Noguchi, Isamu

Noguchi, Isamu (1904–1988). American sculptor and designer, born in Los Angeles, the son of a Japanese father and an American mother, both of whom were writers. He was brought up in Japan, 1906–18, and after returning to the USA he was briefly apprenticed in 1922 to Gutzon Borglum, who told him he would never make a sculptor. For the next two years he studied medicine at Columbia University and also took sculpture classes at the Leonardo da Vinci School in New York, until in 1924 he decided definitively to be an artist. In 1927 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship that enabled him to spend two years in Paris, where he worked as Brancusi's assistant and under his influence turned from figuration to abstraction. He returned to New York in 1929 and in the same year had his first one-man show there at the Eugene Schoen Gallery. Although he used various materials, including wood, bronze, and iron, Noguchi was essentially a stone-carver, and his work has a kinship with Brancusi's in its craftsmanship and respect for materials as well as its expressive use of organic shapes (see DIRECT CARVING). For several years he supported himself mainly by making academic portrait busts, but in 1938 he scored his first major success, winning a competition to make a huge stainless steel piece for the façade of the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center, New York. Before this he had already begun what was to be a highly distinguished career as a stage designer, working most notably for the choreographer Martha Graham (1894–1991). His first design for her was for Frontier (1935, the first time she had used a set) and he continued collaborating with her until 1966. Noguchi drew on the Japanese tradition of No drama in his stage designs, creating spare, elegant abstract environments. Apart from Martha Graham, he worked for other famous choreographers, including George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham, and also for the Royal Shakespeare Company, designing Sir John Gielgud's production of Macbeth in 1955.

After the Second World War Noguchi became recognized internationally as one of the leading sculptors of the day and from the 1960s he had many major commissions for public spaces that allowed him to fulfil his long-held ambition to combine Western modernism with Eastern traditions of contemplative art (he had begun designing sculptural gardens—as well as children's playgrounds—in the 1930s, but he had not had the opportunity to put them into practice). Examples of this type of work are the Water Garden at Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza, New York (1963), and Hart Plaza, Detroit (1975), with its huge Dodge Memorial Fountain in stainless steel and granite. Throughout his career Noguchi frequently returned to Japan and his work is regarded as a successful marriage of East and West. He published an autobiography, A Sculptor's World, in 1968.