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Isamu Noguchi was
born in Los Angeles in 1904. His father was an internationally acclaimed
Japanese poet, and his mother was an American writer and teacher. Noguchi
was reared in Japan and, at age thirteen, was sent alone to the United
States to complete his education. He worked briefly in 1922 as an assistant
to Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of the famous Mount Rushmore monument, and
then enrolled as a premedical student at Columbia University in New York.
However, Noguchi's interest in pursuing a career as an artist remained
strong, and in 1927, a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to
travel to Paris, where he apprenticed in the studio of the sculptor Constantin
Brancusi. In 1929, Noguchi returned to New York before embarking on an
extended trip through China and Japan in 1931.
Back in New York in the mid-1930s, Noguchi began what would become a long
association with two American legends: architect and philosopher R. Buckminster
Fuller and dancer Martha Graham. Fuller, who celebrated the newfound marvels
of technology, had recently designed the now famous Dymaxion House (1927).
This prefabricated house was a metal structure, hung from a central mast,
with outer walls of continuous plexiglass. For Noguchi, who had first
met Fuller in 1929, Fuller represented a uniquely American spirit of modernism--as
opposed to the artists he had met in Europe and Asia--and Fuller's dynamic
command of space, realized with a minimum of materials, was to have a
profound impact on Noguchi's developing concept of public environments.
In 1933, Noguchi sketched plans for a visionary public "earthwork"
titled Monument to the Plough that was to be created in the wheat fields
of Idaho. In the following year Noguchi proposed to Robert Moses, the
New York City parks commissioner, a modified version--titled Play Mountain--for
an urban site. Although neither of the projects was realized, they were
the artist's first attempts at environmental design that transcended the
traditional boundaries of sculpture.
Ultimately, Noguchi's first environmental work resulted from his collaborations
with Graham, whom he had met in 1926. In 1935, Graham commissioned Noguchi
to create a theater set for her ballet Frontier. Noguchi later recalled,
"Frontier was in a sense the beginning and had within all the elements
of space perception, of the volume of space, perception of volume of not
just two-dimensional, but of three-dimensional space of theater. And this
is how it all went in my work." The stage offered Noguchi a unique
opportunity to see his work integrated with actual figures moving through
space. Over the following three decades, Noguchi created twenty sets for
Graham ballets, and further collaborated with such choreographers and
dancers as George Balanchine and
Merce Cunningham. While the majority
of these theatrical environments could not have been translated into permanent
architecture, such stage sets as the 1944 Herodiade demonstrate Noguchi's
growing awareness of how mural structures could be utilized to measure
rather than simply to confine space.
In the 1940s and early 1950s, Noguchi continued to develop proposals for
gardens, playgrounds, and public plazas. At the same time he explored
other aspects of design, and in 1942 he created his first prototypes for
furniture and lamps, which were later marketed by Herman Miller and Knoll.
In 1956-57, Noguchi realized his first environmental project, the monumental
Family stone figures commissioned by Connecticut General Life Insurance
Company, Bloomfield Hills. This project was followed quickly by the Gardens
for UNESCO in Paris (1956-58), the Sunken Garden for the Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, New Haven (1960-64), and
the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1960-65).
These environments integrated sculptural, mural, and landscape elements
into a dynamic synthesis-and, ultimately, Noguchi considered these works
as sculptures realized on a grand scale.
It was Noguchi's five-acre Billy Rose Sculpture Garden that had first
attracted Alice Pratt Brown to the artist's work. In 1970, she had visited
this garden, which houses works by other artists, and, based on her positive
impressions, later recommended Noguchi for the sculpture garden at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Mrs. Brown generously provided the museum
with funds to invite the seventy-two-year-old sculptor, who lived and
worked in Long Island City, New York, to Houston to inspect the site of
the future garden. When Noguchi visited the block at Bissonnet and Montrose
on June 15, 1976, he was "welcomed" by a torrential downpour
that flooded the museum area. Upon viewing the site after the deluge,
Noguchi was inspired to propose building an island for the sculpture garden.
Although this suggestion was quickly discarded, Noguchi's intuitive response
to the distinctive qualities of Houston's climate continued to influence
his later designs. The museum carefully considered the selection of Noguchi
to create the garden, and discussions with the artist extended over the
following two years. As his other urban gardens demonstrated, Noguchi
did not back away from tackling seemingly mundane, everyday concerns;
rather, he was acutely aware of the importance of dealing with the myriad
practical problems that often go hand in hand with a public space. Noguchi's
plan included provisions for lighting, drainage, traffic routes, security
procedures, and visitor comfort. In December 1978, the museum officially
awarded the commission to design the sculpture garden to Noguchi.
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cullen, 1951. Photo courtesy of Houston Metropolitan
Research Center, Houston Public Library. In March of that year, the city
council had honored the museum's request to designate the city park site
as the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, named in memory of
the independent oilman/philanthropist and his wife. The Cullens were an
extraordinary couple whose benevolence touched Houstonians' lives not
only in art but also in education, medicine, and music.
While the Cullen Sculpture Garden evolved through a series of design phases,
Noguchi also worked on numerous other public projects. These projects
ranged from a public square in Bologna, Italy, to a one-acre plaza for
the Japanese-American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, to
a small garden for the Domon Ken Museum in Sakata, Japan. Noguchi's later
sculpture gardens include a one-acre garden for an office complex in Costa
Mesa, California (1983), and the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island
City, New York (1985). Of all these projects, however, only the Cullen
Sculpture Garden was created to house the work of other sculptors; it
is unique among Noguchi's later garden works in this respect.
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