi and of various manifestations of constructivism, these drawings show Noguchi assimilating other elements of the Parisian scene. There are sensuous Arp-like shapes, images that resemble the graphics of French advertising, and one drawing in the mode of the contemporary Purism of Léger, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. Altogether, this group of drawings displays a young artist in search of a formal vocabulary to be put to use in sculpture, investigating forms that eventually would be pruned down to a manageable set. This, of course, was the method of Brancusi, whose reductive, idealizing urge led him to settle on a small group of fundamental forms. Eventually Noguchi, too, would work variations on a number of basic images, but it would be many years before this process became clear.(6) In 1927-1928, his investigations had just begun.

Although many of the drawings employ forms that Noguchi would realize in sculptures, each stands as an integral work. These drawings are extremely contemporary in look -- more so, in fact, than the sculptures to which they relate. Created with the aid of stenciling or masking, they display a mechanical quality that obliterates all sign of the artist's hand. In addition, certain drawings are strong emblematic, calling attention to their own materiality and objecthood. Yet in the active use of figure-ground relationships a kind of three-dimensionality is implied, subtly referencing sculpture without directly picturing it.

These drawings thus are not at all typical studies for sculpture, but refined graphic works intended for exhibition and display. It would have been appropriate for Noguchi to include them as finished works when his Paris sculptures were exhibited in April 1929 at the gallery of architect Eugene Schoen, although it is not known whether they were shown at that time. In December 1930, however, ten of these drawings were displayed in his exhibition at the Albright Art Gallery of the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts.(7) After that exhibition they were not seen by the public for over sixty years, until the Whitney Museum of American Art presented Isamu Noguchi: Early Abstraction in the spring of 1994.(8)

By the time that his Paris abstract drawings were on exhibition in Buffalo, Noguchi was in Beijing and engaged in a very different sort of drawing. He had abandoned abstraction, and returned to figuration. But it was figuration unlike the academic work that he had done in New York during the early twenties, and distinct from the figure studies that he made in Paris each afternoon during his time with Brancusi. For in Beijing Noguchi created the large brush drawings that were his first achieved works in a traditional Asian form.

To reject abstraction was a traumatic move for Noguchi, representing both an abandonment of European modernism and an Oedipal reaction to the powerful influence of Brancusi. Although Noguchi later reflected that at the time he was too poor inside to continue making abstract work, in 1929 the precipitating cause was the commercial failure of his exhibition of Paris abstractions with Eugene Schoen.(9) For income he turned to his pre-Paris skill at academic portraiture, sculpting the heads of wealthy sitters -- an activity that would support him through the next decade.(10) But the initial intent was to save enough money to return to Paris, and to complete the trip to the East that he had projected in his original Guggenheim proposal. This Noguchi was able to accomplish, and in the summer of 1930 he arrived in Beijing, having traveled via Moscow from Paris on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Although Noguchi intended only to pass through Beijing en route to Tokyo, his plans were changed by a letter from his father saying that he should not to come to Japan using their family name. Rejected yet again by Yone Noguchi, Isamu decided to settle for a while in Beijing, where he found another mentor in the celebrated painter Ch'i Pai-shih. With the natural facility that Noguchi displayed throughout his career, he quickly acquired significant skill in traditional ink brush techniques. Working on enormous sheets of rice paper, Noguchi created his most dramatic body of drawings. It is believed that Noguchi made approximately fifty of these drawings in Beijing, an impressive amount of work in a very difficult medium. Some employing restrained thin lines of ink, and others using broad expressive brush strokes, these works depict local models in a wide variety of postures -- reclining women, young men wrestling and in repose, figures standing erect and in odd contortions, parents with their children, and even a disgruntled baby. In their figuration and spontaneity of line, and in their lack of relation to any sculptural project, these works stand in sharp contrast to the Paris abstractions. But in psychological background and generating conditions, the two sets of drawings are quite similar.

