Listening to Stone

13. A CLOSE EMBRACE OF THE EARTH

1. Wolf, On Becoming an Artist, 44.

2. IN, postcard to Ailes Gilmour, January 1931, NA.

3. IN, letter to LG, January 28, 1931, NA.

4. IN, “The Road I Have Walked,” 100.

5. Quoted in Duus, 130.

6. Unidentified clipping, n.d., NA.

7. Translated from article in Mainichi shinbun, January 29, 1931, quoted in Duus, 130.

8. Ibid.

9. Sc W, 20.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Kobata interview, 88.

13. Ibid.

14. IN, “Theatre of Heroes and Phantoms,” Harper’s Bazaar, June 1952, NA.

15. Rhony Alhalel, “Conversation with Isamu Noguchi,” Kyoto Journal (Spring 1989): 36.

16. Mus. Cat., 238.

17. Cummings interviews, 21.

18. Sc W, 20.

19. Hakone Conference transcript, 1984, quoted in Ashton, 37.

20. Ashton, 37.

21. Kobata interview, 72.

22. Alhalel, “Conversation with Isamu Noguchi,” 36; Sc W, 21.

23. Ashton, 42.

24. BM, 15.

25. Sc W, 20.

26. Levy, “Isamu Noguchi,” 34.

27. IN, letter to LG, June 1, 1931, NA.

28. Ibid., July 24, 1931, NA.

29. IN, letter to Yone Noguchi, November 1931, NA.

30. IN, letter to Ailes Gilmour, September 24, 1931, NA.

31. Kobata interview, 92.

14. LONELY TRAVELER, SOCIAL LION

1. Sc W, 21.

2. IN, letter to Yone Noguchi, November 1, 1931, NA.

3. In July a piece Leonie wrote was accepted by a journal called Asia. It included photographs of Japanese garden stones, the type of stones that would in time be inspirational for Noguchi.

4. Art News, December 17, 1932, clipping, NA.

5. Bonnie Rychlak, The Full Figure and Portraiture, 1926–1941, exhibition brochure (New York: Noguchi Museum, 2008–09), n.p.

6. Kay Halle, letter to IN, April 1, 1965, NA.

7. IN, interviewed by the author, Long Island City, NY, April 1977.

8. John Goldsmith Phillips, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 29, no. 11 (November 1934): 195–97.

9. Rose Mary Fisk, “Two Artists as Revealed by Drawings,” The Chicago Evening Post, February 23, 1932, clipping, NA.

10. Henry McBride, “Noguchi in Sculpture and Drawing,” The Sun (New York), February 20, 1932, clipping, NA.

11. The New Yorker, February 27, 1932, clipping, NA.

12. The New York Times, March 8, 1932, clipping, NA.

13. Inez Cunningham, review of Noguchi’s exhibition, The Chicago Evening Post, March 8, 1932, clipping, NA.

14. Ruth Page, interview transcript, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center.

15. Sc W, 21.

16. Karen’s Column, “Bronze Bust Subject of Whopping Tale,” The Washington Times, June 1, 1989, clipping, NA.

17. IN, “Buckminster Fuller: A Reminiscence of Four Decades,” Architectural Forum 136 (January–February 1972): 59 (reprinted in Essays and Conversations, 118–19). In 1930 Fuller had taken over a magazine called T-Square and changed its name to Shelter. He brought it out sporadically for two years. In November 1932 Fuller reproduced Noguchi’s extraordinary new sculpture, Miss Expanding Universe, on Shelter’s cover, and to this issue Noguchi contributed an article titled “Shelters of the Orient,” which drew parallels between traditional Asian buildings and modern Western architecture and compared Japanese houses to Fuller’s Dymaxion House.

18. Levy, “Isamu Noguchi,” 35.

19. Ibid., 29–30.

20. Time, December 18, 1932, clipping, NA.

21. Edward Alden Jewell, exhibition review, The New York Times, December 17, 1932, clipping, NA.

22. Henry McBride, exhibition review, The Sun (New York), December 1932, quoted in unidentified magazine, clipping, NA.

23. John Gruen, “The Artist Speaks: Isamu Noguchi,” 58–62.

15. TOWARD A SCULPTURE OF SPACE

1. Sc W, 21.

2. Cummings interviews, 23.

3. Sc W, 21.

4. IN, “The Sculpture of Spaces,” in Isamu Noguchi: The Sculpture of Spaces, exhibition catalogue (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980), 13.

