eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. From interlocking wooden sculptures to massive steel monuments to the elegant Akari lamps, Noguchi became a master of what he called the "sculpturing of space." But his constant struggle—as both an artist and a man—was to embrace his conflicted identity as the son of a single American woman and a famous yet reclusive Japanese father. "It's only in art," he insisted, "that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all."
In this remarkable biography of the elusive artist, Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchi's creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature. As a boy in Japan, Noguchi would collect wild azaleas and blue mountain flowers for a little garden in front of his home. As Herrera writes, he also included a rock, "to give a feeling of weight and permanence." It was a sensual appreciation he never abandoned. When looking for stones in remote Japanese quarries for his zen-like Paris garden forty years later, he would spend hours actually listening to the stones, scrambling from one to another until he found one that "spoke to him." Constantly striving to "take the essence of nature and distill it," Noguchi moved from sculpture to furniture, and from playgrounds to sets for his friend the choreographer Martha Graham, and back again working in wood, iron, clay, steel, aluminum, and, of course, stone.
Throughout his career, Noguchi traveled constantly, from New York to Paris to India to Japan, forever uprooting himself to reinvigorate what he called the "keen edge of originality." Wherever he went, his needy disposition and boyish charm drew women to him, yet he tended to push them away when things began to feel too settled. Only through his art—now seen as a powerful aesthetic link between the East and the West—did Noguchi ever seem to feel that he belonged.
Combining the personal correspondence of and interviews with Noguchi and those closest to him—from artists, patrons, assistants, and lovers—Herrera has created an authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most important sculptors. She locates Noguchi in his friendships with such artists as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women including Frida Kahlo and Anna Matta Clark. With the attention to detail and scholarship that made her biography of Gorky a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Herrera has written a rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu. Listening to Stone is a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own "essence of sculpture."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374712969 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 588 |
| Sales rank: | 407,112 |
| File size: | 16 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Hayden Herrera is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, and Matisse: A Portrait.
Read an Excerpt
Listening to Stone
The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi
By Hayden Herrera
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Hayden HerreraAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71296-9
CHAPTER 1
PARENTS
When Isamu Noguchi was a boy of ten roaming the hills above the sea in Chigasaki, Japan, he searched for wild azaleas and rare blue mountain flowers to add to the primroses, violets, and daisies that already bloomed in his garden. He persuaded a local horticulturalist to give him clippings. Soon he had about fifty rosebushes irrigated by a ditch of his own devising. And, in the Japanese fashion, he placed a rock in the garden to give a feeling of weight and permanence. When he returned home from one of his plant-searching forays with muddy feet and his mother complained, he responded, "There's such fine mud on that mountain, so rich and black and slippery. I wish we had our garden full of it."
Noguchi decided that when he grew up he would become a landscape gardener or a horticulturalist. Years later, looking back on his childhood, he attributed his passion to embed himself and his sculpture in nature to his early years in Japan. "Primarily," he said, "what we carry around with us is a memory of our childhood, back when each day held the magic of discovering the world. I was very fortunate to have spent my early childhood in Japan ... one is much more aware of nature in Japan—not a vast panorama of nature but its details: an insect, a flower. Nature is very close, a foot away."
Noguchi's love of gardens with moving water and carefully placed boulders would reemerge in the many gardens that he designed beginning with his 1951 Reader's Digest garden in Tokyo and ending in the 1980s with California Scenario, in Costa Mesa. Driven by his feeling of placelessness, Noguchi learned to invent oases for himself and others to inhabit, places where he could calm his restless energy.
Although Noguchi maintained that it was through his gardens that he came to a reverence for stone, it is clear that his love affair with rocks began when he was a child. "Stone is the fundament of the earth, of the universe," he said. "We come from stone and we return to it, it is the earth itself." Torn between East and West, Noguchi never felt that he belonged anywhere. He called himself a "waif," a "wanderer," a "loner." He was a person for whom fierce personal attachments were rare. Rocks, on the other hand, were something he could rely on. Cutting into them with chisel and hammer was a way of merging with the earth, making it his "place."
Noguchi's childhood in Japan formed what he called "the private side" of his being. His American mother, Leonie Gilmour, was, he said, his strongest influence, and it was from her that he developed an interest in art. He described his mother as shy, reserved, and sensitive. "I think I'm the product of my mother's imagination." His father, Yonejiro (Yone) Noguchi, was mostly absent. But the fact that his father was a well-known poet was something that Noguchi mentioned often with pride. In his own work Noguchi hoped to "take the essence of nature and distill it—just as a poet does."
