If the nuclear threat, revulsion with the art world, postexhibition blues, Gorky’s suicide, and creative doldrums all made a change imperative, Noguchi’s immediate impulse was to follow Tara Pandit to India. And so, he said, “I devised a plan of action.”1 In November 1947, one month after Tara left New York, Noguchi discussed the possibility of a travel grant with Hugh Chisholm, assistant editor for the publications of the Bollingen Foundation. Early in 1948 Noguchi submitted his travel grant proposal. On March 30, 1949, four days after his Egan exhibition closed, the Bollingen Foundation granted him a fellowship to travel to Asia to research a book on the “environment of leisure, its meaning, its use, and its relationship to society.”2 It was to begin that July and would last for eighteen months. In his autobiography he recalled: “After the elation and effort that go with preparing an exhibition, comes a depression … I was determined to get away from everything.”3 Noguchi had a habit of leaving places and modes of working just when he was earning praise and position in the art world. Perhaps recognition made him feel fraudulent. Also, if his work was going well, he did not want to repeat himself. He had a horror of producing “Noguchis” for collectors to buy. “It has often been pointed out to me that when I have achieved a certain success of style, then I abandon it. There is no doubt a distrust on my part for style and for the success that accrues from it.”4
Noguchi’s writings of the late 1940s are, as we have seen, full of existential angst. He spoke of the void, of chaos, and of loss of meaning. The Cold War, heightened by Russia’s acquisition of nuclear capability, made him, like many Americans, fearful. To find strength Noguchi needed to search for a way to renew the meaning of sculpture. “If I could just tap the continuity of the past, if I could just find for myself an equilibrium, a basic fundament on which to build sculpture.”5 He had never lost what he called an “incipient sort of social consciousness.” He wanted to make sculpture that went beyond aesthetics and personal feeling and that was part of lived experience, part of space, something that “related to people’s ceremonial view of life.”6 This, he explained, was why he planned to study leisure and not call it art.
On May 12, 1949, Noguchi took off for his beloved Paris. This time, he said, he’d come to Paris “with a commission to write a book for which I had no talent, on a subject I knew nothing about.”7 He spent four weeks seeing old friends and making excursions to Chartres, to Vézelay, and to the Dordogne to see the cave paintings at Lascaux and Les Eyzies-de-Tayac. He also went to Britanny, where he saw the megaliths at Carnac and the island of Gavrinis’s megalithic carvings and its cairn, a mound formed by a mass of stones. He tried to look at art without preconception: “I was merely observing for myself and experiencing the real thing in situ; because we see these things in books, but I wanted to actually see it, and in a sense be a part of it.”8
Noguchi’s notes, photographs, and his twenty-three-page recollection of his travels give a picture of a voyager hungry for understanding of foreign ways, indifferent to discomfort, and almost ecstatic in his response to the sites he visited. Noguchi immersed himself in each new culture as he sought answers to how sculpture in the past had had a ceremonial function and expressed shared values. Although he met many people, travel for him was a solitary thing, a process of “inward seeking with distance and silence alone.”9
In Paris Noguchi visited Brancusi, who he felt had become embittered, perhaps, Noguchi thought, because he had been too isolated during the war. Brancusi told Noguchi that no one understood his sculpture except for a few Americans such as Sturgis Ingersoll and Walter Arensberg.10 Noguchi would never lose his reverence for Brancusi. In 1981 he made the pilgrimage to Tirgu Jiu in Romania to see the three-part sculptural ensemble Brancusi had made in 1937. “His whole life was based on love,” Noguchi said of his teacher. “He was a man who loved humanity, but then he became very bitter. He became bitter because he loved humanity.”11 Noguchi also went to see Le Corbusier and Léger, both of whom he’d met in the early 1940s in the United States. On June 10 Noguchi arrived in Rome and promptly went to the American Academy, where he found his old friend the painter Philip Guston struggling with the elimination of recognizable imagery in favor of abstract, atmospheric fields of exquisitely tender strokes of color. Guston, Noguchi recalled, “would excitedly describe his steps of enlightenment—a peeling down to essences of sensitivity, not revolution but enlightenment.”12 Noguchi wondered what it was that impelled the development of Abstract Expressionism among his painter friends. Was it, he asked, “something in the air that stirred creativity, a potent elixir—that led to new art…”
