Isamu Noguchi

(1904-1988)
At a time when it’s commonplace to talk of the blurring of boundaries between
cultural disciplines and of designers acting out the roles of artists, artisans and
technologists, or vice versa; it’s hard to appreciate quite how radical Isamu
Noguchi (1904-1988) must have seemed when he combined those roles back
in the early 1930s.

If Noguchi had to be described as being any one thing it would have to be as a

sculptor. He studied sculpture after dropping out of medical school in late 1920s
New York and then in Paris as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi. For the rest
of his life, Noguchi applied his sculptural sensibility to everything he created:
from his mulberry paper Akari lights and Martha Graham’s dance sets, to the
mass-manufactured Zenith Radio Nurse and the stone gardens he landscaped at
UNESCO’s Paris headquarters and Lever House in New York.

The blurring of boundaries in Isamu Noguchi’s work mir-
rored his personal history: a fusion of his Japanese father’s
Asian heritage and the American modernity of his Cali-
fornian mother. His parents met after his father, the Japa-
nese poet Yonejiró (Yone, for short) Noguchi, arrived in Los
Angeles in the early 1900s at a time when it was fashion-
able for Japanese intellectuals to live in the US. He placed
a newspaper ad for a translator which was answered by a
young writer, Leonie Gilmour. She became pregnant but,
by the time of the birth, Yone was back in Japan.
Their son, Isamu, was born in Los Angeles in 1904 and lived
there with his mother for two years until she took him to
join Yone in Tokyo. Once besotted by the West, Yone now
loathed it and was far from sanguine at the arrival of his
American lover and their illegitimate son. Soon they split up,
and Leonie moved from Tokyo to the seaside town of Õmori.
At the age of 14, Isamu was sent back to the US to enrol at
an international school in Indiana. He graduated from high
school as ‘Sam Gilmour’ and won a place to study medicine
at Columbia University.

Top: Isamu Noguchi as a young

man. Middle Left: Coffee Tables
1948. Bottom Left: Freeform Sofa
and Ottoman 1946. Top Right:
“California Scenario“ Pacific Arts
Plaza. Middle Right: “Dymaxion
Car Model“ 1932. Bottom Right:
Examples of Noguchi Sculptures.

2 - Great Designers
Once at Columbia, he realised that his
future lay in sculpture. He dropped out
of medical school and renamed himself
Isamu Noguchi. Three years later, he won
a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in
Paris, where he assisted Brancusi. After
a brief return to New York in 1929, Isamu
set off on his travels again to Paris, then
Beijing and, finally, Tokyo, for what he
hoped would be a happy reunion with
Yone.

Fiercely nationalist and still ambivalent

about his half-American son, Yone was
barely courteous, but he did introduce
Isamu to fellow writers and artists. Isamu
sought solace in Kyoto, where he be-
came enthralled by the exquisite simplic-
ity of the ancient Buddhist rock gardens.
Although he would continue to travel
to Japan and eventually married a Japa-
nese woman (the movie star, Yamaguchi
Yoshiko) Noguchi lost his illusions about
ever being accepted there. Years later he
wrote of the Chinese-American artist,
Li-Lan, that: “in the same way as I do she
belongs to that increasing number of not
exactly belonging people”.

Noguchi continued to
design new Akari lights
throughout the 1950s
and 1960s: alongside
the popular “organic”
furniture he made in
curvily sculpted wood
for American manufac-
turers such as Knoll and
Herman Miller.

3 - Isamu Noguchi
 Back in New York in the
mid-1930s, he discovered
the social cachet of be-
ing a charming, cultured,
rather exotic Japanese-
American.

Far from being squashed by “not exactly

belonging”, Noguchi made the most of it.
Back in New York in the mid-1930s, he dis-
covered the social cachet of being a charm-
ing, cultured, rather exotic Japanese-Amer-
ican. His sculpture was commissioned by
wealthy collectors and in 1935, he began a
30 year collaboration designing stage sets
for the choreographer, Martha Graham. He
then ventured into industry with the 1937
Zenith Night Nurse, an intercom in the el-
egant form of a Japanese mask.

When the US joined World War II after

the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, No-
guchi campaigned to improve the lot of
Japanese-Americans, many of whom were
herded into detention camps. After the
War, he contributed to the reconstruction
of Japanese industry when the city of Gifu
asked him to revive its stricken paper lan-
tern industry. Noguchi moved there with
Yamaguchi, whom he had met and married
in 1950. They lived in a traditional wooden
house and he developed new designs
which harnessed the ancient skills of the
Gifu lantern-makers to produce modern
electrified versions of traditional cande-lit
lanterns. Beautifully shaped and capable of
folding perfectly flat, his Akari light sculp-
tures are still made by hand in Gifu today
from the mino-gami paper that comes
from the bark of mulberry trees.

Top Left: Seattle Art Museum Exhibit, 2005. Bottom Left

Images: Isamu’s famous Akari paper lanterns. Top Right:
“Mu“ Keio University 1952. Middle Right: “Billy Rose
Sculpture Garden“ The Israel Museum 1965. Bottom
Right: “The Garden” Yale University 1963.

4 - Great Designers
Noguchi continued to design new Akari
lights throughout the 1950s and 1960s:
alongside the popular “organic” furniture
he made in curvily sculpted wood for
American manufacturers such as Knoll and
Herman Miller. He was equally prolific as a
landscape architect. After creating a memo-
rial garden to his father at Keiõ University in
1950, Noguchi was invited by Japanese ar-
chitect Kenzo Tange to design a (sadly un-
built) memorial to the victims of the atom
bomb in Hiroshima Peace Park. Over the
next decade, he recreated the ancient Bud-
dhist stone gardens he had loved in Kyoto
at Lever House in New York (1951), UNES-
CO in Paris (1951), the Yale campus (1960)
and Jerusalem’s Israel Museum (1960).

Back in New York, Noguchi designed a gar-

den of his own around his home and studio
on a disused industrial lot on Long Island
City in Queens, which eventually opened
to the public in 1985 as the Isamu Noguchi
Garden Museum. He built another home
and studio on Shikoku, Japan’s most de-
serted island. From his two bases, Isamu
Noguchi continued to fuse his mixed heri-
tage in life and work until his death in 1988.
As the writer, Ian Buruma, once noted this
fusion “was not a matter of superficial
ressemblances to traditional styles: it was
in the spirit of his work: artisanal, utilitarian,
and always in search of simplicity.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sam Hunter, Isamu Noguchi, University of

Washington Press, 2000
Ana Maria Torres, Isamu Noguchi: A Study
of Space, Monacelli Press, 2000
Isamu Noguchi, Space of Akari and Stone,
Chronicle Books, 1986
Isamu Noguchi, The Isamu Noguchi Gar-
den Museum, Harry N. Abrams, 1999
Bruce Altshuler, Isamu Noguchi, Abbeville
Press, 1994
Robert Tracy, Spaces of the Mind: Isamu
Noguchi’s Dance Design, Limelight Edi-
tions, 2001

5 - Isamu Noguchi