During the five-year period in which Noguchi worked on the Riverside Park playground and other large public projects, he also made individual sculptures, and he designed his last two sets for Martha Graham (Circe, 1963, and Cortege of Eagles, 1966). As always, he traveled a lot, mostly to Japan, Jerusalem, and Italy. In 1965 and 1966, hoping to design a memorial to Jawaharlal Nehru, who had died in 1964, he went to India. He had learned that a forest to honor Nehru was planned for the treeless banks of the Jumna River, and he wanted to make a white, marble, flower-shaped (or possibly circular) platform on a slight rise in the midst of the trees. He explained his concept to Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, who in January had become India’s prime minister. As with his Gandhi memorial, nothing came of it.
Noguchi exhibited at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery at 978 Madison Avenue in 1963 and 1965. The 1963 show included a group of the bronze casts of balsa wood sculptures plus some bronze casts from the clay pieces he had molded with his bare feet on the floor of his studio in Rome. Since for Noguchi sculpture was giving form to space, he cared about how his sculptures were displayed. Gene Owens, who helped install the exhibition, recalled: “I was struck by the way Noguchi tried to control every detail of the show … Hours were spent adjusting the lights; we changed the size of bulbs; we substituted spots for floods, moved them here and there until the shadows were just right, only to scrap everything and start over. We moved and shifted pieces until the gallery director, Arne Ekstrom, fled.” Noguchi would have liked to change the floor coverings, maybe even repaint the gallery. The bases for the sculptures were a particular concern. A base, Noguchi said, “tends to remove sculpture from man’s own proportion and contact. It supplies a fictional horizon. This is the chief reason why I have attempted an integration of sculpture and base; bases that bite into the sculpture, sculpture that rises from the earth.”1 “As we were leaving the Gallery rather late one evening,” wrote Owens, “I began to tease Noguchi. I said the elevator, which opened into the gallery was unappealing. The carpet needed to match that in the gallery … The game went on until all of New York was made over to fit the show.”2
On April 2, 1963, the day of Noguchi’s opening, Gene Owens wrote to Loretta that Noguchi had met with various newspaper critics at the gallery that morning. “It was a blow to his ego.” The critics did not like the work. Visiting the show a few days later, Owens learned more about the machinations of the New York art world. “There was this very continental rich couple in the gallery fixing to buy one of Noguchi’s pieces,” he told Loretta. “They were undecided but Ekstrom and Noguchi handled them beautifully … made it appear that throngs of people were wanting to buy it. They mentioned one name in particular who was a big shot at the Museum of Modern Art. After the people left Noguchi kept quiet about the business end as usual but Ekstrom blabbed on. Evidently he didn’t know that I knew what he was talking about but I did.” Owens was shocked that museum curators and directors served as advisers to collectors and took 10 percent of the purchase price. The morning when Noguchi and Owens dismantled Noguchi’s show, from which only four or five works had been sold, Noguchi was, Owens said, exhausted and “in a foul mood. He tangled in a very loud way with the movers and he and I almost came to blows a couple of times as did he and Ekstrom. The world revolves around Noguchi so he thinks … Noguchi ruined the base on one of his sculptures this morning and he tried to blame it on everyone within earshot. Ekstrom calmly asked him with a deadpan expression who was responsible; Noguchi hesitated a moment and said, ‘I am god damn it.’ Ekstrom without changing his expression, said ‘Oh I see,’ and walked away very continentally…” Owens surmised that Noguchi’s sour mood was caused by worry: “I rather suspect it was his love life but he has so many things going it could be anything.” When they returned to the studio there were tulips on the table. “Flowers appear mysteriously every so often,” he noted. They were probably from Priscilla.
Noguchi’s spring 1965 exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom was his first showing of stone sculpture since the Stable exhibition. Among the sculptures carved in Japan were two versions of Variations on a Millstone (one in marble and one in granite), Black Sun, and two cube-shaped sculptures. All of these were derived from the Beinecke garden sculptures, and all were imbued with his unfolding passion for Japanese stone. Jomon (1963), a primitivistic fertility figure, was made out of the pinkish mannari granite that Noguchi had discovered in Okayama while looking for stone for his UNESCO garden. His growing interest in the roughness of broken stone appeared in The Mountain, a sensuous, two-lobed hillock made of red Persian travertine. After giving this sculpture its shape he covered its surface with small indentations made by the chisel.