Both the Paris abstractions and the Beijing brush drawings were done under the influence of a strong master, and each represents a tradition with which Noguchi was attempting to ally himself. In the case of Paris there was Brancusi, exemplar for Noguchi of the new art of the century, and inspiration for his own conversion to modernist abstraction. In Beijing there was Ch'i Pai-shih, representative of the Asian artistic tradition that Noguchi sought to reinterpret in modern terms for the West. Looming in the background in both Paris and Beijing was his father, Yone Noguchi, from his earliest years symbolizing the artist to his distant son, but refusing to have any relations with him. Despite contrasting specifics of intent, content and execution, both of these sets of drawings were projects of self-definition by means of identification with a father figure who symbolized a major artistic mode -- the search for identity as an artist merging with the struggle for acceptance as a son.(11)

The Paris abstractions and Beijing brush drawings are the only large groups of drawings that Noguchi intended for presentation to the public in exhibition.(12 ) Virtually all of his drawings done after 1930 are studies for sculpture, most in the form of sketches. (The exception is the body of drawings done by Noguchi in Southeast Asia during 1949-50, which were to be used as illustrations for his unpublished book on leisure.)(13 ) In their formal elegance, and exemplification of Noguchi's natural facility as a draftsman, these drawings from Paris and Beijing stand as his most important works in this medium. They also, as we have seen, instantiate Noguchi's unified search for personal and artistic identity; a process that would culminate in the great stone sculptures of his last years. Transposed into stone, the thematic pressure of these drawings -- the assimilation of modernist abstraction and Asian tradition -- would find a radically different expression in Noguchi's late sculpture of granite and basalt.

Notes

(1.) Isamu Noguchi to Henry Allen Moe, December 15, 1927. Isamu Noguchi Foundation Archives, Long Island City, New York.

(2.) Isamu Noguchi, Guggenheim Proposal, in Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Bruce Altshuler, eds., Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p.17.

(3.) Only six of these sculptures have survived, all now in the collection of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Long Island City, New York. For photographs and discussion of the known Paris sculptures, see Nancy Grove and Diane Botnick, The Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi, 1924-1979 (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1980), numbers 25-48, and Nancy Grove, Isamu Noguchi: A Study of the Sculpture (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1985), pp.75-76. Of the known Paris abstract drawings, 31 are in the collection of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, 3 are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and 29 are in private collections (28 in a single collection).

(4.) For Noguchi's early years in Japan, where he lived from ages 2 to 13, see Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp.11-13, and Bruce Altshuler, Isamu Noguchi (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), pp.11-12.

(5.) Davis and Noguchi were in Paris during the same time, Davis arriving in 1928 and settling next door to a friend of Noguchi's, Andrèe Ruellan. On this connection see Billy Kluver and Julie Martin, Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p.186.

(6.) For one way of looking at Noguchi's developed formal vocabulary, see Martin Friedman, Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1978), pp.91ff.

(7.) An Exhibition of Bronzes and Drawings by Isamu Noguchi and a Group of Bronzes by Chana Orloff, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, December 24, 1930-January 25, 1931. A portion of the sculpture from this exhibition traveled to the Art Gallery of Toronto in February 1931.

(8.) Isamu Noguchi: Early Abstraction, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994). This exhibition will travel to the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine), March 25-June 4, 1995, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, July 11-October 8, 1995.

(9.) Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, p.19.

(10.) For an account of Noguchi's portrait sculpture, see Nancy Grove, Isamu Noguchi Portrait Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).

(11.) Noguchi's first artistic achievements in academic sculpture also involved identification with a father figure, Onorio Ruotolo of the Leonardo Da Vinci School of Art in New York, where Noguchi went to study in 1924.

(12.) The Beijing brush drawings were shown during the Thirties at the Demotte Gallery, New York, February-March 1932; Arts Club of Chicago, March 1932; Reinhardt Gallery, New York, December 1932; Honolulu Academy of Art, January 1933 (traveling to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, and the Pasadena Fine Arts Society); Mellon Galleries, Philadelphia, February-March 1933; and in London at the Sidney Burney Gallery, Summer 1934.

(13.) For an overview of Noguchi's drawings, see Nancy Grove, Noguchi and Drawing, Drawing, March-April 1987, pp.121-124.