Isamu Noguchi - Los Angeles (1904 - 1988)

Isamu Noguchi 1904 - 1988 was a sculptor, architect, poet, furniture and landscape designer.

The son of an American writer and a Japanese poet, Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904. He spent his childhood in Japan and his adolescence in America. Noguchi's fascination with art began while he was a pre-med student at Columbia University. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927 took him to Paris, where he worked in Brancusi's atelier. Noguchi's interests were as wide ranging as his travels; he designed visionary sets and costumes for the Martha Graham Dance Company and New York City Ballet, furniture and objects for a variety of manufacturers, the Akari lamps and myriad environments, site installations and large-scale public sculptures of great note. The Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York, is a repository of his work.

Born to Japanese poet Yonejiro Noguchi and Irish - American writer Leonie Gilmour, Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, America; but was raised in both Japan and the US.

In 1906, at the age of two he moved with his parents to Japan. His earliest memories were of a quiet, isolated and formal home. his father distant and traditional, his mother sad and lonely. He talks of being on the back of a servant, through the garden, adn watching with sadness as the beautiful cherry blossoms drifting to the earth.

At an experimental kindergarten he was introduced to clay. He remembers that experience, recalling that he made a (sea) wave with a blue glaze.

By four or five years of age his mother had moved with him to the countryside - near the sea.
"By then I had become a typical Japanese boy, knowledable in the ways of nature, such as how to skin a young willow twig to make a whistle, or where to find eels."

In 1912 his mother was about to send him away to a French Jesuit school, but instead decided to keep him with her while she undertook to design and build a house for them. Isamu recalls paying very close attention to every detail of that process. At ten, to give him some instruction in Japanese arts he was apprenticed to a carpenter and learned to use traditional carving tools.

In 1917, at 13, his mother, concerned about the treatment of half Japanese children in Japan decided to send him to school in the US. Traveling alone across oceans and lands, he was sent to the Interlaken School in LaPorte Indiana, fouded by Dr Rumely - a progressive educator who's school put tremendous almost 'sacred' importance on the arts and crafts movement with particular emphasis on such figures as: Blake, Emerson, Poe, Baudelaire.

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