{"id":58,"date":"2015-03-26T17:28:37","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T17:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/collections\/?p=58"},"modified":"2015-05-07T04:12:56","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T04:12:56","slug":"isamu-noguchi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/isamu-noguchi\/","title":{"rendered":"The many faces of Isamu Noguchi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Gilmour was discouraged. He had just been told that he’d never make it as a sculptor \u2013 by the guy who sculpted Mt. Rushmore. No, seriously.<\/p>\n

Maybe Sam\u00a0never should’ve moved back to America. Or changed his name to Sam. He didn’t even know this country. He was born here, but\u00a0at the ripe age of one, he and his mother left for Japan to reunite with\u00a0Yone, an amazing poet but a horrible father. Yone had left\u00a0his\u00a0girlfriend\u00a0and son in San Francisco, and when he realized\u00a0that he missed them, he convinced them to move to Yokohama, only to decide that he actually didn’t. He abandoned\u00a0them again, but not before naming his son Isamu, which in Japanese means “bravery.”<\/p>\n

\n
\"Portrait<\/a>

Portrait of Isamu Noguchi, circa 1935. Photograph by George Platt Lynes. \u00a9 Estate of George Platt Lynes. This portrait is on display at the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition 20th Century Americans: 1930-1950<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

\n
\"1903<\/a>

A\u00a0portrait of Yone Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi’s father, taken by Charles W. Hearn\u00a0in 1903 right before Isamu’s birth. (Archive of American Art)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

So Sam (at least that’s what he insisted on being called) wasn’t afraid\u00a0of rejection.\u00a0But it still sucked to be the only\u00a0half-Japanese kid in town, especially in the middle of Connecticut during\u00a0the 1920’s. Especially with the legendary Gutzon Borglum telling him that his dreams of being an artist would never amount to anything.<\/p>\n

Sam needed an identity change, again. So in 1922, in the dead of the winter, he moved to New York City to study medicine\u00a0at Columbia University. It didn’t go well. One day, one\u00a0of his\u00a0professors pulled him aside and told him\u00a0that he really should consider a career in the arts. If that day, Sam went crazy and ran off to live in the woods as a hermit, free of judgement, nobody would have blamed him. Thank goodness he didn’t.\u00a0Thank goodness for Michio.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A photo of Isamu Noguchi’s friend, the Japanese American dancer Michio Ito, taken by Nickolas Muray in 1921. (National Portrait Gallery)<\/p><\/div>\n

It was\u00a0Michio It\u014d, the dancer whose grace on the stage\u00a0had captured the awe of Manhattan, who introduced Sam to the world of artists\u00a0\u2013 the world where he belonged.\u00a0He\u00a0convinced him to change his name back to Isamu Noguchi. Here in New York, a name like that had more currency. Who cared\u00a0that it had\u00a0his father’s rejection written all over it? It was his<\/em> name. And who cared\u00a0that some\u00a0carver of some big monument of some presidents didn’t like his work? It was his<\/em> destiny. Isamu was meant to sculpt things. And he could begin with sculpting his career.<\/p>\n

Isamu spent the\u00a0evenings after Columbia taking\u00a0night classes for art. And when\u00a0his schedule got out of hand, he dropped out of Columbia. He rented\u00a0a studio, and carved\u00a0busts, and showed them in\u00a0exhibits, and won awards. In 1926, Isamu received a Guggenheim Fellowship \u2013 a fellowship he was too young to apply for in the first place \u2013 to study in Paris and voyage\u00a0throughout Asia. He got\u00a0to Paris and\u00a0ditched the program.\u00a0Maybe he was actually too young.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Radio<\/a>

A radio nurse intercom speaker designed by Isamu Noguchi for Zenith Radio Corporation, while doing freelance design work in New York City, 1937\u201338.
Molded Bakelite, metal. (Cooper-Hewitt<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

\n
\"Grey<\/a>

Grey Sun, an arni marble sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, 1967. This object is on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 3rd floor.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

