Abandoning, for the time being, his ambition to become a sculptor, Isamu followed Rumely’s advice and applied to Columbia University. A letter of recommendation from Rumely called Isamu a “most promising student of much more than ordinary ability.”1 Isamu began medical studies in January 1923. “At night I worked in a restaurant, and Dr. Rumely kindly raised the money to pay for my tuition.”2
During his premed studies at Columbia, Isamu met Dr. Hideo Noguchi, a distinguished bacteriologist and a graduate of Tokyo Medical College who had joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research when he was twenty-eight, in 1904.3 Having met Isamu’s father during Yone’s 1920 visit to New York, he took it upon himself to look after Isamu, taking him to dinner at Japanese restaurants and introducing him to his colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute. Even though Isamu was still an undergraduate, Hideo Noguchi arranged for him to work as an assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Simon Flexner, the doctor with whom he himself had worked when he first arrived in America in 1900.
For Isamu, life as a medical student was miserable. He was “totally isolated, no friends … Attending class, that’s all … And hating it.”4 The only professor he remembered well was Raymond Weaver, who taught a course on Dante. “He gave me a passing grade no matter what I did. He thought I deserved it.”5 When Isamu asked Hideo for advice, the doctor said it would be better, and more honest, for him to become an artist like his father. “He himself was an amateur painter—painted fish on his vacations—and he was very enthusiastic about my becoming a sculptor and really tried to promote it. In fact, he tried to get me to do a head of him; he offered me three hundred dollars. But I thought there wasn’t enough dignity in his head.”6
Sometime in the autumn or early winter of 1922, Isamu’s mother and half sister arrived in New York. “She was stuck in San Francisco,” Noguchi recalled, “probably because of finances … So it took her two years to get her breath and get her finances straightened out a bit.”7 During the summer of 1923, after his first term at Columbia, Isamu worked as a chauffeur for Emmet Scott in La Porte. On September 6 he wrote to Rumely, who was still embroiled in his court case, that he would return to New York by the seventeenth and that he wanted to live with his mother, who had taken an apartment at 39 East Tenth Street.8 Leonie secured a scholarship for Ailes to go to the Ethical Culture School. Once again she tried to make a living by importing and selling Japanese curios: netsuke, jewelry, and woodblock prints.
Living with his mother and half sister soon got on nineteen-year-old Isamu’s nerves. He had not seen them for six years, and he could not adjust to being under his mother’s wing. “If she had thought to break my dependence in sending me away, my own reaction had been to feel deserted. My extreme attachment never returned, and now the more motherly she became, the more I resented her.”9 The rebellious streak that had begun in the months before he left Japan returned in full force: “I didn’t want her to tell me what to do, you see. I was very independent-minded. I got this studio finally when I was nineteen … that’s the price you pay for being alone—you get used to being alone .”10
When Leonie discovered that Isamu was preparing for a career in medicine, she was upset. Years later, in a letter to Catherine, she described confronting Rumely about this. She had, she said, “turned up one day at Dr. Rumely’s office and hotly denounced him for turning a boy of artistic temperament toward a career for which he was entirely unsuited. It is quite true, that Dr. Rumely and I had an awful row on that score, and the Doctor, then Isamu’s best friend and advisor, persisted in his opinion, so that Isamu, as you know, took a year and a half at Columbia at a pre-medical course. I have just found a notebook of Isamu’s, neatly labeled ‘chemistry and biology.’ Inside is nothing but sketches of vagaries, fishes, rabbits, nude ladies etc. Not one word of any science.”11
One spring evening in 1924 Isamu returned to his mother’s Tenth Street apartment and found her eager to tell him about an art school that she had noticed in the neighborhood. The Leonardo da Vinci Art School, recently founded by two sculptors, was housed in a red-brick converted church building at 288 East Tenth Street on the corner of Tompkins Square Park. The school’s purpose was to offer art education to the neighborhood’s mostly Italian immigrant community. Tuition was six dollars a month or, if needed, free. “It was a night school, a settlement school, for people who didn’t have the means to go to school … So I went by there and took a look.”12
Onorio Ruotolo, the school’s director, had come to the United States from Italy in 1908. When Noguchi met him he was a successful academic portraitist who did busts of such luminaries as Arturo Toscanini, Thomas Edison, Enrico Caruso, Theodore Dreiser, and Helen Keller. He was also a poet, cartoonist, and book illustrator, and was said to have been an anarchist.13 Heavy-set with a mop of curly black hair, Ruotolo in his mid-thirties was a welcome contrast to the mean-looking Borglum. In Noguchi’s memory he was “very handsome with flashing eyes,” a “passionate man” who followed his instincts.14 Ruotolo’s instinct told him that Isamu had a talent that must be fostered. As Noguchi recalls, the director spotted him when he visited and asked, “‘Wouldn’t you like to study here?’ I said I wasn’t interested in sculpture.” Isamu explained that he had stopped by because his mother had told him to.
