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Isamu Noguchi / イサム・ノグチ

Sculptor & designer　/ 彫刻家・デザイナー (1904-1988)


Isamu Noguchi, full-length portrait, facing right, standing by his sculpture of a nude woman, c1927. Washington DC, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-105840
Isamu Noguchi, full-length portrait, facing right, standing by his sculpture of a nude woman, c1927. Washington DC, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-105840

Biography / 経歴

While best known for his sculptures, Isamu Noguchi also designed stage sets, landscapes, and mass-produced furniture. Because Noguchi approached these different fields as if they were sculpture, he extended the classical definition of sculpture and blurred the lines between fine art and utilitarian design. Noguchi wished to infuse art with practical and social relevance and to create everyday objects that were both useful and beautiful.

Born Sam Gilmour in Los Angeles to American Leonie Gilmour and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi grew up in Japan and was educated in the United States. His interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to art was influenced not only by his exposure to western modernism and his time in Paris assisting sculptor Constantin Brancusi, but also by his travels to Asia where no distinction is made between fine and applied arts.

Beginning in 1935, Noguchi collaborated with choreographer Martha Graham for over 30 years. During the 1940s and 1950s, he designed sculpturally-shaped chairs and tables for Herman Miller and Knoll. Applying traditional Japanese handcrafting techniques, he also created his famous paper Akari lamps - light sculptures for everyday use. Later in life, Noguchi worked on larger designs, including gardens and fountains, which he viewed as a single sculpture. Using water, flora, carved and natural stones, he created spaces that appeal to the senses and respect both nature and culture.

Profiled as part of "Columbia 250: C250 Celebrates Columbians Ahead of their Time". Noguchi began his undergraduate career in premedical studies at Columbia in 1924, but left after beginning sculpture classes at New York's Leonardo da Vinci Art School.
Review: Hayden Herrera, "Noguchi's Odyssey". Art in America (January, 2005). (Republished on LookSmart Education)
Excerpt: "Duus, a historian of Japanese-American relations, is conscientious about giving the reader an idea of the social and cultural context in which Noguchi's life and art unfolded. Her thumbnail sketches of the marvelous cast of characters whom Noguchi counted as friends, collaborators and patrons--people like Buckminster Fuller, Martha Graham, Frida Kahlo, Arshile Gorky and Louis Kahn--are diligent. She also gives a fair picture of the critical response to Noguchi's sculpture during and after his lifetime, both in the U.S. and in Japan. All this is commendable, but Noguchi's story does not come to life."
  • Dore Ashton, "Noguchi, Isamu". The Reader's Companion to American History (Houghton Mifflin web site)
イサムノグチ展・プレスリリースより引用
略歴・作品紹介　/ Brief profile and slected works.
Compiled in January, 2004, for the Architectural Association Library (London).
イサム・ノグチの経歴、作品の場所、参考資料などを紹介。「日本語によるイサム・ノグチの情報提供」を目的にイサム・ノグチ財団から許可を得て運営しているプライベートサイト。
  • Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Bruce Altshuler (eds.), Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, 1994.
Review: Bert Winther, "Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations". Art Journal (Fall 1995).
Excerpts from Gordon's monograph on Noguchi, published for the 1968 retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
"Noguchi is in most ways a product of America and in every way a citizen of the world. His natural sympathies for Japan have led him to probe her culture more deeply, but use of this knowledge is always filtered through his international point of view. His energetic and restless nature continues to lead him to all corners of the globe. He feels that he is caught in between the two poles of Greece and Japan and that the United States is the arena where the battle is being waged...."


Museums & Exhibitions / 美術館・展示

John Haber, "The Modern Art Factory - The Noguchi Garden Museum: Summer 2001"
Links to Isamu Noguchi in Commercial Galleries and Auction Houses

