In the summer of 1962, Noguchi was invited to be artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome, where he settled into the life of an expat artist—long walks, good food, forays to Spoleto, where he could stay in Priscilla’s apartment overlooking the Duomo. Through Priscilla he met the sculptor Dimitri Hadzi, who admired his work and who introduced him to the foundry he favored. Noguchi was fond of Hadzi, but he liked to tease: “Dimitri, for God’s sake! You’re a Greek! You’ve got to carve!” This in spite of the fact that that summer he, like Hadzi, was working in bronze. Hadzi enjoyed the older man’s intelligence, but he saw his selfish side: “Isamu Noguchi was a genius at knowing how to use people,” he said.1
Noguchi’s preoccupation with lightness and gravity continued in Rome, where he had his balsa wood sculptures cast in bronze. Venturing into this fine arts material caused him considerable chagrin. Bronze casting went against the “carve direct” imperative instilled in him by Brancusi. He admitted that, aside from his interest in weight and weightlessness, he had another motive for using bronze: his balsa wood pieces did not sell. A sculpture cast in bronze, on the other hand, was “shippable, durable and eminently classifiable as art (saleable). O, painful knowledge! I must reconcile myself to the realities of the art world.”2
While at the academy, Noguchi began to make sculptures using the floor as a base. He saw the floor as a place or plane that was part of the sculpture as the earth is part of a garden. He had always felt that pedestals removed sculptures from the onlooker. Moreover, he shared the Japanese feeling of respect for the floor not just as something to walk on, but also as a place to sit or to lie down. “Ultimately, the floor as a metaphor for earth is the base beyond all others … The floor is our platform of humanity, as the Japanese well know.”3
This Earth, This Passage, 1962. Bronze, 47⁄8 × 43¾ × 41¼ in.
To make This Earth, This Passage, he used his feet to model a ring of clay placed on the floor. Lessons of Musokokushi, another work in this gravity-bound, primitivistic mode, consists of five rough-textured elements that Noguchi likened to “rocks in some hidden garden in Japan. I was thinking of Muso Kokushi, the legendary master of Zen whose stone arrangements are the most esteemed.”4 The sensuous contact of clay with the soles of his feet must have felt to Noguchi like some ancient ritual—perhaps stomping on grapes to make wine. It gave him something that he had always longed for—a way of connecting to primal matter, the incontrovertible reality of earth. There was, in addition, the link with his memories of kneading clay with his feet at Kita Kamakura. Making mud-pie-like floor sculptures was perhaps also a way of expiating his guilt over using bronze. Beyond that, the clunky amorphous shapes he created could have been a reaction to the classicism of so much sculpture and architecture that he saw in Rome, or possibly they were a response to critics who found his work too skillful and too elegant. In two other floor pieces from his Roman summer—Seen and Unseen, the title taken from one of his father’s poems, and Garden Elements—volumes resting on the floor bring to mind the half-buried rocks in Zen gardens, which in turn allude to islands emerging from the sea. The more geometric and angular sections of Floor Frame look as though they continue beneath the plane of the floor so that in the viewer’s imagination the two parts merge into one. In Japan, Noguchi said, rocks planted in the earth “suggest a protuberance from the primordial mass below.” The elements of a garden are, in the viewer’s imagination, joined beneath the earth. “We are made aware of this ‘floating world’ through consciousness of sheer invisible mass.”5
After his summer in Rome, Noguchi began to spend about a month a year working on marble sculptures at Henraux, a company that owned several marble quarries in the area of Querceta, near Pietra Santa and not far from Lucca. The town of Pietra Santa was full of sculptors from all parts of the world who came there to work with stonecutters and bronze-casting foundries. While Noguchi was working on his UNESCO garden, Henry Moore had introduced him to Erminio Cidonio, president of Henraux, which owned the mountain called Altissimo, where Michelangelo had found his marble. Cidonio’s goal was to bring modern sculptors such as Jean Arp and Marino Marini to work at Henraux. Noguchi came to love this area, the people he worked with, the machine tools that were available, and the mountain itself. He felt that Michelangelo’s spirit permeated the countryside. “How exceptional it is to find a firm dedicated to promoting the modern use of marble.”6
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Noguchi returned to New York in September 1962 to continue his work on his various projects with Bunshaft. He also wanted to move ahead on his autobiography. For this, once again Priscilla Morgan came to the rescue. She recalls that back in September 1959, when Noguchi and Shoji Sadao were helping Fuller set up his exhibition titled Three Structures by Buckminster Fuller in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden, Noguchi asked her if she would read the manuscript that John Becker had ghostwritten. Priscilla obliged and decided the manuscript was terrible. “I knew that Isamu was a good writer, because he had given me a book to read in which he’d written the introduction. I told Noguchi, ‘I think you should be writing your own autobiography.’” Never one to waste time, Noguchi’s response was, “Well, come with me to my publisher on Monday morning.” When they met with Pantheon’s publishers, Kurt and Helen Wolff, Noguchi urged Priscilla to “tell them what you think.” She explained that Noguchi was “a great writer” who should be writing his own book. According to Priscilla, “the Wolffs said they had thought so all along.”7
From the book’s inception in 1959, the collaboration between Becker and Noguchi was fraught. Though Becker professed to be writing in a style suited to Noguchi, the sculptor found little of his own voice reflected in Becker’s drafts. Unsurprisingly, Noguchi proved difficult to work with as well. He felt that Becker had misinterpreted his words in the notes and tape recordings that he had provided. Loath to give up control, he sent Becker continuous criticisms and revisions. It was probably in late January 1960 that Becker, tired of the difficult collaboration, told Noguchi to clear any future changes with Pantheon, because “changes will have to be specific and clear and consistent or we’ll never get this finished.”