Although Isamu at first rejected Ruotolo’s offer to enroll, the director persisted, saying, “Oh, come on, do something,” and Isamu reluctantly agreed to copy a plaster cast of a foot. Ruotolo was impressed. “You must become a sculptor,” he said. “Well, I can’t afford it,” said Isamu. “I’m working in a restaurant. I haven’t got time.”15 Ruotolo offered him a scholarship. “I began attending evening school but then announced that I couldn’t go on because I had a job and also went to college. Ruotolo suggested that I should work for him and give up the restaurant job, and he would pay me the equivalent. How could I resist? I became a sculptor, even against my will.”16 Ruotolo’s teaching involved levitations and séances. “He claimed that he taught me psychically. I worked as in a trance, with each new sculpture hailed and promoted by him.” As Ruotolo’s studio assistant, Isamu’s job was to clean up the studio and help with various chores. “I remember the first summer I was with him I helped him illustrate John Macy’s book on The History of Man. He made some sort of pseudo woodcuts.”17 As his engagement with sculpture deepened, Isamu gave up medical school.
To affirm his new role as an artist, Isamu took back his father’s name. Noguchi was, he thought, a better name for an artist than the more prosaic Gilmour. And in terms of the visual arts, Japanese culture had more cachet than Irish culture. Also, it was a way of putting distance between himself and his mother. “Perhaps [the name change] was an effort at righting something that was wrong in myself, in my work, a lack of identity between what I was and what I could or should be. I hated my father, yet here adopted his name.”18
To make ends meet, Isamu found jobs as a sculptor, with Ruotolo’s help. The first was to make a candy mold, but portrait commissions soon followed. Various young women he met at art school sat for portrait busts, and the Rumely family commissioned a bust of Emmet Scott, who had recently died. A 1924 photograph shows Isamu beside Scott’s bust and holding a sculptor’s tool. The sculpture is, like Isamu’s other early works, academic, but it does convey something of Scott’s intelligence and kindness. Isamu also made a bust of Rumely’s mother-in-law and reliefs of the Rumely children. Each portrait plaque cost five dollars in plaster, thirty-five dollars to cast in bronze, fifteen for the wooden frame, and three for a photograph. The total for two bas-reliefs that he delivered was $116.00. On March 26 Isamu wrote to thank Rumely for sending a check, which “came in mighty handy.”19 In an undated letter he asked Rumely to send fifteen dollars so that he could pay his rent.20 He also asked permission to send Isabel Rumely’s portrait to the National Academy exhibition.
Isamu working on the bust of Emmet Hoyt Scott, 1924
In late March Isamu wrote to Rumely, who was serving a sentence of thirty days at the Tarrytown, New York, jail: “It is 11:30 P.M. as I write this letter. I have just come in from a walk with Mr. Onorio Ruotolo, the sculptor … He reiterated that you were one of the most magnificent of men—a victim of this ‘system.’ We talked of other things besides—of sculpture and education. His educational theories are quite sound. He believes in encouragement … He like you inspires!… I wish you good luck.”21 And Rumely was lucky: according to Fanny Scott Rumely’s memoir of her husband, various eminent citizens came to his defense, among them his friend Henry Ford, who told President Coolidge that he would sit outside the White House door until Coolidge pardoned Rumely.”22 Coolidge was persuaded.