Noguchi’s interest in suspension manifested itself again in the Gift from 1964, which comprised twelve abutted sections cut from one chunk of black African marble whose centers he drilled so that the sections could be wired together and then suspended across two brick-shaped pieces of marble. “They exemplify my continuing preoccupation with balanced stress…,” he explained, “[the] visual anguish of the crushing weight of stone on the thin edge of gravity.”3 Gift is one of the first examples of Noguchi’s creating a sculpture by joining pieces of stone with wire or a rod strung through their core, a technique he called “post-tensioning” and that he would use in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make sculptures that combined different colors and textures of marble or granite. “I am an inveterate experimenter,” Noguchi wrote in 1987. “My whole involvement with stone might be said to be facets of one search, a mad chase within a single medium to find and overcome its further frontiers of possibility, which continually recede. A case in point is Gift.”4
When Vivien Raynor reviewed Noguchi’s 1965 show at Cordier & Ekstrom in Arts, she admired the work but with a caveat: “The viewer may be repelled by the apparent lack of warmth in his work, and could question how much of the perfection is produced by the machine, how much by the sculptor.”5 It is curious that she was put off by the machine precision of Noguchi’s sculpture in this moment when Minimalism and Pop Art devalued art that showed the touch of the artist’s hand. In spite of her ambivalence, she concluded, “This is really good stuff.” Indeed, for all the perfection of some of his surfaces, and in spite of the fact that Noguchi sometimes made a small model and had assistants using machine tools block out a sculpture on a larger scale, he finished the work himself. Remembering this exhibition in his autobiography, Noguchi said that what he had wanted to do was to treat stone as if it were a “newly discovered medium … The execution[s] of all of these were an intimate involvement between myself, the selection of stone, the definition of what to do, and the employment of tools and willing collaborators, wherever I might be. My manner of work is extremely varied. The best is to find a stone and work directly into it.”6
Gift, 1964. African marble, 115⁄8 × 385⁄8 × 125⁄8 in.
In the second half of the 1960s Noguchi had four exhibitions, three at Cordier & Ekstrom (1967, 1968, and 1969) and one in 1968 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The 1967 Cordier & Ekstrom show of twenty small-scale stone sculptures received a glowing review in The New York Times from Hilton Kramer, who extolled Noguchi’s technical mastery and his work’s “gemlike strength.” The stone pieces were, Kramer said, “pure in feeling, unassertive in their imagery, yet marvelously decisive in the boundaries they observe. This is sculpture that seems to generate an atmosphere of enviable calm.”7 Allergic to trendiness, Kramer admired Noguchi’s adherence to an older tradition of beauty and his “unblushing disregard for the esthetic ideologues of the moment.” The following spring Ekstrom showed Noguchi’s Chinese ink brush drawings from 1930, and in December he presented Shapes of Light, a show of Noguchi’s new Akari designs offered as sculptural multiples in signed editions of ten. Noguchi concluded the text he wrote for the exhibition’s press release by saying: “I believe in the possibilities of art designed for multiple production (not reproduction). Art is art whatever it is called.”8
Akari was the perfect expression of Noguchi’s idea that art could be a useful part of daily life. Starting in 1953 his Akari had been selling at Bonniers, a modern furnishings store on Madison Avenue, and, starting in 1954, they were distributed in Europe through Wohnbedarf AG in Zurich. His constant redesigning made it difficult for stores to sell Akari. He made his lanterns asymmetrical, thus almost impossible to copy, and he sometimes eliminated the bamboo ribs. The Shapes of Light exhibition prompted a New York Times critic to say that although Akari had been original when he first invented them, they were now a “cliché of modern design.”9 Yet Noguchi, the reviewer said, had rescued them from the banality of the many imitations, and his new lantern designs were “extremely beautiful … subtle and elegant.”