Isamu spent the next decade or so living the kind of life artists fantasize about\u00a0when they forfeit\u00a0their Guggenheim Fellowships to live in Paris. He sat in caf\u00e9s among other bohemians in the afternoons, and spent his evenings carving\u00a0works out of any piece of wood or metal he could get his hands on. He traveled. He\u00a0made brush paintings in China. He studied pottery in Japan. He went to Mexico City to paint murals with\u00a0Diego Rivera. He stayed awhile longer to have an affair\u00a0with Frida Kahlo. He moved back to New York to build a sculpture\u00a0for the World’s Fair, a grand project, which the critics hated. He made one in Rockefeller Center, another grand project, which the critics loved.\u00a0Isamu\u00a0was a chameleon. And then the war hit.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A letter from Isamu Noguchi to the artist Man Ray, 1942. (Archives of American Art<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

On February 19, 1942, Isamu\u00a0watched from his home in Hollywood\u00a0as all the Japanese Americans around him were forced into incarceration camps.\u00a0He tried to fight for them, even forming an organization called the\u00a0Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy, to make anti-internment films\u00a0and lobby\u00a0politicians to reverse their racist policies. As a New Yorker, Isamu\u00a0was immune to the forced relocation. Everyone told him to go home.<\/p>\n

But then he thought about the people in the camps. What if he could build them parks, and baseball fields, and swimming pools, and cemeteries? Maybe then this war and the incarceration would be a little less horrible. Maybe this was his next calling.<\/p>\n

Within a few months,\u00a0Isamu Noguchi was\u00a0the only volunteer prisoner\u00a0in the Poston, Arizona incarceration camp. But that didn’t work out either. The other prisoners thought he was nuts\u00a0\u2013 this half-white New Yorker caged where he didn’t have to be, just to\u00a0find himself<\/em>. The officials never built any of public spaces he proposed.\u00a0They never planned to. And when he asked to leave, the F.B.I. told him that the fact that\u00a0he volunteered\u00a0himself as a prisoner, even if he didn’t originally deserve to be there, he did now.<\/p>\n

Isamu spent his time in that compound\u00a0writing letters to his friends in the art world, describing his loneliness and frustration. He even made a bust for one of them, Ginger Rogers, who read his letters in between takes for her Hollywood shoots.\u00a0In November he was granted a month-long leave. He never went back.<\/p>\n

After the war had ended, after the prisoners were released without apology and left to recollect their lives, after Isamu reclaimed his career and sculpted bridges in the Memorial Peace Park in Hiroshima. He built UNESCO Peace Park in Paris. He toyed with theater, and worked with John Cage. He fell in love too many times. And through the late 1950’s,\u00a0Isamu carved some faces.<\/p>\n

These sculptures\u00a0comprised a series entitled\u00a0Okame. <\/em>Maybe the sculptures\u00a0were named after the ancient Japanese goddess of masks and luck, who was considered a symbol for beauty until she became a parody of herself. Maybe the foot-tall statues, with their\u00a0peculiar resemblance\u00a0to distorted faces, were meant to represent the physical disfiguring of Japanese bodies during the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the mutated\u00a0perceptions of Japanese people throughout\u00a0American history.<\/p>\n

Or maybe they were self-portraits\u00a0of a shape-shifting artist who spent his life\u00a0adapting to space and form. Who wore masks more often than not \u2013 not because he wasn’t being himself, but because he was all those things. Who was most at home in\u00a0extremes of award and rejection.<\/p>\n

\n
\"noguchi-okame\"<\/a>

Okame, an iron sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, 1956. (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

\n
\"A<\/a>

A portrait of Isamu Noguchi, taken by Irving Penn in 1983. \u00a9 1984 Irving Penn, courtesy of Vanity Fair (National Portrait Gallery<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

\n
\"A<\/a>

A woodblock print of Japanese goddess Okame, produced amidst the Meiji to Showa era. (Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Gilmour was discouraged. He had just been told that he’d never make it as a sculptor \u2013 by the guy who sculpted Mt. Rushmore. No, seriously. Maybe Sam\u00a0never should’ve moved back to America. Or changed his name to Sam. He didn’t even know this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/recollections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}