Oral history interview with Isamu Noguchi, 1973 Nov. 7-1973 Dec. 26

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Isamu Noguchi, 1973 Nov. 7-1973 Dec. 26, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Isamu Noguchi
Conducted by Paul Cummings
At the Artist's studio in Long Island City, New York
November 7, 1973

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Isamu Noguchi on November 7, December 10, 18 and 26, 1973. The interview was conducted at Isamu Noguchi's studio in Long Island City, New York by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

[SIDE 1]

PAUL CUMMINGS: November 7, 1973- Paul Cummings talking to Isamu Noguchi in his studio in Long Island City, New York. To kind of start at the beginning, you were born in Los Angeles but really grew up in Japan and started your traveling very young and kept at it. I’m curious about what that was like on a kind of day-to-day basis, what you did as a child in Japan. You lived in two kinds of worlds. At least that’s the observation from reading your autobiography and the catalogues and things. You grew up with – what? Japanese or English?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: First of all, my mother was American. And going to Japan with an American mother and being half-Japanese puts on in a very anomalous position. On the one hand, she is of Japan, she wanted to be in Japan. But the fact of the matter is that the Japanese do not accept foreigners as another person equal to themselves because Japanese are Japanese and everybody else is foreign, you understand. It’s a very traditional country in that sense; and very unusually so, perhaps. I mean very exclusive in a sense. And, on top of that, my mother was separated from my father when I was very, very young so that I didn’t have that contact that I might have had to one-half parent anyway. So I was an appendage on a stranger; that is to say….And yet, as I say, she loved Japan, let’s say, had friends and pupils there. She taught English. But I was more or less a kind of waif because she was always working a great deal of the time and I was sort of thrown onto the neighboring children and so forth who, of course, were Japanese. So my playmates and so forth were Japanese but I was not Japanese, you see. And, you know, people talk about the discrimination that exists against half-breeds. And, it is probably so. Although I mean, personally, I can’t say that I experienced discrimination as such, a third person looking at it more objectively would probably say that it’s a classical case. I, for instance, have never felt discriminated against in this country either, for that matter, but somebody else looking at it might say: “Well, but you don’t realize that this is evidence of discrimination.” And my own attitude, of course, is another question. Am I really free? Or am I really inherently self-protective against incipient discrimination. Do you understand?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It works both ways. I mean, both the people who may be – my whole attitude and, let’s say, being in a sense a misfit in any situation both in Japan and here, in a sense, might be a part of what makes me the way I am, you know – a misfit.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But growing up as a child, because you lived in Japan until you were – what?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Until I was thirteen.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So you had a chance to have kind of teen-age friends and school?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That’s right. Therefore I had a double background there, especially during the time that we were living in the country at Chigasaki from the time I was six years old or earlier – I’m not too sure – but maybe five or six years old, until I was ten certainly, we lived in this country place. There were no foreign children there at all so all my friends were Japanese children.

PAUL CUMMINGS: so you were really quite different from…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. And, as to whether or not they accepted me, who knows. When I was about eight, I started to commute to a school in Yokohama which was a Jesuit school – St. Joseph’s College.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you know why your mother sent you to that school?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Prior to that, I was going to a Japanese school and she probably worried about my being a country boy in a Japanese school and thought I should have more European-type education, I suppose.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you speak English at home, or Japanese?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I spoke English at home and Japanese outside. Well. When I started to commute to this school, which was frequented by foreigners, you know, the pupils were the children of the residents of Japan and also of other parts of the Orient came to the school. So, for a while I commuted, maybe for a year or so. And for one year my mother took me out of school and tutored me because she didn’t particularly like that school and she thought maybe she could do better tutoring me herself. But that was only for a while. Then I boarded at that school for a while. Finally, she moved to Yokohama and then I went to that school from where we were in Yokohama. But that wasn’t for very long, I don’t think it could have lasted for more that a year. In any case, she was living in Yokohama then. You see. The reason was she was teaching in Yokohama then. You see, therefore, I was kind of real waif, I would say.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You had no contact with your father at all during that time?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: None at all. None at all. So that you might say I’m a classical case of conditioning as a child in a not too fortunate way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You know, it’s curious form reading and everything how choppy it was and how broken up but, but it seems even more so. Was you mother’s idea in sending you back to the United States again to get an education?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Probably for the same reason that she sent me to St. Joseph’s. Probably she wanted to protect me from the kind of half, you know…

PAUL CUMMINGS: Half in and half out.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: …business of not belonging anywhere. She probably thought that I would have a better chance of belonging in society here that in Japan. But as to whether or not that was really so, other people are in a better position than I to know. She didn’t know where to send me. She happened to read in a magazine about a school in Indiana – the Interlaken School – which was devoted to teaching children to learn by doing; that it, it had a kind of manual training approach. She sent me there in June 1971. As you can see from reading my book, I didn’t stay there very long; in fact I never went to school there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. But, before you came to this country, did you have a lot of friends as a student and as a young man in schools in Japan?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. I never had. I never had many friends; I don’t have any recollection of them, or not much. Nor after coming here either, for that matter did I develop great friendships with people. I’m a loner.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Your mother being an English teacher, did you have books around? Did you read? Did you read?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, there were plenty of books around.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you remember any of them?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, you know, she was a rather literate person so we had books. I mention in my book William Blake, for instance. And there were books of poetry. She was fond of poetry. And my father was a poet. And my mother herself was a loner; I mean it was not just me.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In what way?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: She was a very quiet person, a very retiring sort of person. She was not pushy at all. Therefore, I mean, her life was very lonely. She didn’t have very many friends. So that also reflected on me, you see.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you every talk to her about why she was so interested in Japan, what it was that – why she wanted to live there?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, for one thing, she had fallen in love with my father and I was born and she took me over there, I think, somewhat to his surprise and maybe to his annoyance. And, having gotten over there and finding that by then he had gotten another family, there was nothing for her to so. For that matter, probably she couldn’t afford to come back here either.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So she started teaching?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, she started teaching there. It was a very mixed up and unfortunate situation.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you start drawing as a child the way so many children do?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, after all, all children do draw. Yes, I drew. And I looked at pictures and magazines and so on. But I was not, you know – I would say that my mother wanted me to be something like an artist. For a while she thought I would be a forester or somebody like that, and she taught me botany. I have that in my book, by the way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: From this description and from what’s in the book, it seems that there’s been kind of a great searching that has gone on through your early years trying to find a place or a culture

ISAMU NOGUCHI: After all, for one with a background like myself the question of identity is very uncertain. And I think it’s only in art that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In what way, do you think?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, after all, it is only in art that a person who does not belong with any social contact, you see, could find a viewpoint on like which is free of social contacts. One can be an artist and alone, for example. An artist’s life is really a lonely life. It is only when he is lonely that he can really produce. If he is not lonely, he may be a social, nice, person, but you know, he might not be driven to it. After all, in a sense you’re driven to art out of desperation. People are naturally lazy; they don’t do things unless they are driven to it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. I think it’s interesting that, for example, Dr. Mack and the people you knew at Interlaken School and in La Porte, Indiana –

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Oh, they meant well for me.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, I understand that but I think it’s interesting that they tried to guide you to being a doctor, for example.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. But, all right, I mean it was their limited viewpoint. And it was natural that they would. They tried to protect me in that way. I meant to become an artist was not exactly a protected existence from their point of view. They probably though it was a rather risky thing. I mean, you know, so far as economic well-being and so forth was concerned, they though it was probably better to be a doctor.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. But how did you find coming to this country which was brand new to you because you were so young when you had left, and living right in the center – in this very conservative town in Indiana, and finally in high school you did go to? Was that, again, a case where you were still an outsider in terms of…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, they treated me probably as people probably now treat a waif from, say, South Vietnam. You know, they mean every good thing but they don’t make them into members of the community. Although I think this country is better that most countries, at least, if you’re not a Negro. But looking at the Negroes, you’ll see that it’s not so hot here either. So that discrimination takes many different forms. It can take the form of, let’s say, solicitude. I mean, for instance, the solicitude of the missionary. After all, Dr. Mack was a religious man and he probably had a solicitude for me which was not unlike a missionary in Africa.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Good works.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, look, I’m not trying to accuse him of anything. He was a lovely man, a really sincere man, and a good man. And I’m sure many missionaries are good people. I’m not saying that he was a missionary towards me, but I sort of came in the category o a subject for a missionary approach. I’m still, you know, victimized by people who have all the good will toward me and I feel like a Hottentot.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In going to high school, were you active in any school activities, in any sports, or in art classes? Were there things that interested you – literature, music?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. Things of that sort I rather shied away from. I was not what you would call “one of those boys.” I think I was rather shy. I mean in high school I went in for basketball and things like that, like all kids do. But I don’t think that I was willing to be, or was accepted as a member of, you know, boys’ clubs of things like that, gangs, or…