Yone Noguchi never formally married Leonie Gilmour, and lived with her and Isamu only briefly. Nevertheless, Leonie thought that her son was more like his father than he was like her. In the introductory paragraph of his autobiography, published in 1968, Isamu wrote: "With my double nationality and double upbringing where was my home? Where my affections? Where my identity? Japan or America, either, both—or the world?" Twenty years later he posed the same question: "After all, for one with a background like myself the question of identity is very uncertain. And I think it's only in art that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all." But, unlike the paintings of his contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionists, Noguchi's sculptures did not explore his own identity, nor did they delve into the tumult of his subconscious. Rather, he sought to connect with the earth.
* * *
Leonie Gilmour was an extraordinarily unconventional and self-reliant woman. She was five feet three and slender with light brown, wavy hair and soft gray eyes. In photographs, wearing spectacles, she looks delicate, schoolmarmish, and charmingly Irish. Her father, Andrew Gilmour, was, according to Noguchi, an Irish Protestant who emigrated from the village of Coleraine in the far north of Ireland to America sometime in the nineteenth century. Possibly he was part of the influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine of the 1840s, although there is some evidence that he left home to escape family problems. Noguchi, who knew Andrew Gilmour only through a photograph, said that he was "quite handsome, with a beard," though what impressed him most was his grandfather's intrepidness. "My mother told me that he went swimming, one day in Sheepshead Bay on New Year's day." Perhaps it was his grandfather's example that prompted the adult Noguchi to terrify friends by swimming far out beyond breaking waves.
It was probably in the early 1870s that Andrew Gilmour married Noguchi's grandmother, a nurse named Albiana Smith. She was the daughter of Aaron Smith, a fairly prosperous man of Irish descent, and a mother who was descended from a French fur trader and a Cherokee woman. Leonie, the first of Albiana's two daughters, was born in New York City on June 17, 1874. Her younger sister Florence was born a few years later. Andrew and Albiana never divorced, but they did not live together for long. Andrew had two daughters about the same ages as Leonie and Florence by another woman, while Albiana brought up her daughters alone.
Leonie and Florence attended the progressive Ethical Culture School (then called the Working Man's School) founded in 1876 by the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The school emphasized the integration of manual and academic training and children were taught how to use tools, an experience that proved formative. Years later Leonie would apprentice her son to a carpenter, and, when he was thirteen, she sent him to a progressive boarding school that taught boys not just academics but also manual skills.
After Ethical Culture, Leonie went to the Bryn Mawr School, a boarding school in Baltimore founded in 1884 by five young women who believed that girls should be offered as rigorous an education as boys. The school was preparatory for Bryn Mawr College and its curriculum included modern and classical languages, science, and athletics. A superior student with a keen interest in literature, the seventeen-year-old Leonie entered Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia in 1891 on a full scholarship. After an early focus on chemistry, she majored in history and philosophy, and in her sophomore year she won a scholarship to the Sorbonne, where she spent a year studying French literature. Noguchi maintained that his mother translated the work of the nineteenth-century French Romantic novelist George Sand, a writer whose bold novels promulgated freedom for women.
After graduating from Bryn Mawr, Leonie lived with her mother in New York and looked unsuccessfully for editorial work. She finally took a job at Saint Aloysius Academy, a Catholic girls' school in Jersey City, where she taught Latin and French. In the evenings she struggled with her own writing. Her letters to her great friend and fellow Bryn Mawr graduate Catherine Bunnell speak of books that she was reading—works by Schiller and the poet William Young, and George Du Maurier's Trilby, and they hint at her own literary ambitions: "I've been thinking up the plot of a problem story this afternoon. I want to write it down tomorrow if my energies don't evaporate overnight." In a joking tone, she said she hoped to get it published. Changing the subject, she said, "I got a new hat. That is, I took an old black straw hat, somewhat dingy, and with a watercolor brush and bottle of ink improved it into a suitable crowning achievement for a lady of literary and artistic tastes. A whole big bunch of cabbage roses stuck on." Other letters allude to her loneliness and to a disappointing romance.
To supplement her income Leonie sought freelance editorial jobs. Early in 1901 she answered an advertisement placed in a newspaper by Yone Noguchi, who needed someone to help him with his English writings and to type his manuscripts. Yone wrote Leonie back, giving his address as 80 Riverside Drive on Manhattan's Upper West Side:
Miss Leonie Gilmour:
Dear Madam: Permit me! I am a young Japanese who advertised in the Herald and received your letter. I called on your place but not finding even a person.
