Listening to Stone

4. CHIGASAKI

1. LG, letter to Ailes Gilmour, n.d., probably 1928, NA.

2. Sc W, 11.

3. LG to CB, January 15, 1912.

4. Sc W, 12.

5. KK, 106.

6. Sc W, 12.

7. Kobata interview, 12.

8. Ibid.

9. Sc W, 12.

10. Kobata interview, 36.

11. Duus, 65.

12. Kobata interview, 36.

13. Duus, 65–66.

14. Matsuo Miyake, letter to LG, September 28, 1905, NA.

15. Ibid., November 1907, NA.

16. Ibid., February 1910, NA.

17. Ibid., October 1910, NA.

18. LG to CB, 1912.

19. Kobata interview, 9–10.

20. Ibid.

21. LG to CB, January 1913.

22. Ibid., March 7, 1913.

23. YN Letters, 213.

24. Kobata interview, 110.

25. Blake Green, “A Rootless Artist Comes Home Again,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1982, clipping, NA.

26. Sc W, 14.

27. YN Letters, 215.

5. ST. JOSEPH COLLEGE

1. Kobata interview, 17.

2. LG to CB, September 23, 1913.

3. Hakutani, 62 and 67.

4. Kobata interview, 14.

5. Ibid.

6. Sc W, 11–12.

7. Kobata interview, 11.

8. LG to CB, March 1, 1914.

9. Ibid., May 6, 1914.

10. Ibid., August 23, 1914.

11. Kobata interview, 12.

12. Duus, 71. The information about Noguchi’s summer friendships comes from Duus, 70–72.

13. LG to CB, November 5, 1914.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., April 27, 1915.

16. IN and Ailes Gilmour, videotaped conversation by Jody Spinden, quoted in Duus, 71.

17. LG to CB, August 29, 1915.

18. Sc W, 12. It is possible that Noguchi was remembering his work the previous year with the carpenters who built the Chigasaki house.

19. Roberta Brandes Gratz, “Sculptor to the World,” New York Post, April 9, 1968.

20. IN, introduction to Spectacular Heroes of Japan, exhibition catalogue (New York: Japan Society, 1985), 13.

21. Kobata interview, 15.

22. LG to CB, February 24, 1916.

23. Ibid., n.d., 1916.

24. Ibid., July 31, 1916.

25. Duus, 72.

26. LG to CB, August 29, 1916.

27. Ibid., January 23, 1917.

28. Sc W, 13.

29. Kobata interview, 19–20.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. “The Daniel Boone Idea in Education,” Scientific American 109, no. 19 (November 8, 1916): 361–62.

33. Ibid.

34. LG, letter to the Superintendent of the Interlaken School, April 5, 1918, Rumely Mss., Manuscripts Department, LL.

35. Sc W, 13.

36. Kobata interview, 31.

37. Sc W, 13.

38. Mary Cooke, “Isamu Noguchi: Torn between East and West,” The Honolulu Advertiser, April 6, 1973, NA.

39. Kobata interview, 37.

40. Duus, 80–81.

41. Kobata interview, 31.

6. INTERLAKEN

1. Sc W, 14.

2. Kobata interview, 35.

3. Sc W, 14.

4. KK, 109.

5. C. A. Lewis, letter to Edward A. Rumely, July 25, 1918, LL.

6. Thomas B. Hess, “Isamu Noguchi: ’46,” Art News 45 (September 1946): 38.

7. Kobata interview, 39.

8. Duus, 84.

9. Kobata interview, 22.

10. Ibid., 43.

11. LG, letter to Miss Rumely, September 14, 1918, LL.

12. Sc W, 14.

13. Kobata interview, 22 and 33.

14. Sc W, 14.

15. LG, letter to Superintendant, Interlaken School, October 5, 1918, LL.

16. Ibid., October 14, 1918, LL.

17. Kobata interview, 33.

18. Sc W, 14.

19. Kobata interview, 32.

20. Ibid., 110.

21. Ibid., 41.

7. LA PORTE

1. Sc W, 14.

2. Ashton, 31.

3. IN, letter to Mary Rumely Munn, February 16, 1988, LL.

4. Edward A. Rumely, letter to IN, September 15, 1919. Rumely’s letters to Noguchi are in LL.

5. IN, letter to Edward A. Rumely, n.d. IN’s letters to Edward A. Rumely are in LL.

6. Kobata interview, 41.

7. Ibid., 40.

8. Calvin Tomkins, “The Art World: Rocks,” The New Yorker, March 24, 1980, 76.

9. YN to LG, September 9, 1919. The lower half of this torn letter is in the NA.

10. Fanny Rumely, letter to Edward A. Rumely, n.d., 1920, LL.

11. IN, letter to Edward A. Rumely, 1920 or ’21.

12. La Porte High School Yearbook (1922), quoted in Duus, 95.

13. The La Porte Herald, December 31, 1988, clipping, NA.

14. R. K. McLean, M.D., letter to Henry Segerstrom, January 15, 1988, NA.

15. Sc W, 14.

16. Kobata interview, 46.

17. In Noguchi’s memory, that summer Borglum was busy making a huge sculptural memorial for Newark, New Jersey, with “more than forty figures, over life-size, including some horses.” Although Borglum later did do several sculptures for Newark, Noguchi must have been referring to the Confederate Memorial.