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. The groups that form. Yes.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Exactly

PAUL CUMMING: I’m curious about – was it Dr. Mack who was the friend of Gutzon Borglum?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. It was not Dr. Mack who was the friend of Borglum. It was Dr. Rumley

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did Dr. Rumley and Borglum know each other? Did you ever find that out? Or were they just friends from somewhere?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I tell you, Dr. Rumley was quite very unusual person, a brilliant person. He was from La Porte, Indiana but had gone to school in Heidelberg, Germany. I believe he had gotten a degree as a doctor but never practiced medicine. He became a business man and developed a tractor factory – Advance-Rumley Company – in La Porte. Thus he had money. He brought the New York Evening Mail. There was a big scandal that he must have brought to the Evening Mail with money from the German Kaiser. There was a terrible sort of case with the government. In fact, he finally landed in jail fro having presumably….Spreckels, the sugar tycoon, was involved, but he died. I mean I think Rumley claimed that he got the money through Spreckels; and the government claimed that it was the Kaiser’s money for propaganda purposes for the Germans. Rumley was originally an Alsatian. And, having gone to school in Germany, he had German sympathies, you might say; mean, in any case, he was accused of it. The family had a people, not necessarily toward the war. I’m not in a position to say what the facts were. First of all, I was too young to know and I came on the scene after the fact. But Dr. Rumley did land in jail here in town some place-- I forget where it was. Finally he was released – pardoned by Coolidge. I believe he knew Borglum because of his involvement with the newspaper and politics and so forth. I mean, for instance, he was the one who sent John Reed to Russia.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, really?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. I mean he was a liberal.

PAUL CUMMINGS: There were a lot of things happening.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. He was a friend of McClure. He was a friend of Henry Ford. He was a single-taxer when I first knew him. Gradually he became more and more conservative and ended up as an opponent of Franklyn Roosevelt in the court packing case. He formed an organization against the policies of Roosevelt and for the more conservative element, including businessmen such as Henry Ford, and so on, the more right-wing element you might say. But originally he was a liberal. The school that he founded – Interlaken—was based on very progressive ideas. He had very progressive ideas in education and so forth which he had learned in Europe presumably. So I was sent to this school by my mother. They must have had correspondence. She had read about the school. The school actually welcomed people of different races. Well, I landed at the school. For a while I was rooming with a Filipino boy who was an Igorot, one of the samples who, prior to that, had been sent to the San Francisco Fair as an example of the people who lived in trees in the Philippines, a wild boy. His name was Agapowan. So, you see, one never knows whether one is a sample of primitive boyhood of whether on is….I really did not meet Dr. Rumley right away. You see, the school had closed down and had become an army training camp. Then the war had ended and the training camp was closed down. I was still left there. I had no place to go. I think it was for about a year I was out there just, you know, in the wild.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What did you do all during that time? What activities?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, first of all, I was in this deserted school with a couple of caretakers getting the victuals and helping to cook a very limited cuisine, you might say. But I mean really in the wild. They had a horse which I would ride to the nearby village, Rolling Prairie, in the morning to get the produce for the day and the mail. Eventually I was rescued from there by a lady whose husband had been the treasurer of the school. She had sort of established herself in Rolling Prairie. So she took me over there. I worked in the garage and then went to school in Rolling Prairie. I commuted from Rolling Prairie to Interlaken for a while. Then I stayed in Rolling Prairie for a while. Then went back to Interlaken. The two places were very near each other. I used to ride his horse. Finally Dr. Rumley heard about me there. He himself had gotten sufficiently extricated from his troubles. So he called me there and where he was established. He kindly put me to board with Dr. Mack who was a Swedenborgian minister and was the minister of the New Church there. It was Dr. Mack’s family who initially befriended me. And then Dr. Rumley’s family, who lived right near there befriended me too. My going to Gutzon Borglum came about because, as I say, Dr. Rumley knew Borglum through his political and intellectual connections, so to speak, at the time. Dr. Rumley suggested that maybe I could go and tutor Borglum’s son, Lincoln. So that’s what I did. I went and tutored his son, Lincoln Borglum.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In what?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: In English, in anything; you know, I just tutored him.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You were very young for that, weren’t you?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I was just out of high school, and he was a little younger; he was about ten, I guess. You know, how you make your way? I mean when you are a kid? So you might say that even while in La Porte, Indiana where I was staying with Dr. Mack – I of course tried to earn my way – and so I was doing all kinds of odd jobs, I took care of people’s furnaces, mowed their lawns, delivered newspapers, that sort of thing. You know, it was a real sort of American story. I mean it was not unusual, and I’m not claiming anything unusual about me except that, as I say, I was a stranger and I had no relatives, no sense of belonging rally.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you write to your mother? Did you have correspondence with her much?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. But, you know, it was very distant, after all.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It would take a long time for letters to go back and forth then.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Borglum was living where. Then?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: In Stamford, Connecticut. He had a huge place, about seven hundred acres in Stamford. A huge studio. He was building another enormous studio. You know, he did the Newark Memorial inside that – I think seventy-five figures over – life size with several horses in it – all inside the studio. It was an enormous thing. By the time he had lost the job of doing Stone Mountain in Georgia. Although I believe he got about two million dollars form the Daughters of the American Revolution. You know, I understood that, at that time, Borglum’s political clout came from the fact that he was on the investigation of the airplane scandal at the end of the First World War and therefore knew the background of the politicians and could put the screws on them. And that’s the reason people were fearful of him and did what he wanted them to do.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, what was it like? This was another new adventure for you wasn’t it, in a new part of the country?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Life was an adventure. Is ort of started right in at the very – right where Mr. Nixon is today, that’s where I started. It was an American story of a sort.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. How did you like the studio? You had never been to an artist’s studio before?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. There I was, living in the woods, you see, I mean in a shack. I had no idea about sculpture, nothing. There were about ten workmen there, mostly Italians. They were kind to me. Borglum worked with clay a la Rodin, more or less. So I became very familiar with clay from the very beginning. Excepting that I didn’t get along with anybody, for that matter. I wasn’t unusual in that sense. He was a very irascible fellow who enjoyed having people feel badly. I was cutting wood most of the time for his furnaces. You know, I was out in the woods. I was not a family boy, ever.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What about the workmen? Did you learn much form them about the materials and…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. I would say that one learns by osmosis almost. It’s not a question of formal education. One learns attitudes and how to make plaster, or how to do this, how to do that. I don’t say that I learned to be a sculptor at Borglum’s. I learned being in the country and working. I was posing for him for a while. He didn’t make the slightest effort to teach me anything at all.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You were just there to be used whenever he wanted something?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, exactly. So far as he was concerned, I was just a useful or non-useful person. He finally decided I wasn’t very useful. So that was the end of that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How much time did you spend there?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I went there at the end of the school year and was there all through the summer, at the end of which I came to New York and told Dr. Rumley that Borglum didn’t want me, that he didn’t think I’d be a sculptor anyway. So I was thrown upon Dr. Rumley’s good graces. He put me up in a basement room where he kept some books, I mean he took a storage room. And then he kindly raised some money among friends to send me to Columbia University where I took premedical studies.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you like Columbia then?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I didn’t particularly like it. And, again, I didn’t associate with anybody. I don’t know a single person who I would consider having as a friend there. I remember some of the classes I went to, yes. I remember some of the teachers. But none of the pupils. I did not stay there. I didn’t pick them out, or they me. It’s a complete blank. I was at Columbia only two years, by the way. Which is enough really to have established some kind of contacts.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Who were some of the teachers you remember?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Oh, there was Erdman for philosophy and he had a course in contemporary civilization. Then there was Weaver who gave a course in Dante. But really it was a chore that I was trying to get finished. In fact, I was cramming to get through in double-quick time. All I was interested in was getting out.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You had no involvement with anything?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Nothing at all