Though Isamu had decided not to pursue medicine, Rumely remained affectionate and encouraging. “My dear Isamu, you have the real stuff in you!” he wrote on June 2, 1924. “I admire that quality which enables you to stick through the night to get out a job. It is that quality which will carry you far in life, and which is so valuable in combination with your sensitiveness and artistic abilities.”23 In another letter, Rumely said watching Isamu grow up had been “one of the worthwhile experiences of my life.”24
Isamu moved quickly from copying plaster casts to the life class. He later recalled that his first sculpture was of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. “Then I did Jesus Christ. I would say I was extremely facile.”25 Two other early sculptures mentioned in a letter from Isabel Rumely to Noguchi are an allegorical heart made of thorns and a bronze flying fish that was a study for a fountain.26 Isabel also remembered a line drawing of God with a sad face and a heavy burden on his shoulders that the nineteen-year-old Isamu had made for a little magazine and had given to Dr. Rumely. It was an illustration for a poem called “The Great Captive” by the Indian English poet Harindranath Chattopadhyay (brother of the poet, freedom fighter, and stateswoman Sarojini Naidu, who knew Isamu’s parents). Mary Rumely, who owned the drawing in 1970, copied the words of the poem that Isamu had written on the back of his drawing and sent them to Isamu in a letter. Part of it reads: “God is as much a prisoner, dear friend, as you and I … God is a mighty captive in the sky’s enameled tower.”27
After only three months Isamu held his first one-man exhibition at the school. The show included twenty-two plaster and terra-cotta sculptures. Eager to publicize the genius of his young protégé, Ruotolo proclaimed him to be the “new Michelangelo.”28 “He would call up the newspapers and all these reporters would come traipsing in and we would have a news conference.”29 One reviewer for The World and Word waxed ecstatic over Isamu’s show. The headline ran “19-Year-Old Japanese American Born Shows Marked Ability as a Sculptor.” The piece was illustrated by a photograph of Isamu and four of his sculptures: Fountain Study, Christ-Head, The Archer, and Salome. The text compared Isamu to a Donatello faun, and said that his head of Christ had “the mature feeling for a person that is more than human, a sorrow more than divine.”30
Isamu was soon honored by his election to various prestigious groups such as the National Academy of Design and the Architectural League. Both institutions exhibited his work regularly. One of Isamu’s heads was shown in Paris, and he exhibited frequently at the Pennsylvania Academy and in the National Sculpture Association exhibitions. He had been invited to join the National Sculpture Association and the Grand Central Galleries. Twice he participated in Prix de Rome shows and both times he won honorable mention. “Because of Ruotolo’s beating the drum … I became a kind of celebrity at the National Sculpture Society and the Architectural League. In those days the Architectural League was very, very academic.”31
Within a few months, Isamu’s rebellious spirit forced him to move on. “I seldom went to school, and Mr. Ruotolo even moved himself to another studio to allow me the full use of his own.”32 The studio he borrowed from Ruotolo was on Fourteenth Street, just south of Union Square. After incurring Ruotolo’s displeasure by refusing to welcome some of Ruotolo’s friends to his studio on the grounds that he was too busy working, Isamu was “thrown out.” He took a new studio at 127 University Place on the corner of Fourteenth Street, and Rumely agreed to help him with his rent. Isamu relished having his own studio. “I became a sculptor on my own.”33
In New York, Isamu came to know several of his father’s friends, one of whom was the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Michio Ito, who, around 1915, had been part of William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound’s London circle. In 1916 Ito moved to New York, where he choreographed Broadway reviews. Three years later he opened his own dance studio. The experimental “dance poems” he invented influenced a younger generation of choreographers including Martha Graham. Like Yone and Isamu, Ito was seen as a cultural link between East and West. When Isamu met him in 1925, Ito was a handsome thirty-three-year-old ladykiller married to one of his dance students. Isamu must have been attracted to Ito’s milieu—beautiful dancers, sophisticated literary friends. He loved to watch dance performances. Years later Noguchi recalled how much he had learned from Ito as well as from Ito’s younger brother Yuji, a set and costume designer.34
When Ito posed for Isamu in 1925, Isamu produced his first unconventional sculpture. The portrait looks like a Noh mask—in his early twenties Ito had performed in Yeats’s Noh play At the Hawk’s Well, and he was now preparing to put on the play in New York. Isamu molded the head in papier-mâché and later had it cast in bronze. He transformed a long lock of Ito’s hair into a handle. Although the piece is severe and stylized, it does convey the dancer’s dynamic presence. Ito liked the work so much, he asked the young portraitist to make similar masks for his production of Yeats’s play.