After the Akari exhibition, Noguchi came to feel that the popularity of his paper lanterns was diminishing his reputation as a sculptor. He decided to cancel an exhibition of Akari planned for spring 1969 at Bloomingdale’s department store; however, Priscilla, who with Shoji Sadao was in charge of Akari Associates, which handled Akari’s merchandising, must have prevailed, for Noguchi’s Bloomingdale’s Akari show opened in April 1970. Priscilla told Noguchi that Bloomingdale’s was “great,” for it was reordering Akari and building a permanent Akari exhibit.
In discussing Akari with Noguchi, Priscilla always tried to be upbeat, even as the financial downturn of the early 1970s began to hurt sales. “There is a new world coming up in the 70’s,” she wrote, “and Akari is part of what it is.”10 Nonetheless, Noguchi was irked about losing money. In 1971 he told Priscilla that he was not prepared to subsidize Akari Associates, and he suggested that Bonniers could work directly with Ozeki. “As you know,” Noguchi’s letter went on, “I am always the pessimist and you the optimist … Perhaps you will write me that everything is really rosy, big department store sales which will make a loss in selling to Bonniers mean nothing. I hope so … I myself am in one of my periods of deep depression. Well cheer up. Things have got to get better.” When Bonniers decided to phase out Akari, Noguchi was hurt and angry. “It was too hard for him,” Priscilla recalls. “Bonniers’ rejection was like stabbing his child. He wanted to give up.” Noguchi’s emotional attachment to Akari had, according to legend, something to do with his childhood memory of his father placing a light on the far side of a paper shoji screen when Noguchi didn’t want to go to bed unless he could see the moon. Bruce Altshuler, former director of the Noguchi Museum, suggested that Noguchi’s tie to Akari might be that he was trying to “heal psychic wounds” by connecting with “the land of the father who had spurned him.”11
In a January 1968 lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Noguchi once again defended the artistic value of his lantern and furniture designs: “I see no difference in designing a piece of furniture or a piece of sculpture. Each is as valid. But if you think making money taints art, I make more on my sculpture than on my furniture designs.”12 His defensiveness about his involvement with commercial design was prompted in part by the many people in the art world who began to see him as a designer and not as an artist. A Detroit newspaper reporter who heard Noguchi’s lecture said that Noguchi was not a polished lecturer: at one point he announced to his audience, “Bad luck for you if you expected a good speaker.” But, the reporter said, Noguchi’s “fine brain and human warmth” made up for his long pauses, frequent “a-a-a-a’s,” and unfinished sentences.
* * *
Noguchi’s first full-scale retrospective in the United States opened at the Whitney Museum on April 17, 1968, and closed two months later. Curated by John Gordon in consultation with Noguchi, it included sixty-eight sculptures ranging in date from 1928 to 1968, eight objects from his dance sets, and four photographs of his UNESCO, Beinecke, Chase Manhattan, and Billy Rose gardens. All but two of the recent sculptures were carved in stone. A number of the sculptures in the show—for example, To Darkness, Red Untitled, and Hakuin (all 1965–66), and Euripedes, The Roar, and Green Essence (all 1966)—further demonstrate Noguchi’s interest in the contrast between rough and polished stone. Of Green Essence Noguchi said: “This is an early precursor of much of my later work where I attempt to respect nature, adding only my own rawness.”13 In some sculptures such as The Sun (1966), he used his chisel to pit part of the surface and he polished the remainder. Other pieces, like Eros (1966) and Sky Frame (1966), both carved out of pink marble, were highly polished all over. Also included in the Whitney show were sculptures that combined metal and stone and in which the base was part of the sculpture. Fudo (1966–67), for example, has a pink mannari granite shape slotted over a stainless steel support. Fudo’s mix of Japanese stone carved in Japan and steel fabricated in New York reminded Noguchi of his own mixed culture. But, he said, “the conception is as indivisible as I am.”14
Perhaps the most magnificent of the sculptures in the Whitney show were Euripedes and The Roar, two monumental works carved from Altissimo marble at Henraux in 1966. Euripedes is composed of two parts, both hollowed out to create a feeling of mass without weight. He said that the carving of this sculpture was a challenge “to understand the stone and discover its being … to thus eat the stone and know its flavor. Euripedes must have been the first of my large efforts in this direction.”15 Indeed, at eighty-two and a half inches high it predicts the great dolmenlike basalt sculptures of Noguchi’s last years. It also harks back to the rough and smooth fountain stone at UNESCO headquarters. Noguchi remembered that when he carved The Roar he had not wanted to use an already quarried stone. He preferred, he said, “to go up to Altissimo, where Michelangelo had gotten his marble, to find something suitable. This shattered rock was carried down to Querceta, where I then proceeded to meet its challenge.”16 The drill marks, evidence of the wresting of the stone from the mountain, are still there, and much of the sculpture’s shape was given by the shattering. Noguchi left part of the stone rough and part he made smooth so that the sculpture seems to belong as much to the mountain as to art. Its form is heroic, its gesture human. The Roar inspires awe—a feeling of primal connection that one might have upon hearing a full-throated lion roar. The sculpture’s forward thrust is full of animal energy combined with elegiac grace. Like many of Noguchi’s sculptures, it has an anthropomorphic reference: the thrust of mass into space seems particularly male.