PAUL CUMMINGS: You went to classes and studies and classes and studied?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Heavens! That must have been a difficult two years.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It was very difficult, yes. But anyway, in the meantime, my mother arrived here. This is all in my book, by the way. She finally got here. By then I think, it was around 1923. She got a place on Tenth Street. She had come back from Japan with the idea of making a living importing and selling things from Japan, like Japanese prints and imports and things in a very modest way. It went wrong somehow but she managed apparently. So I went to live with her but not very successfully. It’s in the book she got me to go to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But that must have been sort of difficult, wasn’t it, to go back and live with one’s mother after having been away?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Exactly. I say that in the book. After all, absence from 1917 to – well, say, it was six years – it’s considerable for that time of life. So that my being a misfit became a habit after all so you just have to stay that way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, you learn how to live in that kind of style.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, you live in that milieu and that’s your natural habitat, so to speak. If somebody tries to pull you out of that , you don’t like it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I want to ask about the Borglum studio again. You never really made any objects or had anything to do with working on…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, as I say, I posed for a sculpture he was making of General Sherman on a horse. There was a horse there which was very ornery and didn’t like to pose. So we would have to force him to pose, you know with his mouth sort of open and one leg up in the air, you know, like General Sherman’s horse. The horse would object like mad so he had a trick of drinking air and letting out a great big fart. But he was quite a horse. Anyway, that was one of my jobs there. As for making anything, I mean Borglum specialized in making heads of Abraham Lincoln. He did the head of Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in –

PAUL CUMMINGS: Washington.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. That was done by Daniel Chester French. Borglum did another one, a great big one, a head. So I made a head of Lincoln too; and lost it. That was all I ever did there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That was really the total kind of activity with him?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. In fact, his art was no more than that, making generals and horses and monuments.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Official art.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That’s right.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What about the Leonardo da Vinci Art School? That sounds as if it was the first time that you started doing things on your own.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Well, that was more serious, I mean, in the sense that it was sort of an art school which was started in this old church on Tompkins Square on the corner. The red church building is still there. At that time it was an art school. It had been started by the Italian group, the Piccarelli brothers. The director was Onorio Ruotolo.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Of, yes. They were the founders, weren’t they?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. There was a whole group of Italians interested in art. Of course it was academic art, but what else was there in those days? There wasn’t anything else. So, as I explained in my book, I became an apprentice to Ruotolo and had very little to so with the school. I mean I was at the school maybe three months altogether. The rest of the time I was his apprentice. He more or less promoted me.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did he have a studio that you worked in?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. He had a studio on Fourteenth Street near Union Square. He was a Neapolitan, very handsome, with flashy eyes. He was a pupil of Gemito. He took it into his head to make me into a sculptor. I remember the first summer I was with him I helped him illustrate John Macy’s book on The History of Man. He made some sort of pseudo woodcuts. You see, after I had been at school for a short while, I asked Ruotolo is I would work for him. He paid me to work for him so I was able to quit my job as a waiter in a restaurant. Also, I quite Columbia and became a sculptor.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you have drawing classes or anything at the school?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Figure drawing? Plaster cast drawing? Everything?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Sure. All those things.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And then you went right into making –

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. And then he sort of promoted me into making sculptures. Within three months I had an exhibition at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. He promoted me in the sense that he would call a news conference for instance. I haven’t called a news conference since those days. He would call up the newspapers and all these reporters would come traipsing in and we would have a news conference. It can be done, you know. I haven’t done it since but I’m sure that’s the way things are done in Washington – you call news conference and everybody comes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you like all of this activity – you know, finding things to do and -- ?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, you see, I had to earn my living. There was no other way. Borglum had paid me five dollars a week, which was enough to keep me going. Then after about – I don’t know how long it was – maybe a year of it, it couldn’t have been more than that, maybe less – Ruotolo in the meantime had given me his studio and had gotten another studio for himself. I mean he was that passionate a man. He thought he was teaching me through psychic means. He had all those levitations and séances. As I mention in my book, one day some friends of his came calling when I was busy working. I threw them out and he got wind of it and threw me out. That was the end of that. So, again that’s when I appealed to my friend, Dr. Rumley, who had helped me before, to get a studio on the corner of Union Square. That’s how I started doing sculptures; that is, I became a sculptor on my own.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What appealed to you, though, in the working in his studio and doing things for him?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It was a quick way of doing sculptures, a quick, academic way of doing sculpture. He taught me all the tricks. Of course, they were of no use to me afterward but I found out how to make things quickly.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But I mean the activity must have appealed to you in some way.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, it was a lot better than being a doctor. You know, I was fed up with taking the premedical course at Columbia. I liked the life around there. Downstairs in the building was Sandy Calder’s father – Sterling Calder. He had a studio there. He was a very handsome man, I didn’t know Sandy until later on, but I knew his father and mother. Later on in Paris I met Sandy.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How long were you in this Fourteenth Street studio then?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: AS I say, I was there probably less than a year and I got this other studio on Union Square.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, that’s the one I’m thinking about.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I was at that one until I got the Guggenheim Fellowship in the spring of 1927 when I left.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What kinds of things did you do then? Because you hadn’t started doing heads.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I was doing heads. I was doing figures. I was doing a figure of a Russian girl named Nadia Nikolaiova – a head. She was a girl with a nice figure who danced in the Serpent and in a club. She posed for me.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were these commissions you were doing ? Or were they just things you were doing --?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No, I was doing them for myself. But, of course, I was doing things to make money. I remember the first job I had was doing a mold for a sugar candy –

PAUL CUMMIGS: Oh, the cake mold thing?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, that sort of thing. I got that through Ruotolo, as a matter of fact. Then I got other jobs to do, a head mostly. Because of Ruotolo’s beating the drum and so forth, I became a kind of celebrity at the National Sculpture Society and at the Architectural League. In those days, the Architectural League was very, very academic. In fact, everything was academic. And I was academic too. But then I changed at the age of twenty-one, so to speak. I was just twenty-two, as a matter of fact, when I went to Paris.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What kind of artist were you interested in? What kind of artists did you know at that time?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Actually, I didn’t particularly are for academic artists in those days. I would go to galleries. I was befriended by several people. I mean being young and sort of wanting to be an artist, people would befriend you somehow of other. One of those was J. B. Neumann, who had a gallery. Another one was Alfred Stieglitz who had a gallery. They both recommended me for the Guggenheim Fellowship. Then there was George Gray Bernard who built The Cloisters and later on sold it to the Rockefellers. Those three people I would say – and they were older people, of course – they befriended me. And who else? Well there was James Earl Frazer who was one of the judges on the Guggenheim Fellowship; but I did not know him until later; I knew him not too well but later. He was a sculptor who was esteemed, so to speak. The figure of animals at The Museum of Natural History are his. I was at The Museum of Natural History the other day and saw the tigers and what not roaming around and they are covered with graffiti. I thought all the graffiti looked good.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How well did you get to know somebody like Neumann?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Very well. In fact I did a head of him many years later, in 1932. We were friends. And I used to hang around Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery all the time. And of course the Brummer Gallery; I knew Mr. Bummer but not that well. And, as for artists in those days, I don’t think I knew any particularly. It was only later when I came back from Europe that they started to come out of the woodwork.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Because there was no meeting place here or anywhere.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. It was a very bad period for art here. The only exhibitions were those at Stieglitz; and Brummer- Brancusi, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What did Neumann show that interested you?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Neumann showed those of his own taste, which were somewhat Expressionist, I’d say like, you know, some of the German Expressionists and things like that. But we were friends. He was one of my early backers. He was an enthusiast and a nice man. Of course, you know all about Stieglitz; I don’t have to tell you about him

PAUL CUMMINGS: I’ve always heard of Brummer as being a sort of distant character. Was he --?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, you know, he was a European, you know, somewhat of an oily character. But at least he knew art. He showed antiquities. He had this gallery on top which was a beautiful gallery. I mean it’s a shame that it’s been turned into a place for Design Research.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. A skinny building.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It’s a beautiful gallery building; it should be a gallery again.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But they’ve changed the floors and everything.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I don’t know what they’ve done inside.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s been changed a lot. Mr. John’ s Hats is in there now. Of course you saw the famous Brancusi show at the Brummer Gallery?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. That’s right.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Since you were moving in this rather academic milieu, how could you respond to the Brancusi in such a…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Purely on my own, I would say. I mean it was not something through any conversation of introduction other than just that I happened to see it. There was no sort of direction pointing or sharing of a new viewpoint or anything like that. I didn’t have anything like that. I didn’t know anybody like that excepting Steiglitz and Neumann, and hey didn’t – well, it’s true they may have told them to go to see it. I also saw an exhibition of Quinn’s Brancusi on Sixth Street. There was a gallery there then and I saw an exhibition there of some of the collection of John Quinn. He had gotten some of his things from the Armory Show, I think.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. Yes. I wonder if that was the Quinn auction because there was the Anderson Gallery and they had a big exhibition.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t in the Anderson Gallery.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It wasn’t. It was a different one.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I know – what’s his name? At the Anderson Gallery, but later on.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Have you thought in retrospect about what it was, or how it was that Brancusi became so important? Because that seemed to be one of the keys of going to Paris.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, no, actually I didn’t go to Paris to meet Brancusi. I went to Paris because I was going to India. In fact, my application to the Guggenheim was to go to India, and Paris was on the way to India. I can tell you that either my memory is very bad or that I am generally hazy about things in the past. If somebody would remind me of things, I could probably talk about things more clearly as to what I was doing in those days. But, you know, some people have a kind of penchant for that sort of thing, you know. There’s a fellow in Cincinnati – do you know him? Solway -- ?