I don't need any English teacher—yes, I do! I want one who can correct my English composition. Can you take such a task? I suppose that you are able, with good English and literary ability. About three pages a week. How much you charge? Pray answer me!
Yours
Yone Noguchi
P.S. Tell me when you can see me, then we will talk about—that's better, I suppose.
Leonie took the job, and within a few weeks Yone wrote to her saying how grateful he was for the work she had done. He apologized for paying her so little and asked her to work on four different manuscripts. "Am I not asking you to do too much? I am afraid I do! ... And one more thing. I think that I will come to see you on next Sunday night. Say, about 8 o'clock. Doesn't it suit you?" Despite Yone's awkward English, Leonie, a lover of poetry, was happy to participate in its creation. Though Yone's poems tended to be rhapsodic and trite, she was clearly drawn to their romanticism. A few years later she told a mutual friend: "I confess the sort of poetry I like best is that which makes me slightly drunk—and I find ideas to be not a necessary ingredient in producing the divine intoxicant—in fact they have a sobering affect [sic]." As the letters and manuscripts went back and forth and as their meetings became more frequent, the tone of Yone and Leonie's exchanges became less formal. Within a few weeks, he would sign a letter "Yours Jap friend, Y. N."
* * *
Yonejiro Noguchi was born in the town of Tsushima in rural central Japan on February 8, 1875, the youngest son of Denbee Noguchi, who, though he claimed Samurai descent, was a shopkeeper selling such items as geta (wooden sandals), umbrellas, and paper. Upon graduating from the First Prefectural Middle School, Yone moved to Tokyo, where he attended a preparatory school for Keio Academy (later to become the prestigious Keio University). Japan, after being isolated from the world for so many years, was eager to catch up with the West, and when Yone entered Keio the curriculum emphasized Western culture. Yone practiced his English and, like many students at the time, dreamed of going to America. On November 13, 1893, the eighteen-year-old Yone left school and, with only one hundred dollars in his pocket, sailed steerage class from Yokohama to San Francisco on the steamship Belgic. In his autobiography Yone Noguchi recalled: "My friends saw me off at Shimbashi Station [in Tokyo]. I felt most ambitious when they wished me godspeed; but my heart soon broke down when my oldest brother, who came to Yokohama to bid me a final farewell, left me alone on the Belgic."
Upon his arrival in San Francisco, Yone and a group of fellow passengers found lodging at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where he marveled at the pleasure of the sheets and soft pillow—Japanese pillows were made of wood. He was amazed also by the splendor of Californian women: "What lovely complexions, what delightfully quick steps." American women were, to his eyes, a "revelation of freedom and new beauty." They looked, he said, like "perfectly-raised California poppies."
The day after his arrival he presented a letter of introduction to a member of the Patriotic League (Aikoku domei), a radical group of political activists who had fled Japan and aimed to reform their country's government. The league published a daily paper, The San Francisco News (Soko shinbun), and Yone was hired without pay to deliver the paper to its two hundred subscribers. Along with several other young league members he lived at the paper's O'Farrell Street office, sleeping on a table covered with newspaper. Yone found this life tough, but he was pleased to have time for reading, especially Lord Byron, his favorite author.
Before long, Yone realized that by associating with his Japanese coworkers he was not learning English. He therefore attended elementary school to improve his English and took various jobs cleaning, dishwashing, waiting on tables, and translating newspaper articles for The San Francisco News. After about a year he decided that he needed to resume his literary studies. A friend told him about Joaquin Miller, a well-known poet, essayist, and bohemian guru who lived in the Oakland Hills overlooking the bay. Yone climbed the hill to a small white house set in the midst of fruit trees and rosebushes. "I fell in love with the place at once ... More than the place itself, I fell in love with Mr. Miller, whose almost archaic simplicity in the way of living and speech was indeed prophet-like." To the young Yone Noguchi, the septuagenarian Miller was "the very symbol of romance and poetry." Miller had long white hair and an even longer white beard. He wore a cowboy hat and boots, a red sash for a belt, and a diamond ring, and he sometimes threw a bearskin over his shoulders. Occasionally he dressed more formally in a dark double-breasted vest and a dark felt hat. He had worked as a mining-camp cook, a lawyer, a judge, a newspaper writer, a Pony Express rider, and a horse thief (for which he was briefly incarcerated). During the Gold Rush years he moved to Northern California, lived in a Native American village, and married a Native American woman. He had a number of wives but when Yone met him he was single.