Later that year, with the help of an editor recommended by Pantheon, Noguchi rewrote the book as his “own personal story.” The book should no longer be considered a collaboration, he told Wolff, and he suggested that a new contract be drawn up giving Becker a smaller percentage of money than originally agreed. He said that he planned to acknowledge Becker’s contribution in a foreword. The proposal enraged Becker, who refused to have his name associated with the project and warned that if the text were to be published using one line written by him, he would take legal action.
Priscilla coached Noguchi through months of negotiations with Becker, which led nowhere. Both men refused to back down—Noguchi claiming he had been gravely misunderstood and Becker refusing to be associated with a book he hadn’t written. The stalemate eventually led Pantheon’s copublisher, the London firm of Percy Lund Humphries, to back out, saying that they sympathized with Becker and would only publish the book that he had written, because publishing Noguchi’s revised version would lead to litigation. Pantheon likewise withdrew from the project. The Wolffs were old friends of Becker’s, and on March 7, 1960, Helen Wolff wrote to Gerald Gross, an editor in Pantheon’s New York office, that “Noguchi’s rather ruthless self-assertion brought out Becker’s self-assertion, and Pantheon is caught in the squeeze.”8
Noguchi was shocked when he heard that Lund Humphries was abandoning the book. He wrote to them on April 7, 1960, saying that they were denying him his “basic human right … the book is written in the first person and I cannot be made to say things which I do not think and in a way I do not say them.” Three days later he wrote to Becker that there had been a mutual misunderstanding of what collaboration meant.9 He reiterated that he would be happy to collaborate as long as he had the final say about the text. But, he said, given Becker’s insistence that his text be published unchanged, his only alternative was to write his own book, deleting Becker’s material. Becker should, he said, be compensated for his time and expenses and should have a share of Noguchi’s royalties. The next day, April 11, having finished two sets for Martha Graham, Noguchi left for Japan.
In June Priscilla wrote to Noguchi that she had still not heard from Becker. Her hope was to get the rights back and perhaps to find a new writer who would put the text in the third person. She and her lawyer, Robert Montgomery, were talking to possible publishers. Even as she gave Noguchi encouragement, her own mood was sad: “Where,” she asked, “are all the simple lovely truths that mean so much and from which all stems. But dearest Isamu, somewhere still you stand as such an extraordinary truth to me.”
In the summer of 1962 Priscilla went to London to talk with Thames and Hudson about the possibility of publishing Noguchi’s autobiography. Their response was that the text needed shaping and editing and they wanted to find a European copublisher. With this in mind, in late August she went to Amsterdam to meet with the publisher Andreas Landshoff, whose reaction was positive. After several more meetings, she learned that Becker was not eager to continue work on the book. She told Noguchi that she would write Becker “to keep the relationship warm until all is accomplished.” Priscilla’s four-page single-spaced letter updated Becker on where the book project stood. She said that she hoped that they could “bury the past and start afresh,” using the work that both he and Noguchi had done. She said she would “be the go-between and devote my constant time and attention to the interests of a good book.” On November 10 she reported to Noguchi that Becker had called and was “warm and cordial” and “pro-Noguchi.” Her feeling was that Becker’s ego had been injured and that he needed praise (something she was skilled at giving). She ended her letter with “I do love you, Isamu.” Two months later he wrote to her: “God Bless you for all your wonderfulness.”10 In the end she persuaded Becker to let Noguchi write his own book.