[MACHINE TURNED OFF]

PAUL CUMMINGS: You got the Guggenheim and went to Paris in 1927

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. But I did not go there with the intention of meeting Brancusi. It just happened by a kind of fluke. The second day I was in Paris, I met a man – Goldman – who knew Brancusi. So, when I mentioned that I had seen this exhibition and that I admired it, he asked, “Would you like to meet him?” I said, “Sure.” So we walked over there, you see. That’s how I met Brancusi. And that’s how I asked him if I could come and hang around and help him a bit. He said, “Yes.” So I’d spend half a day with him and the rest of the time I’d spend drawing at the Academie Collarosi, the Grande Chaumiere. I don’t know how long I was with Brancusi, maybe six months, I don’t really recollect exactly how long; but it was for quite a while.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But that was such a shift from the academic world, but obviously you –

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. I’m quite capable of doing that, you know. Well, first of all, I was not pleased with the academic thing anyway. In fact, that’s why I applied for the Guggenheim. If you read my plan for it, it’s not oriented toward the academic; I mean it’s oriented to something else. I was trying to find a way to get away from the academic. Although I mean I wouldn’t have been able to put it in quite those terms in those days. I really wanted to find another way. So, coming to Paris and being among all those other artists who were all in another vein… It’s surprising how backward America was. People don’t realize how backward America was in art. Excepting for a very few – for a small coterie. And with my background in Indiana and with Gutzon Borglum, you can imagine that I didn’t have the best kind of training to see the difference. That was to say, I felt it. I stupidly knew there was something wrong. I had an idea – it wasn’t necessarily sort of …Although no doubt there must have been conversations with Steiglitz and Neumann which disposed me that way. But not otherwise.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That’s interesting. What was the activity in Brancusi’s studio? Did you cut things for him?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. He showed me how to help him cut bases, for instance, out of limestone; you know, how to do this and that. I was his helper, his sort of right hand. He would give me things to do that he thought I could do. He was very kind to me. After all, I didn’t ask him for anything. He didn’t have to pay me. I had the Guggenheim Fellowship. I was useful. You know, he wasn’t a man who was given to helping people. I mean he was rather dour, you might say. I don’t think he ever had many assistants, so that it was exceptional that he even allowed me to come there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you learn things about cutting stone and surfaces and finishing…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. That’s what I learned.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Craft kind of things?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, exactly. He was entirely oriented to craft. And everything he did had to go through his hands in a very vigorous way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Because I know even the bronze things – the surfaces are articulated and changed.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That’s right. Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s curious – you were twenty years old and had a certain activity with an academic sculptor in New York, and all of a sudden here you were in Paris going to Collarosi and Chamuiere and working with Brancusi and I suppose sometimes moving around and meeting other people. What was Paris like for you? I mean this was a new country and a new language and a new atmosphere.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It was a fantastic experience for a young man like that. Of course, I wasn’t the only one. I mean there were other Americans in Paris; Sandy Calder, for instance, who I soon met up with and made friends with. He went there under somewhat different circumstances. But his father was a strictly academic sculptor who I knew downstairs from Ruotolo’s. Sandy was a freewheeling sort of cartoonist in wire, you might say. He was making those charming Circus figures floating in the air. I would say that Sandy was one of my early influences there in that his things were anti-gravity, you know, they were very light. I made a lot of friends there, surprisingly. Whereas previously I had very few friends, in France I suddenly came upon, you might say, people who either were like me or that I could accept, or who would accept me. After all, this business of any kind of separation of discrimination didn’t exist there. I mean I don’t say that It existed in New York either for that matter; I did not recognize anything like that. Although, as I say, when you enter the art world you are not in a world which is discriminatory, that’s the last thing they think about. Therefore, I say it’s only in the art world that you can be free.

PAUL CUMMINGS: .…and develop and do things. Do you think also the fact that in France the visual arts were more important generally than they were in New York in those days…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, Well, at least they gave you a certain self-importance that you wouldn’t have. I mean here it just didn’t mean anything. You must have interviewed other people who were there around that time.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, yes. Right.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: So you know just the general atmosphere of what it must have been like. I mean people like – well, there were certain enemies like Marin and Dove and O’Keeffe who were still young then, of course, although they were all fairly young.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Stuart Davis –

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Stuart Davis. Did you interview him, by any chance?

PAUL CUMMINGS: No

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, Stuart Davis, for instance. When I went to Paris I had friends in the Rue Vercingetorix. Stuart Davis was one. Morris Kantor was another. And Andree Ruellan, who was a cute girl. I used to see Stuart a lot. He had exactly the point of view. He was one of those, of course, who had broken away from the Academy even while here. He had gone there as more a mature artist. I was younger, of course, you see, and therefore less developed than he. He was seven of eight ears older than I. And Morris Kantor too, was a more developed artist. I made the only painting I ever made in Morris Kantor’s studio.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, really! I never heard about a painting of yours.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I haven’t got anything to do with painting.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That’s fantastic. What was it of?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Oh, I forget.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It was just a painting you made in one day.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes

[END OF SIDE 1 – TAPE 1 – SIDE 1]

[SIDE 2]

PAUL CUMMINGS: This is side 2. Anyway, let’s put you in Paris a little more here. After Chaumiere and Collarosi, were there any particular people that you got criticism from? Or were you just drawing…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No, the drawing classes had no criticism. We just drew what we pleased and we were our own critics in a sense. But I must say that in Paris I really sort of became a part of society in a sense. I had a letter to Jules Pascin and he introduced me around. I had a letter to Ezra Pound but I never used it. I never met him until many, many years later on. Let’s see, I had a letter to Fujita, the Japanese artist. He found me a studio. And who else?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Who were the letters from? Who wrote them?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, Michio Ito, the Japanese dancer, gave me the letters to Pascin, to Fujita, and to Pound. In Paris in those days, the café was the center of meeting and so forth; it was a very easy way of meeting people and of striking up a conversation. I mean the best way in fact, the life of Paris was the life of the street. Something we don’t have here. I think I was very, very fortunate. That’s all I can say.

PAUL CUMMIGS: I’m curious about sculpture you made with the sphere with the quarter sliced out of it, I guess, cut out of it—that piece.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. That piece I made in 1928. By then, I had gotten a studio in Gentilly which is outside of Paris near Mont Rouge. That was the year following Brancusi where I was trying to digest his precepts and at the same time get away from him. So I made these things which were Brancusiesque.

[INTERRUPTION]

PAUL CUMMINGS: You were describing the quartered Sphere.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. As I say, it was a period when I was trying to digest…And I felt that I had to learn cutting stone one my own, I mean aside from just being a student of Brancusi. That was my sort of effort to learn how to cut sphere. You know, it’s a very definite process of cutting. For instance, you have to make a cube; and from a cube you make the corners. Otherwise you’ll never get a sphere. That was the problem which I set myself to do. And did. That’s all it is you see. Both of the pieces – the inside which was cut out, and the part that was cut out, I saved for a while anyway. And to the quarter section which was cut out I added a piece of metal. A photograph of that was reproduced in Vogue magazine with myself a year or two later. I don’t remember the issue; you might be able to find it. But I wouldn’t have it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, one can find out, sure. So you had really set yourself a problem to make a shape rather than an object of anything else.

ISAMU NOGUVHI: Yes. It was purely a mechanical thing. I mean it was not trying to be art; I was merely trying to learn how to make a sphere.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How to use the tools and stone and the surface and cut…

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That’s right. There were other things I did which were not that pure. They were attempts to make abstract art, you might say, art. That Sphere was non-art in those days. Today you’d say: it’s art. But in those days I considered it purely non-art. Maybe that was its virtue.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What were the other kinds of objects that you made then? I mean you just couldn’t keep on making spheres.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I made, on one hand, solid things, some of which were cast, some of which I cut in wood and stone. There are a couple in here I can show you but I can’t show it on the machine.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. Okay

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Do you want to come and take a look?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Sure.