Called the "Poet of the Sierras" and the "Byron of the Rockies," Miller was the author of several books of poetry, the most famous of which was Songs of the Sierras, published in 1870. One of his poems, "Columbus," was memorized by schoolchildren and ended with "Sail on! Sail on! Sail on!! And on!," a line that Yone Noguchi remembered Miller reciting in a voice that "leapt like a leaping sword." From 1886 until his death, in 1913, Miller lived at "The Hights" (the name he gave to his Oakland Hills home). He wrote poetry in the morning, planted trees and shrubs in the afternoon, and built monuments to General John C. Frémont, Robert Browning, and Moses. To the north of his house he built his own funeral pyre.
When Yone appeared at his door, Miller must have been charmed by the young man's handsome face with its chiseled jawline, sensuous mouth, and large, dark, sensitive-looking eyes. He invited Yone to stay in a cabin attached to his own. Instead of paying for his keep, Yone cooked breakfast and dinner and performed various odd jobs. Finally having found a home that made him happy, Yone made the decision of his life: "I secretly decided that I would become a poet." He spent his mornings writing poetry and reading. Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman were his favorite Americans, but he also read the great seventeenth-century haiku poet Basho and a book about Zen Buddhism. In the afternoons he helped Miller garden and clear land. He took to heart Miller's advice to be intimate with nature and to value silence. During the four years that Yone spent at The Hights, the two men spoke very little.
In June 1896 Yone published five poems in The Lark, a San Francisco journal to which Joaquin Miller was also a contributor. This first entry into the world of print was for Yone "the greatest of joys, and I never felt anything like it again." The following year he published his first book, Seen and Unseen, or Monologue of a Homeless Snail. After a period of embedding himself in nature at Yosemite, in 1897 he published a second book of poems, The Voice of the Valley. In spite of his clumsy English and rather maudlin, hyberbolic rhetoric, his poems were well received in San Francisco literary circles. Readers were impressed that a young Japanese man was writing in English about his passionate response to nature. His work seemed delightfully exotic, a bridge between East and West.
Prompted by what he called his "mad desire to ally my soul to the heart of Nature as nakedly as possible" and "to heed the calling voice of trees, hills, waters, and skies in the distance," Yone embarked on what he called "tramp-journies." His models were Basho, who wrote poetry while traveling by foot in northern Japan, and the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish writer and poet Oliver Goldsmith, who liked to go "vagabondising" in Europe. Yone set out for the Yosemite Valley. After a night under the stars he wrote a poem, the first lines of which read, "Oh Repose, whose bosom harbors the heavenly dream-ships, welcome me, an exiled soul! / Thou, Forest, where Peace and Liberty divide their wealth with even a homeless convict."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Listening to Stone by Hayden Herrera. Copyright © 2015 Hayden Herrera. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
1 Parents 7
2 Dear Baby 20
3 Tokyo 27
4 Cbigasaki 36
5 St. Joseph College 43
6 Interlaken 55
7 La Porte 59
8 I Became a Sculptor 66
9 I Will Rival the Immortals 80
10 Out from the Shadow of a Big Tree 89
11 Head Buster 99
12 To Find Nature's Reasons 110
13 A Close Embrace of the Earth 117
14 Lonely Traveler, Social Lion 125
15 Toward a Sculpture of Space 134
16 Art with a Social Purpose 140
17 Mexico 148
18 New York, 1936-39 156
19 California 169
20 Poston 177
21 MacDougal Alley 186
22 Letters to Ann 199
23 Noguchi and Martha Graham, Passionate Collaborators 211
24 The Rock and the Space Between 220
25 Tara 230
26 1946-48 235
27 Impasse 242
28 Bollingen Travels 248
29 Harbinger Pigeon 255
30 Shinbanraisha 263
31 Mitsukoshi Exhibition 269
32 Yoshiko Yamaguchi 277
33 Kita Kamakura 292
34 My Solace Has Always Been Sculpture 310
35 UNESCO: A Somewhat Japanese Garden 322
36 Changed Visions 334
37 Priscilla 345
38 Working with Noguchi 356
39 Levitating Rocks, Wings of Prayer 363
40 Toward an Autobiography 372
41 A Primer of Shapes and Functions 378
42 The Wheat Itself 386
43 Red Cube, Black Sun 396
44 The Stone Circle 408
45 To Intrude on Nature's Way 417
46 A Place for People to Go 436
47 Imaginary Landscapes 447
48 California Scenario 459
49 Bayfront Park 467
50 All Things Worthwhile Must End as Gifts 474
51 Kyoko 488
52 No Beginnings, No Endings 499
Notes 511
Acknowledgments 553
Index 557
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