The Roar, 1966. White Arni marble, 517⁄8 × 91 × 241⁄8 in.
Noguchi told Newsweek’s art critic David L. Shirey that his Whitney show was only a “partial retrospective since it doesn’t include my industrial designs. I consider them art too.”17 While his exhibition was on, Noguchi was interviewed by his friend the Japanese sculptor and critic Tatsuo Kondo, who was then living in New York and who occasionally served as Noguchi’s assistant.18 Noguchi spoke freely to Kondo about his recent work and his artistic development. “Stone is used simply as stone in recent work,” he said. He took himself to task for the perfection of some of his works. Finish, he told Kondo, was not important. “Simply I keep working on it unconsciously. It may be a bad habit … it is not my intention to make them neat. Simply I cannot stop myself until I keep on working up to a certain point.”
He told Kondo that while his work was diverse, “you will find that there is only one person. I feel that one can see my point [of view] in this exhibition. It is a merit that I am not dependent on style … I believe that each work is complete in itself. I don’t think it is necessary that one work is related to the other. Rather, I want to start anew on each work. If he is really creative whatever he may do, the finished work would appear newly born with no past nor life history in front of it … well, one cannot go so far. But I believe that one should strive toward it.”
In speaking about his relation to his contemporaries, Noguchi always called himself a loner: “I am not very community-minded,” he told Kondo. His main problem, he said years later, was that since childhood there was a “lack of communication, a lack of real intimacy between myself and my surroundings.”19 Because of his mixed blood, he said, “I am always nowhere.”20 “I tend to do something opposite to what others are doing … Well, I am always escaping.”21 Even as Noguchi held himself aloof from people, he said that he wanted his art to “participate in society.” He differentiated his art from that of his Expressionist colleagues. He said he aimed for meaning that went beyond his own emotions. He wanted, he said, to help people, not just to satisfy his own ego. Artists should “use their ego to achieve something [more] important than ego … I wish that everyone becomes [an] artist and becomes free.”
In his New York Times review of the Whitney exhibition, Hilton Kramer was both praising and belittling. On the positive side he wrote, “Noguchi must be considered one of the most important of those modern sculptors who have upheld the purity of carving as the essential task of their art.”22 He spoke of Noguchi’s “superlative craft … grace and tact … amazing subtleties … and brilliant simplicities.” In his opinion Noguchi’s sculptures of the last decade were his best. But in the end Kramer felt “depressed” by the show because he felt that its beauty and refinement “generate so little power.” Noguchi’s Japanese reticence and lack of aggression was a point against him. So was the fact that Noguchi was working within traditions that had “outworn their relevance to contemporary experience.” And he had not supplied the “modernist adventure … with an impetus and an achievement capable of extending it into the future.” Kramer perhaps did not understand that a part of Noguchi sympathized with Japanese and Chinese tradition, which did not emphasize originality, but rather revered exquisite work in the style of an earlier master. In Newsweek David Shirey gave Noguchi a full page with many quotes from their interview: “I’m the fusion of two worlds, the east and the west,” Noguchi told Shirey, “and yet I hope I reflect more than both … My Japanese background gave me a sensibility for the simple. It taught me how to do more with less and how to become aware of nature in all its details. Wheat, for example, when processed, doesn’t resemble the grain. If you want to taste wheat, you don’t eat bread. My sculpture is the wheat itself.”23