[MACHINE TURNED OFF]

[MACHINE TURNED ON]

ISAMU NOGUCHI: To get away from Brancusi I started doing things in sheet metal. He wasn’t using sheet metal. At least I thought that was the only way of getting away from him. So I made things in sheet metal; and then combinations of wood and metal, and things like that. I have photographs of a great many of these things. [Addressing a third person] Do you know where they are?

PAUL CUMMINGS: One thing that interests me is that you were consciously reacting against Brancusi.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Well, to find one’s own identity, you cannot borrow from somebody else. Also, one has to revolt against one’s parents – yes? And I had that very strongly in me in any case because I hated my father. Therefore, it was easy to hate somebody; not that I hated Brancusi... I didn’t hate him, but I felt obliged to be free of him. So when I came back from this country, I brought some of these things with me. I had one show of them at Eugene Schoen’s. And after that show abandoned abstraction completely; I felt that it was just sort of a cul-de-sac, for me anyway. [Ms. X has brought some photographs which they are looking at.] These [photographs] are things I used to do in Gentilly. Here is the Quarter Section, for instance.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, I see.

Ms. X: Is that the Quarter Section you used?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. That’s the Quarter Section I’m talking about. You see, so they merged from being very Brancusiesque like this – like this—things like this –

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes but now this – What is this piece called? Do you remember the name of that one?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I forget

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s interesting where a rod comes in it.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, I put rods in the work. One tries to get away from strong influence. How Brancusiesque can you get?

Ms. X: where do you think most of these are?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: God knows. I have no idea. Well, before I left Paris I did this plaster figure to get away from Brancusi, you see.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, I see. To really react - -

ISAMU NOGUCHI: At that time in Paris I did another figure which the Whitney Museum owns.

PAUL CUMMINGS: there are a lot of pieces I’ve never even seen photographs of.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, that gives you and idea.

PAUL CUMMIONGS: Was part of the reaction to try different materials, to combine things?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well – if you’re looking for yourself, and you haven’t got the foggiest idea, isn’t it natural that you try everything? I’m not capable of mentally predetermining what I am of what I’m going to do. It’s only by doing it and getting rid of it, and then doing something else and getting rid of that, and getting rid of every possibility…. I don’t know when it is that the I am I – I can’t tell you – maybe I’m never I – I’m not saying. But at some point, out of a number of things you might say: these things would consider myself and the rest are not. Or you might say: they’re all me.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. When you were making the things in the mid-1920’s in Paris, did you make drawings? Or did you work directly?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, I had a lot of drawings. Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were they studies for the sculptures?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Generally, or going alongside it. I have some of those drawings left.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Even for the sheet metal pieces and the wood-and-stone combinations?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So that the images and objects developed in your mind through the drawings and then were put into …?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. [Addressing Ms. X] Do you know where those drawings are?

PAUL CUMMINGS: I’m still very curious about tat kind of structure which looks like it’s rods and –

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, you know, these – [Looking at drawings]

PAUL CUMMINGS: How are those made? It that a drawing? It looks like a print.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. No, it’s painted.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Anyway, we have you working in Paris in 1928. That was where your first one-mad show was – right?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No, not in Paris; it was here at a place called Eugene Schoen’s. You see, I brought a number of the things back here with me, including these that you saw in here, and they were shown at Eugene Schoen’s. He had a kind of furniture shop – not exactly a furniture – I don’t know what he had – things like that. It was, I think, on 61st Street between Lexington and Park, around there. Eugene Schoen was his name and I had an exhibition there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was that successful in any way?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. I didn’t sell anything. And I needed money badly. So that’s when I started doing heads again.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. That’s the Carnegie Hall Studio. The heads have always been useful?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Useful because I could make money and meet people.

[INTERRUPTION]

PAUL CUMMINGS: Anyway, we have you back here in the Carnegie Hall studio.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Well, I tell you the Carnegie Hall studio –

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you find that?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: How did I find it?

PAUL CUMMINGS: You know, there are some artists who have been there but usually it’s dancers and musicians.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: There was a penthouse there, you know, at the top. Dorothy Maynor had it for a while. How the devil did I get in there? I must have gotten in there in the very beginning, I mean when I came back here. I needed a place and I got that. I did all my first heads there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But how did you meet people?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, by then I was a kind of social character, you see. I had become an artist. I don’t know how I met people. For instance, Michio Ito I had known before. He was this Japanese dancer, very handsome. I had done a head of Michio Ito in 1926, maybe before I went to Paris. [Addressing Ms. X] Have you got a head of Michio Ito there?

PAUL CUMMINGS: You know, there were people who you met who had other studios in Carnegie Hall.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I didn’t know anybody in Carnegie Hall. I used to go there and listen to music but …. Here’s the head of Michio Ito that I did in 1935 in my academic period.

Ms. X: 1925?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Or 1926 – I’m not sure. I really don’t know. I mean it’s in that time. So, as I say, I had letters to various people in Paris, from him. He had a studio in the John Murray Anderson studio building, the dance studio building. He had a dance class there, and so did Martha Graham. I think I met Martha Graham there. So subsequently, when she moved to a studio near Carnegie Hall right a few doors away on 56th Street, I used to go there and watch her dance, or rather watch the kids dancing anyway. That was my entry into the dance world that way. And various other worlds that compose New York. One meets them, you know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But where did somebody like Buckminster Fuller appear?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: In 1929 I used to go down to Romany Marie’s in the Village. A lot of people went down there. I met him there. And one met a lot of people down there. It was sort of s transfer of the Paris café life to New York in Romany Marie’s. She had a real function.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I’m very curious about your association with that place because so many people have mentioned it with different groups of people. It seems like each corner had its own group and once in a while somebody would go back and forth.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Sure

PAUL CUMMINGS: Who are the people that you met there generally? Or who would you see when you went there?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I mean everybody went there. For instance, Stuart Davis went there. Or anybody you can think of in those days went there, I mean in the early days. I remember when I was doing Bucky Fuller’s head in 1929, she had a place on Minetta Street.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That was the first one, yes.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: And Bucky got me to help him with painting the place up solar, you see.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Early Andy Warhol.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: And having got solar reflectors and so forth of Bucky’s devastating. As a matter of fact, when I did Bucky’s Head it was at Carnegie Hall. I had moved to Madison Avenue to an old laundry on top of the building. It had windows all the way around it. We painted the inside of that silver. It was practically blinding, I mean you couldn’t see a thing. That’s where I did a Head of Bucky Fuller.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And that’s the chromium one, isn’t it?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. And I did a head of Marian Morehouse who became E. E. Cumming’s wife. I did one of St. John Perse. I did an awful lot of heads in those days.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I’m curious how those came about. Does one person know somebody else or recommend somebody else?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: How do you meet people? What’s a city? What is life of a city? Hoe do people come to cities? Yes? There’s a kind of…

PAUL CUMMINGS: Interplay.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. A kind of electrical spark that flies from one to the next you…

PAUL CUMMINGS: Why was the Fuller Head chrome? Was that something new for you? Was there a particular reason?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, actually chrome was such a new thing in those days; very new. I had been making bronze heads. It may have been Bucky’s influence to make it chrome. But it must have been my volition because it was modeled for that. It could not have been put into chrome if it was made in some other way. Subsequently I did chrome steel castings, you know, heads, too. At least one head anyway.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Really!

ISAMU NOGUCHI: But Bucky’s was a chrome plated bronze head.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That’s fantastic. Did you have time to do much other work besides the heads?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. I did the heads entirely in those days; nothing else. As a matter of fact, I did it almost with the intention of not doing heads; that’s it, I enjoy doing heads but doing heads was not my objective at all. I did heads as a means of earning money to have friends. I did heads of friends too – after all, Bucky and Martin and all those people I did. But, by the spring of 1930, I had made enough money to escape. And I went off back to Paris for a few months, back to Gentilly to the studio which I had kept right along. I couldn’t have kept it forever, after all. I did some more work there during several months. And then in the summer I took off for China. My objective was to go to Japan but I got into Siberia through the Siberian Railroad all the way across. We went through Manchuria, you know, Harbin, Mukden, and the got to Peking. And got stuck there. As I describe in my book, I got stuck there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Now, one thing I’m curious about: somewhere along in there you got in touch with your father, or he got in touch with you.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Well, you see that’s right in my book. I don’t have to tell you.