Exhibitions　/ 展示

-- see separate page of listings


Works / 作品

-- see separate listing of resources related to individual works


Criticism / 批評

An assessment of the aesthetic and political considerations behind the rejection of Noguchi's 1952 design for a cenotaph to be placed at the Hiroshima Peace Park.
On the occasion of Japan's issuance of a commemorative postage stamp of Noguchi, Richie reviews two recent publications on Noguchi: Masayo Duus' biography, The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey Without Borders, and the catalog to the exhibition Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor.
Describes Noguchi's apartment, opposite his studio space in Astoria, Long Island.
Abstract: "In 1942 the sculptor Isamu Noguchi was 'voluntarily' interned in the Poston (Arizona) Relocation Center for Japanese Americans. Poston represented a significant experience of racialization for this Japanese American sculptor, one that seems to have pushed him to interrogate how race and identity operated within the liberal model of American art during the 1940s. Noguchi's sculptures of this time approach the relations between race, nation, and identity critically. The particular abstract forms of Noguchi's work suggest how modern sculpture might evade, resist, or question the racist assumptions that permeated contemporary discourse about the 'nature' of American art in the 1940s."
Art historian Anne M. Wagner reconsiders the political implications of Noguchi's work in the '30s and '40s, finding new relevance in his lost 1939 carving 1,000 Horsepower Heart.
  • Josiah McElheny, "Useful Noguchi". ArtForum, November 2004. (Republished on LookSmart Education)
"Here I am defining usefulness not simply in terms of functionality. Rather, I am interested in exploring how our experience of the use of things in the everyday world might become a subject for art, as well as how art can be used in ways apart from visual contemplation alone. Noguchi was an early proponent of the idea that sculpture can involve the viewer in ways other than confronting him or her with a monolithic image; he suggested instead that the experience behind our interaction with the functional forms around us could be absorbed into the sphere of art."
"This iconic artist and Midcentury star is being embraced by museums and design enthusiasts alike."


Text from press release for Smithsonian exhibition, Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, May 3-September 7, 2003)

Isamu Noguchi was born on November 17, 1904 in Los Angeles, the son of Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and American writer Leonie Gilmour, who separated soon after his birth. Throughout his life, Noguchi felt caught between, and simultaneously drawn to, two very different cultures. He spent his early childhood in Japan before returning to the United States where he trained as a sculptor in New York. A Guggenheim traveling fellowship enabled him to work in Paris with renowned sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and to travel throughout Asia between 1927 and 1931. In China, Noguchi was intrigued by Tang dynasty terra-cotta figurines, while in Japan he drew inspiration from unglazed prehistoric clay tomb sculptures known as haniwa. These encounters left a lasting impression on Noguchi, who would later describe his experience as "my close embrace of the earth…a seeking after identity with some primal matter beyond personalities and possessions."

As an artist, Noguchi was drawn to clay — a medium used in Japanese art since prehistory and one that could be worked quickly and expressively to reveal informal, spontaneous, and humorous qualities not visible in less flexible media such as bronze or stone. Noguchi, like other artists in his time, found that clay was a natural medium through which he could interpret and react to the struggle between tradition and modernity in postwar Japan.

"Noguchi's knowledge of Euro-American traditions of modern sculpture, and his experience working with stone, metal and wood, informed his use of various Japanese clays," says Sackler curator of ceramics Louise Allison Cort. "But his ceramic work in Japan also reflects his investigation of Japanese cultural themes. Through clay, Noguchi found a way to explore the Japanese dimension of his dual cultural identity."

By the time Noguchi returned to Japan in 1950, he had become a sculptor and designer of international renown. Asked to hold an exhibition, but unable to ship existing objects from America in time, Noguchi was invited by his friend and fellow artist Kitagawa Tamiji (1894-1989) to work at a ceramic facility in Seto where he spent a week of intense labor, producing more than 20 vessels and sculptures including Journey, My Mu, and The Policeman (all 1950), which are on view in the ceramics exhibition. Japanese viewers were startled by Noguchi’s daring and experimental departure from the vessel forms of traditional ceramics.

Late in 1951, he began another extended visit to Japan, staying near the city of Kamakura as a guest of the well-known traditionalist potter, Kitaoji Rosanjin, who is represented in the show by such important works as Shigaraki Large Jar (1957) and Basket-shaped Vase (1951). Noguchi spent an exceptionally creative, yearlong period at Rosanjin's, during which time he became absorbed in what he described as the "uniquely coarse Japanese earth." He adopted the materials used by Rosanjin and two potters later designated Living National Treasures, Kaneshige Toyo and Arakawa Toyozo, who breathed new life into the time-honored clays and glazes of Japan's regional kilns. The works Noguchi created during this time reflected his immersion in many aspects of Japanese culture including its craft traditions, Zen Buddhism, haiku, and the aesthetics of the tea ceremony, as well as ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement.

Inspired by Teshigahara Sofu (1900-1979), founding director of Tokyo’s vanguard Sogetsu school of ikebana, Noguchi made ceramic sculptures that also could function as vases for avant-garde ikebana by Teshigahara, such as Lonely Tower and War, both on view in the exhibition, which were featured in his solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura in 1952.

Noguchi's 1952 exhibition inspired a number of young Japanese potters to push the boundaries of classic Asian ceramic forms and utilitarian design, infusing their work with the principles of international art movements, such as Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. Yagi Kazuo, Yamada Hikaru and Suzuki Osamu, who had formed the avant-garde group Sodeisha (Crawling Through Mud Society) in 1948, were admirers of Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. "The unconventional approach to working with Japanese clay by esteemed outsider Isamu Noguchi provided a jolt of energy to help these artists move across the boundary from vessel to what the Japanese art world called objet. They led the way in redefining ceramics as a valid medium for abstract sculpture," says Cort.

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