In June 1935 Noguchi borrowed Buckminster Fuller’s Hudson and drove to California. He stayed long enough to make a few portraits and with the money he earned from these, together with six hundred dollars granted to him by the Guggenheim Foundation, he set off for Mexico City. Most likely he was encouraged by his friend and former lover Marion Greenwood, who had gone to Mexico in 1932 to study fresco painting and landed a mural commission in the city of Morelia.
Mexico in the 1930s was a mecca for artists and intellectuals drawn to the postrevolutionary ferment and to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Mexico City. They were fascinated by the exoticism of a country that had kept its agrarian culture and where village life seemed not to have changed much since preconquest days. The “primitive” and the folkloric—pre-Columbian temples, open-air markets, traditional dances, folk songs, local crafts, native costumes—all had tremendous appeal. The fame of the Mexican Mural Movement launched in the mid-1920s by Los Tres Grandes, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, had spread to the United States and profoundly affected American muralists on the WPA.
When Noguchi arrived in Mexico City in mid-1935, he rented a small apartment for eight months and sought out Marion Greenwood and her sister Grace, who introduced him to the Mexican art world. The Greenwoods and their colleagues were working under the supervision of Diego Rivera painting the walls of a former convent that had been transformed into a market in a working-class neighborhood a few blocks north of the Zocalo, Mexico City’s central square. They persuaded Rivera to get government permission for Noguchi to take over a hallway on the second floor of the market, a space that had been designated for the sisters to paint. Since Noguchi’s proposal had all the standard leftist symbolism, Rivera gave him the go-ahead.
Noguchi worked on his relief mural during the last two months of 1935 and finished it early in 1936. His eight months in Mexico assuaged the anger and frustration of his recent time in New York. The Abelardo Rodríguez mural was, he said, a “social protest against the WPA.”1 “How different was Mexico!” Noguchi wrote in his autobiography. “Here I suddenly no longer felt estranged as an artist; artists were useful people, a part of the community.”2
Perhaps inspired by Siqueiros’s use of cement in his frescoes at the Chouinard School of Art in California, and enthused by Siqueiros’s talk of using experimental materials and techniques for art, Noguchi decided to sculpt his mural in cement.3 After the market’s brick wall was built out to where volume was needed and carved away to give depth, cement was thrown onto the wall to give broad definition to shapes. A final coat of fine aggregate color and cement was mixed dry and then applied wet with a trowel and polished. In an article he contributed in 1936 to Art Front, the journal of the New York Artists’ Union, Noguchi wrote that artists should abandon traditional techniques and materials and experiment with plastic, spray guns, and the pneumatic hammer. “Why not paper or rubber sculpture?” he asked. He extolled the idea of public art, art that had a use and was part of life. “Let us make sculpture that deals with today’s problems. Draw on the form content so plentiful in science, micro- and macro-cosmic; life from dream-states to the aspirations, problems, sufferings and work of the people.”4
A torn fragment of a 1936 newspaper clipping in Noguchi’s archive has a photograph of the thirty-two-year-old Noguchi dressed in shirt, jacket, tie, and hat posing below his relief mural. As if in solidarity with his coworkers, he stands just below an image of a clenched fist—that favorite motif of the Mexican muralists. The quotes from him in the text reveal a newfound revolutionary fervor: “Capitalism everywhere struggles with inevitable death—all the machinery of war, coercion, and bigotry are as smoke from that fire.” Labor, youth, and the red flag would, he proclaimed, create a world “with equal opportunity for all.” Years later Noguchi looked back on his Mexican mural with its hackneyed leftist imagery as being propagandistic, but at the time, working alongside friends on a public mural that expressed shared political values was for him a great moral uplift.