PAUL CUMMINGS: No, but how did he find you on the way to Peking? Where did your father come into this because there was that note about you…

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I was in Peking for eight months. I hate to go over this again because it is in my book. But a letter was sent to me from my father from my mother enclosing a letter from my father asking me not to come to Japan.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, I see.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: So I didn’t want to go to Japan. That is, I was very ambivalent about it; I wanted to go, and I didn’t want to go. But I was already on my way, so I went to Peking, my money was running out and I might as well go back to the States but I though I’d better stop in Japan anyway. I had no intention of seeing my father; I was just going to stop by. It was only because of newspaper reporters that I got to meet him.

PAUL CUMMINGS: From what it says in the book, it sounds as it life in Peking was very exciting.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Oh, it’s a fantastic place. Anybody who goes to Peking feels the same way, of course.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. Here again is a new….

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Peking is like Paris. It’s a city of great antiquity, you know, a thousand years. I mean you find the Yuan walls there. It’s a culture that is so embedded in the place that it has a life of its own. I don’t think the Communists have destroyed it. I mean nobody can destroy it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s just there, part of earth.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Part of the people.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you like working there? I mean, here was a whole new situation again.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I loved it. I did drawing there. I did one sculpture which is outside there. You can see it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That was that man….

ISAMU NOGUCHI: A figure. A bird….

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, right, the figure. And the rest was the large drawings?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That’s right.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were there small drawings? Other things?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Not much.

PAUL CUMMINGS: There were no classes?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No, no.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you meet many of the Chinese artists?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I met Chi Pai Shi, who was the most eminent – a very famous artist. He dies not too long ago at the age of ninety-six, or something like that. He was a great painter. He was already a patriarchal figure – I don’t know how old he was – he must have been close to seventy then.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you study using brushes and inks and things before that? Or not?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I was facile at drawing. I seem to have lost my facility but I was facile at drawing. I could do anything. It was easy for me.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s interesting to see how it kind of follows a natural progression….

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I tell you, I’m strong believer that people are conditioned at different stages of their life to be most effective in certain ways and that you shouldn’t try to protract that effectiveness. For instance, if you are a good long distance runner at the age of twenty-two, this does not guarantee that you will be able to walk up the steps when you are fifty.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You can do one thing but not the other.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, exactly. But do that and don’t try to be something else.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I see. But it’s awfully hard to recognize that, isn’t it?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No, I don’t think it’s difficult to recognize. You can see what you’re capable of doing, I think. I mean I might say that just now I’m capable only of making monster trigasas. But, on the other hand, you could say I was probably not capable of doing it in those days.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So it’s change and development and evolution.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Either way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You’ve never been to Peking, have you, since then?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. I’d love to go.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How was Japan? Because you had gone to Japan and this was the first time in many years.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I went to Japan in 1931. I was there once before, My recollection of Japan is very strong from my childhood and from those years. Some people think that Japan is doing great, and some people think, you know, that it’s too bad. I belong to the second class.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But how was it? Because when you left before, you were a child, and then you came back and you were – what? -- in your twenties and you had traveled and you had had a lot of experience. What was it like? Had it changed a great deal in your eyes?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Of course. I mean, again, we come back to this whole problem of not being a Japanese. I was still a foreigner. I was just as much a foreigner as I ever way; in fact, maybe even more so. The question is: am I acceptable? And you say: no, you’re not. So, being in Tokyo, one of my uncles took it upon himself to befriend me against my father. He didn’t approve of my father so he befriended me. He gave me a house to stay in and did all kinds of things for me – kindness directed toward me just partially but against my father mostly, I think, and for my mother, by the way. She was well-liked by other people.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How long did you spend in Tokyo that time?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I didn’t stay very long. I did a couple of heads. I did a head of my uncle, the one who befriended me. And I did a head of the maid in the house. And not much else. I then went off to Kyoto and was there for five months working in stems from that time.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was that an interest in finding new ways of making things? Or, again, a cultural…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I was very much clay-oriented by the time I had done all those heads after all. I did those two heads in clay in Tokyo and the I made them in ceramic later on in Kyoto. I was interested in working in ceramics. That was when I started doing ceramic work.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Why did you want to meet somebody who was a faker of the Tang figurines?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Because they made good fakes, you see. If I can make good fakes, presumably the skill is there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I see. And the celadon….

ISAMU NOGUCHI: But, whatever it is, I mean….

PAUL CUMMINGS: I want to ask you about the thing you did. The Wrestlers.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Oh, yes. That’s something I did in Toyo at that time.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was that cast? Or how was it made?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That was made in clay and then I made a casting of it and from that cast I made a mold and made it in terra cotta.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That explains it because it had the lines and things on it. I was just wondering how that was arrived at.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I did quite a few things in terra cotta then, and they were shown at John Becker’s gallery in 1932, I guess.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Afterward, yes. Where does John Becker come into this? He seems to be an important person.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I knew of him in Paris on my way to Peking. He bought a stack of drawings from me. This stack of drawings was a part of his stock, so to speak. He didn’t have a gallery then. He was a rich boy from Chicago. He opened a gallery on Madison Avenue and sold my drawings and other things. He had Roy and various other artists. So, when I had an exhibition at Demotte Gallery of my drawings, I had a small show of these terra cotta things at Demotte. It was a double exhibition.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But you knew Becker for a long time, didn’t you?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I mean, as I say, I had this exhibition. Then I didn’t see him any more until I was going to do a book – well I was asked to do a book. Kurt Wolf of Pantheon suggested that maybe John Becker could help me write it. I got into trouble then because he though he was me by then. So I had trouble getting rid of Mr. John Becker.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Over identification.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Exactly.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I wondered, because the name kind of weaves in and out. An obvious point – have you ever thought about all the traveling that you do. Looking at it from the outside like me, it seems that you go places and do things, not necessarily knowing that you’re going to do something when you get there, or that it’s an activity that seems very much a part of your normal way of living. There’s so much traveling. It that…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: First of all, there’s not that much traveling if you look – I mean it’s only at certain periods. It’s only more recently maybe that I’ve become sort of habituated that way. But it just goes to show that you’re really inside yourself; you know. The more you travel, the less contact you have outside because you’re thrown upon yourself. You come to a new place and people get along very well without you; they don’t need you. So, normally speaking, you’re all alone. There’s no more lonely thing than being a traveler, right?

MS. K: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Coming into some new town in the middle of the night. Yes.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I mean you have to be predisposed to bear it. Otherwise, you won’t do it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You did the Playground idea, and The Mountain, the first play piece.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. You see, in about 1933, having done more heads and so forth and being disguised with doing heads, one has, you know, a kind of desire to get away into another realm, another dimension. I suppose it’s the same thing that makes us go to the moon; a desire to get away. Although I was popular, you might say – I knew a lot of people – I was not satisfied. Maybe, again, that’s your lonely traveler who tries to walk away to some place and attempts to look at the world in a different way. I did three things then. One was called Monument to the Plow. The idea was a pyramid on the plains with a plow at the end. The way that came about was because Dr. Rumley had told me that the steel plow was an American invention brought about through correspondence between Franklin and Jefferson, you know, how to weld steel and iron together so that it won’t break but would still be hard. Since Dr. Rumley was a manufacturer of tractors, at one time, he knew John Deere people. I thought maybe I could get them interested in doing a monument to the plot. I never did, but I did the model of the Monument to the Plow. I still think it’s a good idea to make.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s marvelous when you think in terms of current “Earth” art and things.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Right. But I was a little ahead of the time. Then, at that time I did the Monument to Ben Franklin. How that came about was there was the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. There’s a triangle in front of the Franklin Institute. I thought of making a monument to Ben Franklin on this triangle. And devised this thing.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. It was just the insulators –

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Dordovich put on a show at the Franklin Institute and asked me for ideas on how to light the thing.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, I didn’t know about that.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: So I suggested making a great big disc of cloth which would be hanging there, bring the ceiling down. I think it was used. Anyway, the third thing I made was the Play Mountain which came about because I thought that a New York city block could be much better used as a playground if it had three dimensionality and was in the form of a rook where you could go both inside and outside and that it be an incubated place, a big play object. I had done a head of Murdock Pemberton, the critic on The New Yorker, in 1931 or 1932 – I’m not sure. He took me over to Robert Moses with this idea. Moses just laughed his head off and threw us out more or less. That was the beginning of my experience with the New York City Parks Department. And I have no use for them whatsoever.