In the mid-1920s Isamu continued to sculpt heads and figures: “I was doing a figure of a Russian girl named Nadia Nikolaiova—a head. She was a girl with a nice figure who danced in the Serpent and in a club.”35 Nadia was a ballet dancer who, in 1926, posed for free so long as Isamu would give her a percentage of the selling price. In eight months Isamu created the best known of his early academic sculptures, a full-length serpentine nude figure of Nadia called Undine (Nadja). The water nymph from the popular ballet Ondine is imagined as if she were underwater, so that her mass of wavy hair floats upward. Her clasped hands are raised above her head in that position of vulnerability and exposure so popular in depictions of the female nude. Her sensuous body with its exaggerated swing of the hip is highly erotic. The way light moves over her skin seems to echo the artist’s excitement.
Isamu working on Undine (Nadja), 1926
On February 2, 1927, perhaps in order to sell this sculpture, Isamu wrote a one-page essay about Undine:
Tortuous as a flame or as the spray from a sea wave she stands—dynamic action thrills in every part of her, from the curve of her foot to her flying hair—and yet an eternal serenity seems to preside over her. Have you noticed when watching a flame or when watching a storm at sea that Nature never appears to overexert herself?—an infinite reserve seems to linger in even its ultimate thrust …
As to her spirit, why, I should say that she moves us all, each probably in a different way, or in several different ways. To me she represents a wonderful awakening; and what a marvellous vista of subtle connotations does that not imply!36
The figure sculptures that Isamu made in the 1920s were first modeled in clay and fired, then a mold was made, and finally plasters and bronzes were cast by the Roman Bronze Foundry in Queens, New York. Since casting was expensive, he sometimes had buyers finance the process.
Having finished Undine in 1926 and garnering great praise, Isamu had confidence in his mastery of the techniques of academic sculpture. With success came an expansion of his world. “I was befriended by several people. I mean being young and sort of wanting to be an artist, people would befriend you somehow or other.”37 In his downtown neighborhood he met an increasing number of artists and art dealers. “I liked the life around there.”38 But the satisfaction was short-lived. Although Isamu was, as he recalled, “the hope of the academy,” he was restless. “By twenty-one I had run the gamut and was disillusioned.”39 Needing to find a way to move beyond his academic work, he began to visit galleries that showed modern art. “In 1926 when I was twenty-one, the horizons of art rapidly opened for me. I was a frequenter of Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, An American Place and the New Art Circle of J. B. Neumann, who became my counselor and friend. I began going to all the not-too-frequent exhibitions of modern art.”40 Isamu was enthralled.
The catalytic event for Isamu’s transformation into a modernist sculptor was his 1926 visit to the Brummer Gallery’s Brancusi show, organized by the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, who shepherded the young Isamu around the exhibition. “The exhibition of Brancusi that year on the beautiful top floor of the Brummer Gallery completely crystallized my uncertainties. I was transfixed by his vision.”41 Years later, asked how, given his academic training, he could respond to Brancusi, Noguchi said that while Neumann and Stieglitz had probably recommended that he see the Brancusi show, he had come to appreciate Brancusi’s work “purely on my own … I mean it was not something through any conversation or introduction other than just that I happened to see it.”42 He did acknowledge that “there must have been conversations with Stieglitz and Neumann which disposed me that way.” Isamu’s familiarity with the Japanese emphasis on simplicity and reverence for materials also triggered his immediate enthusiasm for Brancusi’s work.
