"...die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug."
A reminiscence on Isamu Noguchi (Part 1)
For the past two months, while ruminating over the future sculpture garden on Main Street, I’ve been undertaking a crash course in landscape design. My holiday reading turned out to be Noguchi East and West. Its author, Dore Ashton (1928-2017), was a professor of art history and an art critic in New York who wrote a number of books on modern art, and although her biography of the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi is barely mentioned in her obituary, it is extensive, well-researched, and good.
Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was among the most accomplished sculptors of the twentieth century. The illegitimate son of a notable Japanese poet and his American editor/translator, he is an almost Zelig character. He seemingly worked with everyone and made public sculpture gardens everywhere. . . in Paris, New Haven, Manhattan, Jerusalem, Osaka, Tokyo, Fort Worth, Houston, Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta, Costa Mesa, Miami. . . and this barely scratches the surface!
Reading Ashton’s book today put me in mind of my own past encounters with Noguchi:
In the spring of 1975, I was 22 years old, had been stationed outside Tokyo as a Chinese linguist for two years, and was about to get out of the Army. In March, I had married a Japanese woman, Fuki. We had shacked up together the summer before, and were living in a small house in a rural hamlet in Kanagawa Prefecture and expecting a baby in May. And I had applied to be discharged in Japan in July, and was trying to find some sculptor to apprentice to, but had not had any real luck so far.
My brother-in-law, Hira, a journalist in Tokyo, suggested that I write a letter to Isamu Noguchi and he would figure out how to get it to him. I didn’t actually know that much about Noguchi, but I knew he was famous, and had heard that he had a studio in Japan, and since I was now expecting a mixed-race child, I imagined he might be sympathetic to my cause.
I had pretty much forgotten about this letter, when one evening some months later my neighbors ran over to fetch me. “You have a phone call!” (Home phones were rare in Japan in those days.) It was Noguchi. He told me he was now in Tokyo and suggested that we meet at his hotel on Saturday afternoon.
I packed my “best” carvings in the car and drove to meet him at the appointed hour. His place was tucked away in the middle of downtown Tokyo behind the big international hotels. But unlike a modern hotel it was an old-style inn with a wide entrance foyer and wide dark polished floor boards where the staff prostrated themselves in greeting while offering slippers in exchange for one’s shoes. I was expected and they led me to a suite of rooms off to the right where Noguchi was seated at a low table on the tatami mat floor.
“So, we meet in Tokyo.” Noguchi had a penchant for portentous pronouncements; his father had been a poet after all.
He beckoned me to sit and we sat together looking out though sliding glass doors on a shady mushroom garden. Noguchi had unusual blue-green eyes and a prominent, oddly-shaped balding forehead, and the entire scene felt like “Visit to the Mushroom Planet.”
We met for about an hour, but I can’t remember all we spoke of. He quizzed me about my role in the military. The war in Vietnam was finally coming to an end, and he expressed his opposition to the whole thing. I explained how having been sent down from college, I lost my student deferment, and while objecting to the war since high school, I couldn’t honestly claim to be a conscientious objector, so rather than be drafted, I enlisted to study Chinese. He told me how he had lived for some months in China before World War II, and how Chinese brushwork had been important to him, and I agreed that I enjoyed practicing my calligraphy and was fond of the Taoist Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching. He asked me to describe the sort of sculpture I was interested in and I told him that I had cast a few small bronzes during my first year in Japan and had been carving wood since then, but that while studying Chinese in California, where I had been welding and casting in bronze, I also imagined casting amorphous shapes in plastic, sort of like amber, impregnated with various found and fabricated shapes that would float within. He scowled at my descriptions. He hated my idea and urged me to continue working in natural materials. He mentioned steel fountains he was making for a plaza in Detroit, and I wondered aloud whether these wouldn’t end up being melted down someday. “After all, Leonardo da Vinci’s bronze horses got melted down for cannons.” Hearing this, he smiled. Perhaps the comparison to Leonardo felt flattering. At the end, I was surprised when he asked whether I wanted to come visit his studio in Aji-cho, on the island of Shikoku. He explained that he was in Japan only briefly, traveling between projects in Switzerland and New York. He told me how to get to Aji-cho, and we fixed a weekend two weeks hence, in April.
Afterwards, one complication arose. Fuki’s obstetrician, Dr. Fleet, was going on home leave during her due-date in May, and was proposing to induce as many near-term births as possible beforehand, exactly at the time of my planned trip to Noguchi’s studio. Nevertheless, since this was my best chance to make headway in finding an apprenticeship, we decided I would go ahead with my trip and miss the baby delivery.
And thus the journey seemed doubly momentous.
(To be continued…)