History Mexico, 1935–36. Colored cement on carved brick, l. 72 ft. Mexico City
History Mexico reads from right to left, the right section being the first thing you see as you come to the top of the stairs. The imagery is full of red flags, clenched fists, and proletarian figures battling oppression. As in Mexican muralism the heroes are the defiant worker and the peasant mother. The enemies are capitalists, fascists, the church, and war. One of the many clenched fists holds a pickax that beats down what appears to be a recumbent figure holding a swastika. A fat capitalist is murdered by a skeleton. On the far right is an abstracted depiction of the New York Stock Exchange and Trinity Church. Perhaps this juxtaposition was inspired by My Dress Hangs There, the tiny panel that Diego Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo painted in New York City in 1933 while Rivera was at work on his more obviously Communist Radio City mural. In her idiosyncratic protest against economic inequality under the capitalist system, Kahlo painted a red ribbon to link the Stock Exchange (whose steps are a collaged graph saying “weekly sales in millions”) and Trinity Church, which has a dollar sign in its stained glass window.
History Mexico has some gentler, more optimistic images: a recumbent mother suckles her baby, a boy confronts Einstein’s e = mc2. When Noguchi wrote to Buckminster Fuller to ask for an explanation of this formula, Fuller sent him a fifty-word telegram. Noguchi was amused when a man watching him working on his mural said that e = mc2 meant Estado = Muchos Cabrones, meaning “the state equals many sons of bitches.” Late in his life Noguchi said of his mural, “I went to Mexico and did a wall there that was more or less Communist … Not because I was a convinced Communist. But because I thought that this was the wave of the future. The inevitability of change…”5
The art world in Mexico was vibrant. Friendships were passionate, as were enmities. The latter were often political, given the conflicts between the various leftist ideologies, and muralists wielded not only brushes, but pistols. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were at the center of this bohemian world. Their home in the San Angel district of Mexico City was alive with visitors—old friends and new ones from all parts of the world. Rivera was a well-known philanderer and female travelers were often the objects of his attentions. Kahlo entertained this mixture of artists, writers, composers, and globe-trotters with festive meals at a long table decorated with flowers and Mexican folk crockery. Sometimes her pet spider monkey added to the commotion by stealing fruit or her parrot, Bonito, waddled about the tabletop and pecked at the butter. In her habitual Tehuana costumes and with flowers and ribbons decking her hair, Kahlo was a colorful presence. With a few copitas (cocktails) her wit could become outrageous and she deployed swear words as freely as a mariachi.
One day, riding in a taxi with Noguchi, Rosa Covarrubias, wife of Vanity Fair illustrator Miguel Covarrubias, spotted Kahlo on the street and they stopped to say hello. “Rosa introduced us. And somehow or other, we went dancing.”6 Noguchi was enchanted. Kahlo, at twenty-eight, was at the height of her beauty, and the two soon struck up a love affair. With her voluptuous lips and her dark, penetrating eyes beneath joined eyebrows, she was far more alluring to Noguchi than women of more conventional prettiness. She was passionate, affectionate, and both strong and vulnerable. She had a mordant sense of humor and loved to laugh. In spite of being a partial invalid as a result of a near-fatal bus accident in her youth, she was determined to fight pain with joy. Noguchi recalled that Kahlo loved to sing and dance. “That was her passion, you know, everything that she couldn’t do she loved to do. It made her absolutely furious to be unable to do things.”7 Beyond the charm of her personality and beauty, Noguchi admired Kahlo’s work and recalled that she gave him a painting, but, years later, he could not remember where it was.
Frida Kahlo photographed by Isamu Noguchi, 1936
Kahlo and Rivera had separated briefly in 1934 (when he had an affair with her younger sister Cristina), but by the time Noguchi came to Mexico, Kahlo had forgiven both her husband and sister. Noguchi recalled his affair with Kahlo: “I loved her very much. She was a lovely person, absolutely marvelous person. Since Diego was well known to be a lady chaser, she cannot be blamed if she saw some men … In those days we all sort of, more or less, horsed around, and Diego did and so did Frida. It wasn’t quite acceptable to him, however. I used to have assignations with her here and there. One of the places was her sister Cristina’s place, the blue house in Coyoacán.”8 As their attachment to each other deepened, Noguchi and Kahlo decided to rent an apartment. One friend, the painter Marjorie Eaton, who went to Mexico at the Riveras’ invitation in 1934, recalled that the lovers ordered a set of furniture for their rendezvous spot, but when they were expecting delivery, it never came. The truck driver assumed that the furniture was for the Riveras’ San Angel house, and he drove there and presented Rivera with the bill. It was a fiasco, but it did little to discourage the two lovers.