In Italy Noguchi studied the great monuments of sculpture and architecture, looking always for the connection between art and life. The Piazza du Duomo in Florence, for example, impressed him as a place where people gathered for leisure and for prayer. “This is a true space of the mind, the consciousness of an opening outward. To heaven or the world beyond.”13 The notes he jotted down on his travels speak of the church as a theater. Architecture was a “theater in which is played the drama of life.”14 In future years he would try to make sculpture that, like an Italian piazza, shaped space in such a way that people could gather to enjoy each other. Besides Rome and Florence, he also visited Siena, Venice, Padua, Vicenza, Bologna, Arrezzo, Assisi, Paestum, Tarquina, Pisa, Lucca, Bergamo, and Pompei. At Paestum the Temple of Poseidon prompted thoughts about the “sacred relation of man to nature—nature is always clean, there is no such thing as a slum in nature, not in houses that are nature born.”15
From Bergamo he went to Barcelona, where Antonio Gaudi’s church of the Sagrada Familia enthralled him. In August he traveled to Greece and Crete. “No happier situation could be imagined whereby to see for the first time the record of classical antiquity. I entered Delphi as a British Officer arrived with his Jeep, we were the lone occupants of a house from where to forage for figs and pomegranates, and to make an omelet. To trace the white marble remnants, imagining their use from scanty information: that I take is what imagination is for.”16 Growing up on Greek myths and creating sets for Martha Graham’s myth-inspired dances, Noguchi felt connected to classical culture. He recorded his impressions of architecture, sculpture, and people in lively sketches swiftly penned in ink. After two and a half weeks in Greece he moved on to Egypt, where he visited Cairo, Saqqara, Luxor, and Abydos.
At last Noguchi arrived in India, the country that had been his prime but unreached destination during his Guggenheim years. And now there was an added attraction: Tara. Noguchi did not stay long in Bombay, where the reunion with Tara took place. “To be in India would have been destiny twenty years before,” Noguchi wrote in his Bollingen manuscript. “Now this was tinged with a sadness … My sadness came with Tara his [Nehru’s] niece for whom nationality had become a barrier—as I already knew too well from Japan. Entering Asia, I felt myself an intruder, if I wish to think so, mixed-blood disqualified additionally beyond the question of race.”17
Through the Indian League of America, Noguchi had also made many Indian friends, among them Gautam Sarabhai, the eldest son of Ambalal Sarabhai, the head of a wealthy milling family in Ahmedabad, a center of the cotton textile industry in western India. After leaving Bombay he went to visit the Sarabhai family, whose home provided him with a luxurious and friendly place to catch his breath between forays to all parts of India. From Ahmedabad he flew to Madras, where he stayed with his friend, the famous dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar (brother of the musician Ravi Shankar), on the outskirts of the city. While Shankar was occupied with his dance school (a school that taught a mixture of traditional Indian and Western dance), Noguchi took walks and delighted in “open fields and people at their daily chores and ablutions. Cows would amble by and crows collected in great numbers.” Shankar helped Noguchi prepare for his journey south, providing him with a bedroll inside of which Noguchi was to pack his belongings. The bedroll was necessary for sleeping in third-class train carriages, at train stations, or in primitive hostels called dak bungalows. Shankar also gave Noguchi a Punjab costume, which Noguchi liked because it disguised his foreignness. “I became practically invisible,” he recalled.18 Before he set off, Noguchi experienced what he called “an expression of friendship without barriers.” One night, Shankar woke him up and whispered: “You must be lonely, let my wife come to sleep with you.”19 (Shankar’s beautiful wife, Amala, was her husband’s dance partner and the mother of his young son.)
Noguchi seems to have wanted to devour every inch of India. Between September 15, 1949, and January 11, 1950, when he left for Bali, he visited some fifty places. In December he slowed down and spent two weeks in New Delhi working on a portrait of Nehru. Although he had lost interest in portraiture, he may have wanted to do this portrait because of Nehru’s family connection to Tara.
