Isamu Noguchi – Sculptural Design

Foreground: Bench, 1966.
Installation view at the
Japanese American National Museum.
Photograph by Norman Sugimoto.

To mount a fitting tribute to Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, decided to organize a major exhibition featuring objects that articulated the artist’s remarkable versatility. The internationally acclaimed exhibition, Isamu Noguchi – Sculptural Design , has traveled to London, Madrid, Paris, Cologne, Rotterdam, Berlin, New York, Seattle, and now to Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum.

Isamu Noguchi – Sculptural Design (February 5–May 14, 2006) provides a fascinating glimpse into the artist’s interdisciplinary talents as a sculptor, designer, landscape architect, ceramic artist, stage set designer, and developer of mass-produced furniture such as coffee tables, lamps, and sofas. Because Noguchi approached these different fields by treating each area as if it were sculpture, he creatively blurred the lines between art and design. The installation will include work ranging from the artist’s classic granite sculpture Round Square Space to the set designs he created for choreographers Martha Graham and George Balanchine to his still-popular Akari paper lamps. Examples of his iconic Herman Miller Sofa and Coffee Table, along with a marble study of Slide Mantra (which was eventually built in a playground in Sapporo, Japan), and a proposed reconfiguration of half of Central Park in New York City all demonstrate the tremendous breadth of Noguchi’s interests and abilities.

My Arizona, 1943. Fiberglass and plastic.
© 2005 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation
and Garden Museum, New York
/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

This formidable traveling exhibition brings with it enormous amounts of silver sand, black lava sand, broken glass, and bales of fireproofed hay—all elements prescribed by another interdisciplinary artist, Robert Wilson, the exhibition’s designer. Wilson, who has embraced an equally fluid career as a theater director, choreographer, artist, architect, and designer, became acquainted with Noguchi in the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition’s design and visual concept, created by Wilson at the Watermill Center on Long Island, New York, represent the two artists’ shared passion for the theater, spatial design, and the creative use of light. Wilson presents Noguchi’s designs in discrete rooms, one brightly lit and the next dim, as if the visitor is moving from “act to act”; the objects can be seen in an entirely new light while retaining their original integrity.

Rocking Chair.
Installation view at the
Japanese American National Museum.
Photograph by Norman Sugimoto.

Wilson has sought to present Noguchi’s work as rich in contrast, and this approach is indeed reflective of the artist’s life. Born Sam Gilmour in 1904 in Boyle Heights (a few miles from the National Museum) to Leonie Gilmour, an Irish American teacher and editor, and Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet, he spent his youth in Japan before returning to America. Eventually he changed his name to Isamu Noguchi. He began studying abstract sculpture in New York and Paris and learned from modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, among others; he also had the opportunity to work with muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico. Fusing elements of American modernism and traditional Japanese craftsmanship, Noguchi created designs for mass-produced sofas, coffee tables, and Akari lamps, which remain as popular today as they were during his lifetime.

When World War II erupted, Noguchi chose to join his fellow Japanese Americans in a government-run camp in Poston, Arizona, even though he did not live in a restricted area. He had hopes of developing an art school, but conditions within the camps were such that he was forced to abandon his plans, and he left camp after several months. He marked this experience with the work entitled My Arizona.

As was revealed in Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics, a traveling exhibition organized by the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which was installed at the National Museum in 2004, Noguchi returned to Japan after the war and discovered a like-minded community of young artists eager to seek out new directions and ideas. He began working on larger site-specific pieces, including gardens and fountains, and he expanded his focus to include landscape architecture. Applied to all myriad projects in his life, was this central philosophy stated by Noguchi: “My various activities . . . all approach the same end—through diversity a permeation of sculpture.”