Interviews, Issue 3

In Minds Of: Isamu Noguchi

Brett Littman explores Noguchi’s universal approach to sculpture

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Isamu Noguchi, the great trailblazing sculptor of the 20th century, is difficult to define. He spent his eclectic lifetime working in both the U.S. and Japan as an accomplished sculptor, prolific industrial designer, landscape architect, and set designer, transgressing traditional boundaries of fine art. Though his oeuvre has been studied and analyzed extensively over the past 50 years, there are still so many unexplored interpretations of his practice and much about him that remains unknown. He is an endlessly fascinating figure.

Even now, decades after his death, his art is beloved by many. The Noguchi Museum, which the artist himself constructed to house his own work in New York, has invited viewers to experience Noguchi’s holistic vision up close. We sat down with Brett Littman, the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, who gave us a glimpse into the enigmatic mind of Isamu Noguchi.

PLUS MAGAZINE: To start off, let’s discuss Noguchi’s early life. From what I understand, he had a very unusual upbringing.

BRETT LITTMAN: Noguchi was born the illegitimate son of Leonie Gilmour and Yone Noguchi in 1904, California. He grew up in a farm commune in Pasadena until he was three, and his mother was a critic, writer, and editor of poetry. She was someone who bucked tradition by not only being a single mother but also by deciding to bring her young son to Japan by herself. It was a pretty radical thing to do since she did not speak Japanese. She arrived in a country that was, to be frank, highly misogynistic and still tradition-bound, and she managed to carve out an existence there for about seventeen years.

From a young age, she pushed Noguchi to become an artist. That was her dream for him. She apprenticed him to a Japanese carpenter at the age of ten so he could help build their house. He spent a lot of time learning how to carve wood from that Japanese carpenter. When it came to things like that, he was a bit of a child prodigy.

P: Do you think he felt a sense of cultural belonging growing up in Japan?

BL: Noguchi had both a beautiful and fraught relationship with Japan. During that time, he was not really embraced by young Japanese kids because his features were not purely Japanese. He looked Eurasian. I don’t think he ever felt a sense of belonging. Growing up there did have an impact on him artistically and philosophically later on, but I think that influence was a push and pull for him for a long time.

P: But he ended up moving back to America, right?

BL: Yes–when he was thirteen, his mother sent him back to the United States to go to a school called Interlocken in Indiana. And as you can imagine, already in 1916 with the outbreak of World War I, there was a rising anti-American sentiment in Japan. And I think she felt that he would be better off if he went back to the United States. She encouraged him to become an American. Noguchi wrote that before he got on the boat to go to the United States by himself, a place he’d never been before, he had to go through some kind of ceremony with an American counselor where he had to renounce his Japanese heritage. So, Noguchi surely was quite thrust into some pretty interesting situations as a young man.

P: What were his early experiences studying art in America like?

BL: Well, one of his first art apprenticeships in America was terrible. It was with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who did Mount Rushmore. He surely did not like Noguchi just because of his Asian heritage and told Noguchi that he would never be a sculptor.

P: Noguchi changed his last name from Gilmour (his mother’s surname) to Noguchi (his father’s surname) at around that time. Why do you think he did that?

BL: Well, when he was around 19, he was beginning to start his career as an artist and was conscious that he viewed himself as an American. In his writings, he mentions that by that point, he was fully American and had no trace of Japanese in his thinking and in the way that he approached the world. But I think that it was important for him to change his name because it grounded him. Obviously, his first name is Isamu, and that’s not a typical Western name. But I think Isamu Noguchi, in a way, brought his identity together in concrete form. It was a way of saying that if he was going to present himself as an artist, this maybe was the most truthful way for him to do it.

P: Do you think he felt a sense of belonging in America?

BL: Noguchi surely was someone who absorbed a tremendous amount of cross-cultural information as a young child. He had that struggle between being a hybrid child of American and Japanese descent, maybe never quite understanding if he belonged anywhere. He is considered an American artist. Even though he is Japanese American, he was born in America, not in Japan. But he experienced racism and discrimination in his time in America. So, I think part of the fulcrum that Noguchi is on his whole life is the inability to find a home, which is why he became such a global traveler at such an early age. He left America already at the age of 22 when he got a Guggenheim Fellowship. At that point, he started circumnavigating the globe. He was quite nomadic. He became what I would call probably the first global artist, someone who really traveled a lot and absorbed a lot from many different cultures. He was very interested in the universality of what art could do.