Like Rumely and Ruotolo, Neumann and Stieglitz were among those people who saw something in Isamu that made them want to help him. Born in a village in Austria-Hungary in 1887, Neumann opened a gallery in London in 1910, immigrated to the United States in 1923, and opened the New Art Circle. He not only showed European artists like Munch, Kandinsky, and Rouault, but he also had a few Americans such as Oscar Bluemner, Max Weber, and Walt Kuhn. “Neumann showed those [artists] of his own taste, which were somewhat expressionist … some of the German Expressionists and things like that. But we were friends. He was one of my early backers.” It was probably in the early 1930s, when Noguchi sculpted his portrait, that Neumann wrote a profile called “Reflections About Isamu Noguchi”: “For Noguchi, so it seems to me, a background deeply rooted in American psychology is immensely important. Anyone familiar with his past sculpture will readily recognize a typically American approach in his direct, decisive grasp of each subject.”43
Stieglitz told a story about Isamu’s first visit to the recently opened Intimate Gallery in February 1926. When asked where he came from, Isamu replied, “From all over the world.”44 He spoke admiringly of an O’Keeffe painting of deep blue petunias: “That is nature expressed as nature would do it,” Isamu reputedly said. “If there were a living petunia, a third one next to the two painted ones, they would recognize each other.”
“The boy spoke of the ‘professional’ attitude,” Stieglitz recalled, “as against the ‘play’ spirit of workmanship and things made not for exhibition but to satisfy the worker, such work alone being real … The young man said that nature was like a huge keyboard of a musical instrument and that the man who could pick out chords, could see relationships, was the artist.”
If this story is accurate, Isamu already harbored certain ideas—art as play, nature as the basis of art—that would continue to characterize his approach. Isamu was drawn to the older man’s outpouring of controversial opinions. People like Stieglitz, Noguchi said, have “their own authority. They did not have to ask other people.”45
In 1926 a chance conversation changed the course of Isamu’s life. “One day when I was out at the Roman Bronze Works, the director, Mr. Bertelli, told me that Mr. Harry Guggenheim had seen a piece of mine and suggested that I try for the newly founded Guggenheim fellowship.”46 Isamu wasted no time in finding people in the art world—Neumann, Stieglitz, and the prominent academic sculptor James Earle Fraser—to recommend him for the grant. Fraser, he said, “represented my academic past.” The other two stood for his desire for change. Isamu asked Rumely for a letter of recommendation as well, and Rumely gave a picture of Isamu’s youthful strength of character, intelligence, and talent: “He could carve wood; he could work with all tools; he could hammer metal designs; draw as almost no student in the school … If he can secure for himself the requisite preparation that will include training, travel and contact with the artistic treasures of Europe and broadening experience in productive work, he should rank as one of America’s great artists ten years hence.”47
Isamu’s 1926 essay for his Guggenheim application reveals how dramatically his thoughts and feelings were inspired by his modern art awakening. The essay also reflects his early absorption of Japanese culture, his knowledge of Rumely’s philosophy of education, and the Swedenborgian concepts he learned about as an adolescent while living with the Mack family. A crucial statement of Isamu’s outlook, the Guggenheim essay contains many ideas that would guide him for the rest of his life: “It is my desire to view nature through nature’s eyes, and to ignore man as an object for special veneration. There must be unthought-of heights of beauty to which sculpture may be raised by this reversal of attitude. An unlimited field for abstract sculptural expression would then be realized in which flowers and trees, rivers and mountains as well as birds, beasts and man would be given their due place.” He said he wanted to “become once more a part of nature—a part of the very earth, thus to view the inner surfaces and the life elements.” The materials out of which his sculptures would be made would, he said, be part of their content. “As yet, I have never executed any of those ideas. I have rather been saving them as sacred until such time as I should have attained technical confidence and skill … My proposal, therefore, should I be so honored as to receive your fellowship, would include a travel study and production period of three years—the first year to be spent in Paris, where I should endeavor to acquire proficiency in stone and wood cutting, as well as in a better understanding of the human figure.”