5. IN, quoted in the catalogue for his exhibition at the Marie Harriman Gallery (New York, 1935).

6. Cummings interviews, 22.

7. IN, “The Sculpture of Spaces,” 13.

8. Cummings interviews, 22.

9. “Playgrounds Are No Game,” New York Post, February 9, 1980, clipping, NA.

10. IN, note in Marie Harriman Gallery exhibition catalogue.

11. Sc W, 22.

12. Ibid., 21.

13. Quoted in Amei Wallach, “Hanging Out with Bucky, Thinking Big,” The New York Times, May 21, 2006, 35. Between 1933 and 1935 Fuller produced three Dymaxion Cars. The first was shown to the public with much fanfare in 1933. When the U.S. automobile industry refused to let Fuller’s new car enter their annual exhibition in Manhattan, Fuller attracted attention by driving this car around the block outside the showroom. Fuller’s hopes to find a manufacturer for his car were dashed when it was rear-ended and it rolled over in a race in Chicago, killing the driver. Although the accident was not caused by the car’s novel design, prospective investors vanished.

14. Sydney Burney was a British art and antiquities dealer who, in 1933, mounted an exhibition of African art that posited the idea that this art was of equal value to the art of Western cultures.

15. IN, letter to LG, July 9, 1933, NA.

16. Ibid., July 25, 1933, NA.

17. Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: Putnam, 1977), 144–45.

18. IN, letter to LG, August 17, 1933, NA.

19. IN, letter to LG, September 3, 1933, NA.

20. IN, notes for a planned autobiography, NA.

21. Ibid.

22. IN, in Hiro Narita’s film Isamu Noguchi: Stones and Paper, 1997.

16. ART WITH A SOCIAL PURPOSE

1. PWAP New York Office, report on IN, February 28, 1934, quoted in Duus, 149.

2. Nancy Grove, Isamu Noguchi Portraits, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, 1989), 14.

3. IN, note on project for Ely Jacques Kahn, 1934, NA.

4. Cummings interviews, 23.

5. “Playgrounds Are No Game,” New York Post, February 9, 1980.

6. IN, “The Sculpture of Spaces,” 13.

7. In 1934 and 1935 Averell Harriman was administrator for the National Recovery Administration.

8. The models for public projects exhibited at Marie Harriman’s gallery included his memorial to Carl Mackley, Monument to Ben Franklin, Play Mountain, and Monument to the Plow. Among the portrait sculptures were Clare Boothe Brokaw, Mrs. Carlos Davila, Lilian Palmedo, Immo Gulden, A. Conger Goodyear, and Audrey McMahon, the latter soon to be head of the New York office of the Federal Art Project of the WPA.

9. The New York Times, February 8, 1935, clipping, NA.

10. Edward Alden Jewell, “Noguchi Sculpture in Metal Exhibited,” The New York Times, January 31, 1935, clipping, NA.

11. Edward Alden Jewell, The New York Times, February 3, 1935, clipping, NA.

12. Sc W, 22–23.

13. Ibid.

14. Margaret Rose Vendryes, “Hanging on Their Words,” in Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 156–59.

15. Ibid.

16. Martha Graham, “From Collaboration, a Strange Beauty Emerged,” The New York Times, January 8, 1989.

17. Sc W, 23.

18. Ashton, 54.

19. Sc W, 125.

20. Ibid., 123.

21. Robert Tracy, interview with IN, reprinted in Essays and Conversations, 80.

22. Sc W, 123.

23. Cummings interviews, 27.

24. Sc W, 23.

17. MEXICO

1. Cummings interviews, 27.

2. Sc W, 23.

3. Siqueiros, in turn, may have been influenced by Noguchi’s Abelardo Rodríguez mural when he did his cement relief mural at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico in 1952–56. Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico,” 30.

4. IN, “What’s the Matter with Sculpture?” Art Front 19, nos. 9–10 (1936): 13–14, reprinted in Essays and Conversations, 18–19.

5. Kobata interview, 61.

6. Amy Wolf, On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and His Contemporaries, 1922–1960, exhibition catalogue (New York: Noguchi Museum, 2010), 71.

7. IN, interviewed by the author, Long Island City, NY, April 1977.

8. Ibid. The blue house was Kahlo’s childhood home (now the Frida Kahlo Museum). Rivera had purchased it from Kahlo’s father to help with the family’s finances. After Kahlo and Rivera divorced and remarried in 1939–40, they made the blue house their home.

9. Ibid.

10. IN, letter to Frida Kahlo, n.d. Noguchi’s letters to Kahlo are in the Frida Kahlo Museum archive, Mexico City.

11. Sc W, 24.

12. IN, letter to Frida Kahlo, n.d.

13. IN, interviewed by the author.