PAUL CUMMINGS: They haven’t improved. One thing that fascinates me about that plan s that there are so many kinds of shapes and articulations and forms in it that you seem to have pulled together from the past and then developed afterward. It seems like a pivotal point.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It’s a key piece.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you arrive at it? Was it made with lots of pieces through drawings?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No, it was purely instinctive.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you arrive at it? Was it made with lots of pieces through drawings?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No, it was purely instinctive.

PAUL CUMMINGS: All the pieces went together. It’s such an obvious sign, you know, from everything.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I think that occasionally you have pivotal pieces that you do and those are not preconceived, but by accident, by circumstances coming together. I did another thing then called Musical Weather Vane.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, yes, with the sound.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. And, again, I wanted to break out of this constricting category.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I often wish the Monument to the Plow had been built. I think it’s a marvelous idea.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, maybe it will be built one day who knows?

PAUL CUMMINGS: One never knows.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Actually, you know, if I pursued it – it’s still not impossible. It’s just a question of wanting to do it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Still, about 1933. How did the whole interest in Playgrounds and Gardens come about?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, it all developed, you know, one thing after another. One thing leads to another. For instance, this playground – Play Mountain -- was probably a precursor of other playgrounds. In fact it was. That also tried into topographical thoughts and from that to other types of topographical work was a natural transition, you see. You know, I don’t know what made Mr. Olmsted make parks. I understand he was a newspaperman at first, was he not?

PAUL CUMMINGS: I think so.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: So what made him change course? Who knows? It’s probably that sort of thing. One thing led to another. Maybe he read a book, or, who knows.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But it seems that, in recent years, you’ve done gardens and – I don’t know – you’ve….

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. But I don’t go about trying to be a landscapist. I’m only a sculptor. I don’t try to do anything which is…. I wouldn’t want to do Central Park, for instance. I don’t think I’m well equipped. I couldn’t do it. And I don’t like to do things which are too big because then I lose control of it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But some of the projects have gotten to be quite large.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. But they’re still within my scope. I can hold onto it. You know, in about 1956 or 1957, Detroit had asked me about using the earth which was being dug up for the expressways. They thought I would make a mountain of two out of it, or a sculpture, which was a nice idea. Mr. Blessing had been down to Machu Pichu and he thought this was a great idea. Which it was – a great idea. And I don’t see why it couldn’t be done. It can be done. AS a matter of fact, Max Urban, the architect who did Cape Canaveral (Cape Kennedy now), all those enormous things, he was doing in Nassau County Center and he asked me if I wouldn’t like to dig a lake there and make a mountain. I said: “No, thanks,” because I thought it would be beyond my scope to control as a sculptor. Maybe today I would say differently. But at that time I didn’t want to get mixed up with a civic job which would rob me of my freedom to be a sculptor. I mean, the other day I was in Paris. They wanted me to do Les Halles – you know – that space….

PAUL CUMMIGNS: Oh, yes, where the markets were.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: There was this great big hole. They wanted me to do that. But then I pictured myself arguing with French bureaucrats and this, that, and the other…. So I said: “No, thanks.” I’m very cautious about keeping myself free and not entangled with becoming, you know, a landscapist, so to speak. You know, you can become terribly involved.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. But how do you find working on these large outdoor projects like, for example, Yale for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Those were done with the office of Skidmore, Owings, and Merril and they’re very defined space. I knew jest what I wanted to do and I had the support of the architect. I did not know the owners, the governmental…

PAUL CUMMINGS: But I mean in terms of doing, well, say, studio sculpture, things that you would make here, as opposed to the larger, outdoor pieces. Do you find that you alternate? Does one take all your time? Then another takes all your time?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No, it’s not that way.

[INTERUPTION]

PAUL CUMMINGS: We were discussing problems of moving from interior sculpture to the outside.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. I shift. You know, you feel lonely after a while and you want to have contact. I work with architects, dancers, and what not, partly for the contact, partly for the experience of working more in more space.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Your whole involvement with Martha Graham and the stage sets – those things – the images and the objects and the space seem similar to the sculpture but yet quite different. Do you conceive of those sets as being specifically different? Or do they just…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. Everything I do is linked to each other. I’ve never done anything in, for instance, a theater set which I was not already involved with elsewhere somehow. It’s all linked. Take, for instance, Herodiade – I built it up out of plywood. I had already been doing sculptures of that sort. You know, everything is linked together like that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How influenced were you by, say, the choreography, or the music, or your discussions with her? About what she…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: She had specific requirements. For instance, she wanted to have a place to sit down, or she waned to have a place to…

PAUL CUMMINGS: Climb on, or push against?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: She would tell me what she wanted and I would try to supply her with the required things. Plus the fact that she would tell me the story was involved with and now to evoke this emotion through these props. That was the main thing.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you get very involved in how she was going to use them? Or did you just present objects and props?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I knew how she was going to use them. I was delightfully surprised at hoe well she used them, you know, how inventive she was. I knew how she was going to use them. Of course, sometimes I was disappointed. For instance, the last thing I did for her was for Hecuba – it was called Cortege of Eagles, or something like that. I was disappointed because she asked me to make about seven masks that she wanted to use and then abandoned them and used only one or two. I was disgusted, you see. And also they did not use the props the way I wanted them to be used. I wanted them so that they could be sort of thrown around like kites. I suspect it was not so much she herself as her company wanted to use them like something to climb on and they had to be made completely differently. And I did not like that. That’s the reason I haven’t done a thing since then.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What about the Union of Stagehands and Carpenters and people like that? Did they build those things? Did you build them?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, usually it would end up that I had to build them more or less because, you know, they can’t be bothered.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I know that’s such a tight union, I was just wondering if you ever had any trouble with them over the years?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I never had any quarrel with them. I mean you make your proper obeisance and then they leave you alone. I mean, a thing like this is very much a theater thing.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. I’m trying to get town a little more to the thinking behind the pieces that you would do for the stage. For example, were you interested in the music? Did that have any specific…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Very much. Very much. Yes. For instance, I like to listen to music when doing things, somewhat similar music. When I did Orpheus for Balachine, I didn’t have the music of Orpheus on a record, but I had Verklarte Nacht of Schoenberg. So I played that constantly while I did Orpheus. And, well, it seemed to have worked.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And Stravinsky and Schuman and all those other composers that were used. Where you had some music you would listen to it?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you like the experience of designing for the stage, which, in many cases, they say is a closed-in shoe box?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I enjoyed it because to me it becomes a world. I have a little model here of a stage which I’ve always used, or I use one similar to it. You can see it here – would you like to see it?

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. I notice in the Dance Collection at the New York Public Library that you had made many things out of cardboard.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, yes. They asked me if I had anything to give them and, you see, I had nothing. I just happened to have those things left over; they were just leftover things from the time I did Orpheus. And, as for Martha Graham, she never wanted me to do the costumes anyway. And the sets usually got lost in the making. I’d be making them and, since I never made instructions to set designers to do it – I did it myself in a sense – whether I did it here or whether I did it in a set designer’s studio, it didn’t make any difference. I did them. So I didn’t really need drawings. I’d just go ahead and make them.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It was all in your head and you just make them.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That’s right. I had little maquettes, you see, but unfortunately the maquettes always seemed to get lost.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Everything gets lost in scenic studios.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Especially if you do it yourself, nobody is responsible and, therefore, you lose it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But you always made the maquettes for the various sets so there would be made some pre-visual…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I read that, when you did the King Lear, you never got to see that performance ever.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: No. I never saw it. Which was a pity. What happened was I went to England to do it. The first performance was going to be – I forget – a month away. I couldn’t hang around England, and I couldn’t go back again, I mean it was too expensive. So I just didn’t see it all again, I mean it was too expensive. So I just didn’t see it at all. And, you know, these things – after you do the sets it takes time – the actors, you know….

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you find working in the English theater – in terms of the actors and the sets…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It was marvelous. The British are natural-born sort of linguistics. They love the English language; they really speak English. Here we just use it as a tool. Over there it’s an art. They’re absolutely great.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did they react? I remember there was an awful lot of furor about the costumes.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: They reacted very strongly, very positively, and you know, most of them against me. Of course, there were a few like Bryan Robertson who way here who was of course pro-me. But then he was pro all kinds of people with his… You know he ran the Whitechapel Gallery.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. Well, what about the actors, though. I mean these were not…they looked as if they were not easy costumes to wear.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: They were very difficult costumes to wear. Gielgud hated it; he hated it. But the last times I saw him in London – oh – maybe last spring – I saw him in a restaurant where I was having supper. He was at another table. He came over and said, “You know, I’d like to work with you again.” He also said that Peter Brook said that he got everything from me. I mean he said so; I don’t know whether… He said so to please me probably.