Noguchi had a twinkle in his eye when he recalled one of his “assignations.” He was in bed with Kahlo at her family home in Coyoacán when Chucho, the houseboy, warned them of Rivera’s arrival. Noguchi dressed as fast as he could, but one of Kahlo’s hairless escuincle dogs pounced on his sock and ran off with it. Noguchi scrambled up a tree in the patio and fled over the roof, but Rivera discovered the sock. “Diego came by with a gun,” Noguchi recalled. “He always carried a gun. The second time he displayed his gun to me was in the [English] hospital. Frida was ill for some reason, and I went there, and he showed me his gun and said: ‘Next time I see you, I’m going to shoot you.’”9
In Frida Kahlo’s personal archive in the blue house in Coyoacán are several undated love letters from Noguchi. One of them was written just before he left Mexico. Only the last page was saved, which begins midsentence: “have given were not my heart so hardened and frozen by distrust of this world. Forgive me dearest for not having been all I should have been—Perhaps when we meet again (soon I hope) when we love again I will have the courage and humility to be very real. But, believe me I love you—you are to me every love thought—how I want to be with you more and more your Isamu.”10
* * *
By early summer in 1936, when he boarded a train bound for Orizaba, Veracruz, where he would take a ship to New York, Noguchi was so broke (having spent whatever he earned on materials for his mural) that he had to sell Buckminster Fuller’s Hudson and to produce portraits of three well-heeled Americans in order to pay for his passage home. The Mexican government paid him a fraction of what they owed him, saying that he hadn’t finished his mural by the deadline indicated in his contract—a contract that he claimed never to have signed. “I only managed to collect half, or $88, of the money the government owed me for the work … but I have never regretted having had the opportunity of executing what was for me a real attempt at direct communication through sculpture, with no ulterior or money-making motive.”11
The day after Noguchi left Mexico City he wrote to Kahlo from the Hotel Diligencias in Orizaba:
I already feel cast adrift on a changing sea of Time, with no more familiar signs to make one forget how vast and strange this world is, how alone I am without you. Your beautiful flowers are in a glass here by my bed as fresh as yesterday.
I think to call you up, then to take the next train back to try to explain something to you—I don’t know what—the rain beats upon this tin roof and far away the insects are singing.
Frida I have been so inarticulate with you and with myself also—please forgive me for being so dumb and selfish and blind. However, that I see light sometimes proves that I will come back to you one day grown up and more understanding and more worthy of you should you by then still care for Isamu.
Good night my darling,—and when you hear the song of insects, and of rain and of wind, listen also for my voice.
Isamu12
From on board the SS Orizaba of the New York and Cuba Mail Steamship Company, Noguchi wrote again. “Frida, I am such a poor letter writer being lazy and given too [sic] dreaming after each sentence—dreaming of things I wish I could have said to you while holding your hand—perhaps some day I may be able to—O, please give me the hope and the courage.” Back in the United States in July 1936 he wrote Kahlo: “I dash from extremity to extremity—where is a job? It is all very pregnant with hope, wonderful things to do in a wonderfully vital land, if only they would give me half a chance!… there are the nights when I lie on top of the bed without a stitch on letting the sultry air gently cool my body wet and now tanned a deep color I often dream—you are near—we live together these nights!”
Noguchi and Frida remained lifelong friends. They saw each other in 1938 when she came to New York for an exhibition of her paintings at Julien Levy’s gallery. In 1946, when Frida had a spinal fusion at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery, Noguchi visited her and gave her a glass-covered box with butterflies pinned to the back panel. In Kahlo’s self-portraits butterflies are a symbol of transcendence. She hung the butterfly box over the door of her hospital room and later, back in Mexico, placed it on the underside of her four-poster bed’s canopy. It was the last time Noguchi saw Frida. “She was there with Cristina,” he recalled, “and we talked for a long while about things. She was older. She was so full of life, her spirit was so admirable.”13