During the fellowship’s second year he would travel to India, China, and Japan. “I have selected the Orient as the location for my productive activities for the reason that I feel a great attachment for it, having spent half my life there. My father, Yone Noguchi, is Japanese and has long been known as an interpreter of the East to the West, through poetry. I wish to do the same with sculpture … May I, therefore, request your assistance in enabling me to fulfill my heritage.”48
The Guggenheim Fellowship was awarded, and Isamu received a grant of $2,500 for one year. It seemed a fortune. He would have to reapply each year for a maximum of three years. On the day before he sailed, his mother helped him pack and then accompanied him to dinner at a little Armenian restaurant where they met his Bulgarian friend Boris Majdrakoff, whose portrait Isamu had recently made. On March 19, 1927, Rumely hosted a going-away party with fifteen guests at a Japanese restaurant where they ate raw fish and drank sake. Leonie later wrote to Catherine that among the many speeches, Ruotolo warned Isamu against the seductions of women, saying that though they were the source of much inspiration, they could also be “a source of danger.” At this Isamu winked at a pretty young woman named Nita and she threw him a kiss.49 Leonie’s speech advised her son to “keep his head,” but Isamu answered, “What’s the use of putting water in the soup?” When Isamu was asked to say something, “all he did was to get up and grin all around and say that he hadn’t a thing that he wished to say but that he felt fine and hoped that they all did the same and he drank their health in sake.”
After this festive meal, many of the guests accompanied Isamu to his ship, due to sail at midnight. Nita was clearly sad to see him go, and, as Leonie reported to Catherine, kissed him before he set off. “I suspect there’s a romance there and wonder how long it will take to cure the ache of parting, and perhaps, probably, find other loves. She is a Russian girl and deaf, so she speaks with a slow drawl, not so very distinctly. She posed for several of his studies, but not for Undine. That was Nadia.”
* * *
Two days after Isamu’s departure, Leonie wrote telling him that after seeing him off Nita had kept assuring her that Isamu was “the nicest boy she ever knew.”50 Ailes, Leonie reported, had been disappointed that her brother had left without her saying goodbye. Isamu had given his sister the wrong date, and she had come into the city one day too late.
In her son’s absence, Leonie took charge of some of his business affairs. In late March she wrote Catherine that Undine had been cast in bronze and was on exhibition at the Grand Central Art Galleries. “The price marked on it is $4500. The art gallery gets 20% of the selling price, $1500 goes to Mr. Albee, who put up the money for the casting, and Isamu promised 10% to his model, Nadia, who heroically posed for over a period to 8 months without accepting any return.”51 Leonie had asked Mr. Albee to either buy Undine or grant an extension to the loan.
Leonie told Catherine that Isamu had offered to send her a part of the fellowship money every month. She refused it knowing that the cost of material for sculpture was high. “But he says I may retire after four years.”52 She was, she said, “camping” in Isamu’s studio for the week: “No heat but gas, which makes me sick, so I have to turn it off. Cold as a barn … Ice cold running water outside the room. Smells of the toilet in the hall. Noisy, dusty—rats running about.” In spite of his early success, Isamu’s finances remained precarious.
On March 27, the Cunard Line’s RMS Aquitania left Isamu in England where he stopped for a few days before proceeding to Paris.
On his first night in London Isamu met the artist Nina Hamnett in the lobby of his hotel. She introduced herself to him as a painter and took him for a ride around Hyde Park and then to the glamorous Café Royale. “She was,” he later recalled, “the first person to tell me about Henri Gaudier [Brzeska], saying that she had posed for him a few times.”53 Indeed, Hamnett had once been the modernist sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska’s lover. She was also a friend of Brancusi’s, and possibly sent Isamu off to Paris with a letter of introduction to him.
On Easter Sunday, just before he left London, Isamu wrote Rumely thanking him for a telegram that he had received on the second day of his transatlantic voyage. “While you have burdened me with your expectations you give me renewed courage. As always you steel me to my best efforts.”54