It was probably during one of the posing sessions that Nehru asked Noguchi to think again about what kind of memorial would be appropriate for Gandhi. On January 7, shortly before he left India for Indonesia, Noguchi wrote to Nehru: “Your Excellency, I have been thinking of the Memorial to Gandhi at Raj Ghat, an improved plan for which I wished to present to you in Ceylon. However, realizing how busy you must be I hesitate to encumber your time.”20 He therefore enclosed his plan, which he described as “extremely simple” and intended to be built in stages. The first stage would be to build “a hedge of massive square monoliths about 9 ft. high, placed on the sides of an octagon, like the threads of a spinning-wheel,” that tool with which Gandhi and his followers spun yarn in defiance of the British authorities. Carved on the faces of the monoliths would be “the story of India’s people, especially the poor, led to freedom through Gandhi’s teaching.” At a later stage he planned to add two pathways to bisect the octagon and to suggest the spinning wheel’s spokes. “Between these would be placed the expanding alignment of sculptures till they merge as a host covering the field.” This memorial was to be yet another of Noguchi’s unrealized projects.
Noguchi fell in love with India and returned there many times. Much of what he saw would have clear echoes in his later work. The triangular sundials, circular pits, domes and spheres, and spiral stairways, for example, of the eighteenth-century astronomical observatories in Jaipur and Delhi would reappear in Noguchi’s sculptured gardens.
In October Noguchi made a ten-day excursion to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), during which he was entranced by the giant lion paws carved into the base of a cliff. He next traveled to the temple of Mahabalipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu in northeast India, where he was enthralled by sculptures carved directly into and out of granite boulders. They made him see once again “that sculpture is the one art, the one communication which cannot be conveyed as two-dimensional information—as with a photograph. There is a residual experience that cannot be gotten in any other way than through physical experience, whether by sight, touch, contact, distance and the ever changing relationship of volume and space which comes from the continuous change that time gives, the time of day; that movement gives, or that thought begets. How extraordinary to be so immediately confronted in so pure a form [by] all these facets without distractions.”21 The stone carvings at Mahabalipuram and those at other sites that Noguchi saw during his Bollingen travels convinced him that stone was his true medium.
That fall he also visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram near Pondicherry, a three-story concrete building designed by Antonin Raymond, who would, two years later, commission Noguchi’s first garden. Wanting to learn more about “the basis of Indian belief and creativity,” he also visited the ashram in Arunachala founded by the famous Indian guru Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. At both ashrams Noguchi participated in the rituals, prostrating himself when the guru appeared. Traveling with his bedroll, his notebook, and his camera, playing, as he noted, the role of the mendicant, Noguchi took trains all over India: “My greatest delight is to ride the train at night in India. On the hard shelf of a third class coach, listening to the cliciti-clak of the wheels with the wonderful night air blowing through, nothing can compare.”22 His visual voracity kept him on the move, seeking out temples, mosques, stupas, gardens, sculptures of dancing goddesses, Buddhas, and lingams. He journeyed into the jungle kingdom of Vijayanagar, where he found shelter from rain in a “dak bungalow … I live on bananas for the three days searching the mysterious remains fast returning to nature.”
Noguchi arrived in Bali on January 12 and he remained there and in Southeast Asia (where he began his portrait of Sukarno) until May 2. Bali was, he said, “that land of the imagination where what is real is what is dreamed. Where people all inhabit the same dream, hear the same music from their heart … Music and the dance emanate from each village.”23 He settled in a village called Solo and, as he watched children and adults dancing as if in a trance, he made sketches that captured the dancers’ movements and that suggest that he too was in a state of transport that allowed him to draw with greater freedom than ever before. Puppet performances also captivated him: “The shadow play starts at two in the morning and lasts until dawn with children in rapt silent attention.” From his position in the shadow chamber, Noguchi drew the puppeteer chanting as he manipulated his cutout puppets.
A highlight of his Indonesian travels was his visit to Borobudur, a ninth-century Buddhist monument in central Java. He was overwhelmed by the immense stone structure with six square platforms topped by three circular platforms, in the center of which is a dome. Borobudur’s various terraces symbolize Buddhist cosmology; as a visiting pilgrim climbs upward it is as if he were reaching some kind of enlightenment. Noguchi wondered whether the kind of beliefs that went into the creation of such a marvel could still apply in the modern world. “The evidence of the past attests to the place of sculpture in life and in the ritual of communication with spirit, with tranquility.”24