18. Kobata interview, 46.

19. Cummings interviews, 6.

20. Sc W, 14–15.

21. Bonnie Rychlak and Ian Buruma, Noguchi and the Figure, exhibition catalogue (Mexico City: MARCA, 1999), 36.

22. Julien Levy, “Isamu Noguchi,” Creative Art 12, no. 1 (January 1933): 29–35.

23. Duus, 97.

8. I BECAME A SCULPTOR

1. Edward A. Rumely, letter to Columbia University, fall 1922, NA.

2. Sc W, 15.

3. Hideo Noguchi’s renown came from his culturing of the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum, which causes syphilis, and then developing a skin test for the diagnosis of syphilis. Later his research to find a vaccine for yellow fever took him to Africa, where he died of the fever in 1928.

4. Kobata interview, 47.

5. Ibid., 80.

6. KK, 107.

7. Kobata interview, 45.

8. IN, letter to Edward A. Rumely, September 6, 1923.

9. Sc W, 15.

10. Kobata interview, 30–31.

11. LG to CB, March 27, 1927.

12. Kobata interview, 58.

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

14. Cummings interviews, 9.

15. IN, “The Road I Have Walked,” 98.

16. Sc W, 15.

17. Cummings interviews, 9.

18. IN, notes for a planned autobiography, NA. Curiously, Arshile Gorky, who became a close friend of Noguchi’s in the early 1930s, changed his name from the Armenian Vosdanig Adoian to the Russian-sounding Arshile Gorky about the same time. He surely felt that an artist would have greater success as a Russian than as an Armenian.

19. IN, letter to Edward A. Rumely, March 26, 1924.

20. Ibid., n.d.

21. Ibid., March 20, 1924.

22. Fanny Scott Rumely, memoir of Edward A. Rumely, manuscript, LL.

23. Edward A. Rumely, letter to IN, June 2, 1924.

24. Edward A. Rumely, letter to IN, n.d.

25. Sam Hunter, Isamu Noguchi (New York: Abbeville, 1978), 32.

26. Isabel Rumely, letter to IN, September 20, 1965, LL.

27. Mary Relief Rumely, letter to IN, March 1, 1970, LL.

28. Hunter, Isamu Noguchi, 32.

29. Cummings interviews, 9.

30. Quoted in Duus, 102–3.

31. Cummings interviews, 10.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 9.

34. Duus, 100.

35. Cummings interviews, 10.

36. IN, statement about Undine, February 25, 1927, LL.

37. Cummings interviews, 10.

38. Ibid., 9

39. Sc W, 16.

40. Ibid. Noguchi meant Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery—Stieglitz did not open An American Place until 1929. Noguchi also remembered seeing in a gallery on Sixth Street an exhibition of John Quinn’s collection, which included a Brancusi sculpture that Quinn had bought at the Armory Show in 1913. Cummings interviews, 11.

41. Ibid.

42. Cummings interviews, 11–12.

43. J. B. Neumann, handwritten manuscript, n.d., Museum of Modern Art, IN, Artist’s File.

44. Herbert Seligman, Alfred Stieglitz Talking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 62–63.

45. Kobata interview, 73.

46. Sc W, 12.

47. Edward A. Rumely, letter to Henry Allen Moe, January 15, 1927, NA.

48. IN, Guggenheim Proposal, 1926, reprinted in Sc W, 16–17, and in Essays and Conversations, 16–17.

49. LG to CB, March 27, 1927.

50. LG, letter to IN, March 21, 1927, NA. All the letters from LG to IN quoted henceforth are in NA.

51. LG to CB, March 27, 1927.

52. Ibid.

53. When Hamnett lived in Paris, she, Brancusi, and the British sculptor Jacob Epstein had made a daily pilgrimage to the Paris cemetery where Oscar Wilde was buried and where Epstein had placed a grave monument that he had sculpted—a figure with an erect penis. Every day the cemetery’s caretakers covered the offending member with a cloth. Epstein and Hamnett’s daily mission was to remove the cloth. IN, “Brzeska and the Grave of Pound,” Geijutsu-Shincho, November 19, 1978, unpublished translation in NA.

54. IN, letter to Edward A. Rumely, Easter Sunday, 1927.