I Keep Bumping into this Guy

Isamu Noguchi’s Bolt of Lightning – A Memorial to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.

When I started working at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia in 1983, I was standing on the front steps of Independence Hall when I noticed a large sculpture depicting a silver lightning bolt connected to a kite and a key. I learned that it was a sculpture by the Japanese-American artist, Isamu Noguchi, entitled Bolt of Lightning…A Memorial to Benjamin Franklin.

The art tugged at my imagination, and as the months passed, so did my interest in the artist. His name resonated with me, particularly after I started dating John Isami Osaki. Thus began my decades long interest in the art of Isamu Noguchi.

After this initial spark of interest, I kept encountering Noguchi’s art. In Honolulu with John in 1984 I viewed Noguchi’s Sky Gate. Noguchi described the sculpture as an “evocation to the skies of Hawaii.” It is 24 feet tall and consists of a wavy ring supported on three legs. You can stand beneath it and gaze up at the sky through the ring. The sculpture was made of industrial sewage pipe four feet in diameter that was shaped and painted. It was, as the artist noted, “a calculation in economy.”

Later in 1984 while visiting my sister in Seattle, I saw Noguchi’s Black Sun at the Seattle Art Museum. This piece is Noguchi’s first large stone carving—9 feet in diameter, and carved in Japan of Black Brazilian granite in 1969. I thought, “I keep bumping into this guy.” First in Philadelphia, then in Honolulu, and now in Seattle. “Who is he?” I wondered. “What inspires his art? What is his story?” Two decades passed. Then in 2014 I was in New York preparing for an art tour I had designed which included a visit to Noguchi’s home and museum on Long Island. At last the time had come to learn more about Isamu Noguchi.

Noguchi was born in San Francisco in 1904. His father was Japanese poet Yonejiro Noguchi and his mother American writer Leonie Gilmour. His parents met when Yonejiro hired Leonie to edit his poems for publication, a romance developed, and after his father left the United States his mother discovered that she was pregnant. Noguchi was raised by his mother, and as a child he lived in both the United States and Japan. However, he never felt rooted to one place and as an adult he never spent an entire year in the same location. He was always moving from place to place. Noguchi tapped the energy generated by this rootless existence and by his family ties to both the U.S and to Japan and he channeled it into his art.

The commission Noguchi received in 1956 to create a garden for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris illustrates his drive to channel his rootlessness into his art. Noguchi wrote, “I was commissioned to do gardens for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on the recommendation of Marcel Breuer, who, I believe, suggested me because of my Japanese name… This ultimately led to a long and close association with my father’s country and to my development as an artist. UNESCO was my beginning lesson in the use of stone.”

The initial commission was to decorate a plaza already paved with marble on the southwest side of the building. Noguchi was hired to “do something interesting with the space as a sculptor.” His initial thought was to install a dry rock garden, but after visiting the site in Paris he realized that there was no surrounding greenery to set off the beauty of the stone. He convinced the art commission to expand the project into an adjacent sunken area, and when they objected to the additional cost, Noguchi raised the extra funds from Japan with the assistance of his Japanese friends.

With the funds in hand and permission to use stone from Japan, Noguchi set off for his father’s homeland. As an American sculptor, he wanted to make a statement about the relationship between sculpture and space. As the son of a Japanese poet, he wanted to tap the centuries old tradition of working with stone and creating a Japanese garden. To guide him on this dual journey, Noguchi was introduced to Mirei Shigemori, a renowned Japanese garden designer with a passion for the avant-garde. Shigemori incorporated non-traditional materials in his garden designs using, for example, colored concrete to delineate different areas of raked stone in a garden at Tofukuji, a 13th century Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto. (Shigemori had selected his first name “Mirei” (pronounced “me-LAY” in Japanese) as a tribute to the 19th century French painter, Jean Francois Millet.)

Together Noguchi and Shigemori selected stone for the Paris garden from Japan’s island of Shikoku. While still in Japan, Noguchi took the lead in arranging the pieces in the order in which he wanted them to be placed in the final garden in Paris. But Shigemori struggled to adapt to the vision of his American colleague. He wrote: “’Worked from the morning all day to lay out the garden, and got about half done. Very tired. Since I respect Noguchi-san’s feeling above everything else, I cannot arrange the stones the way I think they should be, and that is very hard for me.”

After over three years of effort, the UNESCO garden in Paris opened at the end of May 1959. The reviews were mixed. An American sculptor had explored the depths of Japanese traditional gardens to create something new in Paris—not entirely Japanese and not entirely western either. The Japanese Embassy staff and Japanese artists living in Paris were confused; to them it did not look Japanese. For Noguchi, the project greatly contributed to his quest to create in a grand scale, transporting art from existing as objects created by one person from one cultural tradition in one country, to entire spaces filled with objects that can serve as “man-made spatial oases for the twentieth century” all over the world. Consider joining me in Paris in April 2021 to experience Noguchi’s UNESCO garden in person.