PAUL CUMMINGS: One of the things that’s interesting – and I ran across some correspondence that you had with the Federal Arts Program – the WPA – in the late 1930’s – that seems to have been a very difficult experience.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, you know I tried to get on the WPA. And I was always turned down. Then I did a head of the Audrey McMahon who was head of the WPA in New York. And that sort of clinched my disfavor among them because I think she hated this head. I mean she was sort of ugly as a mud fence and I guess I made her even more so. I got so annoyed that, when Harry Hopkins came to visit me once with a gal, I mentioned it to him. He said, “Oh, we’ll fix that right away.” He called his office and said, “Get Holger Cahill here right away” (to my studio). And Eddie (Holger) Cahill came running. You know him, don’t you?

PAUL CUMMINGS: I knew him yes.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: He came running and he said, “Of course we can get you on the WPA” – he was in charge of the WPA Art Section in Washington. But Audrey McMahon was in charge here in New York. He said, “We’ll get you on. Where would you like to go? How about Seattle? How about Chicago? How about anywhere? We’ll get you on the WPA anywhere but in New York.”

PAUL CUMMINGS: I always thought that was very curious because everybody was on it.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. That was what annoyed me so. You see, I wanted to do big things. You know, you get so fed up doing heads. I was trying to get out of doing them. I’d enter all sorts of competitions. I didn’t win any at that time. So in disgust I took off and went to Mexico and did this thing down there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That was interesting because you never had made anything like that before that I recall.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It was what you call social protest against the WPA.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. How was Mexico to work in?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It was marvelous. They were open to art, open to artists’ propaganda, you know, there was not all this Mexico for the Mexicans.” Or all this national feeling. Where I get along well is where people haven’t got this kind of…

[MACHINE TURNED OFF]

PAUL CUMMINGS: I’m curious about the Wall of Mexico. Did you submit designs and everything for that? Or was that a …?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I made a little drawing, a painting, which I submitted to Diego Rivera who was in charge. He approved it. I agreed to do it for the same price that the muralists were getting, so much a square meter. Which wasn’t very much, I forget what it was.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Very little. Eighty-eight dollars or something.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That was the whole thing; I got eighty-eight dollars for the whole thing. It was a little more than that but I never got it. In other words, it was to have been twice as much, which I never got. But it was a great pleasure doing it.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It is still existing there?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Oh, yes, yes. When I was down in Mexico last, which was three years ago. It was in fine condition.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How is it to see something like that thirty years later?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Marvelous! It’s marvelous experience really. It brings back that whole period, and the people who were my friends then, many of them dead. Diego Rivera is dead; and his wife. And Miguel Covarrubias. And all my friends then.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That’s the only one like that that you’ve ever done?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: In cement like that, yes. Excepting, you know, there was a hangover from that, I mean the Plague on Radio City is a kind of hangover of that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, yes. It’s the same large background.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Because, after coming back here from Mexico, there was this competition and I submitted one which was quite different from Mexico. But the second one I did just as a hangover from Mexico City and did a somewhat similar sort of thing and won the competition. And, whereas it might have been appropriate in cement, I don’t know whether it might have been appropriate in stainless steel.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I always have great arguments with people who come to Rockefeller Center and say, “Where’s Noguchi?”

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I know

PAUL CUMMINGS: But it’s fascinating how it looks still alive.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It’s nothing alive. And the steel looks great. I mean nothing stands up like that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes. That’s terrific. After Mexico, you came back to New York. What about the Artists Union?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, first of all, you see, it’s a long question by the way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: There was the question of the artists’ relation to society then and how artists felt sort of as a people apart. You see, that’s why I felt at home being an artist. We were all pariahs to start with. And I, being a pariah, was among pariahs and was not longer a pariah. So we all supported every cause which was against the Establishment – like the Spanish Civil War, like the union thing so long as the unions were less strong than the people they were bucking. Now we’re no longer interested in unions because it’s turned the other way around. But, in those days, the unions needed our support and we supported the unions and we did all kinds of things in support of causes. I think the chief employment of artists in those days was sort of social rebellion and supporting this cause and that cause. They’re still called upon to so these things but I think artists do it very halfheartedly now. I mean at least I do; in those days I was committed to it. But no more because it’s a kind of hangover.

[END OF SIDE 2 - TAPE 1 – SIDE 2]

TAPE-RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH ISAMU NOGUCHI
IN HIS APARTMENT IN NEW YORK CITY
DATE: DECEMBER 10, 1973
INTERVIEWER: PAUL CUMMINGS

[SIDE 3]

PAUL CUMMINGS: This is Side 3 – December 10, 1973 – Paul Cummings talking to Isamu Noguchi in his apartment. It seems that , in the late 1930’s, you had a particularly strong reaction to the Spanish Civil War, as did many artists and literary people. I was wondering what your feelings about that are.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I think that all artists, or most artists, had a strong sense of belonging to the Loyalists cause. I mean there were very few that took the opposite side. I meant it all came from all our experience with the Depression and so forth that we associated ourselves with the more liberal element. You know, we had hopes of a better world. I suppose we also had a strong sense of guilt. I mean I can’t imagine what else could have been in the back of our heads excepting to feel that we should be doing something for the loyalists. At that time, too, there was a considerable number of refugees coming from Europe. There was this group called the Neue Belginum. Kurt Weill and others were deeply involved in trying to get people out of Germany and Europe. Not that they had a premonition of the was that was to come, but, in any case, that Hitler was there and we were all concerned to try and help the people from Europe in Europe. And, of course our own position in those days was strongly pro-labor. I mean we were very much involved with the labor movement with – what’s his name Hillman, and Joe Curran, and all those people were not exactly heroes but they were on the right side, so to speak. And so was Vice-president Henry Wallace. Not that our heroes were such great guns but we had to be on that side. I think it took the was really, and Stalin and his coming to terms with Hitler, to really sort of make us diverge from that very fixed and sort of convinced point of view. We just were not going to be convinced otherwise.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you as an artist ever feel any pressure by the Trotskyite group or the various Left political organizations that were around and kind of filtering into American…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Oh, yes. There’s no question but that there was an effort by various factions to solicit out participation. I remember I was asked if I would go to Germany and do a head of Hitler by one of the Communist groups. As far as that was concerned, I was approached by the Japanese, too, to come to Japan or make a statement and so forth. So there were all kinds of pressures for people’s sympathy and so forth. I avoided any kind of direct involvement. I was never a member of the Communist Party of anything like that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: People like Stuart Davis were very involved….

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Even Stuart I’m sure didn’t belong but he was sympathetic, he had to be. I mean it’s not that it was particularly in his character to be, you know, political; I don’t think he was a very political person. And yet you had to push your side. There were very few people who didn’t take a side. As a matter of fact, I think Gorky was one of those who didn’t take sides.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Yes, he was always sort of in the middle, wasn’t he?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, it wasn’t a question of being in the middle; it was just that he refused to take sides. I remember when Hitler invaded Poland I was with Gorky and DeHirsh Margules. That night we were listening to the Radio, as a matter of fact. We made several paintings together at hat time.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, really?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. It was interesting.

PAUL CUMMINGS: When did you meet Gorky? You knew him rather well, didn’t you?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, I knew him for a long, long while. Oh, I don’t know when I met him. It was during the time when he was on the WPA and I wasn’t. I must have been him around in the galleries and knew him and talked to him and so forth. And then I became quite intimate with him just before World War II, in the spring of 1941. I had a station wagon and I drove him out West.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What was that like? That must have taken days and days.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Well, I mean it was almost an epic trek.

PAUL CUMMINGS: During all that time did you talk about art, or the country, or…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. We argued all the way across. He insisted upon seeing a little old lady in the clouds. I’d say: no, that’s just a cloud. I mean it was one of those interminable arguments. He was very, very well-versed in art history. I mean he was a great teacher, among other things, for me anyway.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In what way was he a teacher? Other people have said this about him who you really couldn’t expect to say it, and I’m very curious what it meant.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, his enthusiasm went over so that he had to participate with other people. Which I suppose is what makes a great teacher: I mean his own discovery being sort of shared. I mean, after all, people who are developing receive new viewpoints, they discover the world, or they “discover” something that had already been discovered. Let’s say they discover a painter. The painter has been discovered long before. But then they want to share. That’s the best kind of teaching really, because you’re not off the griddle. You have really discovered something, you see. Here, I just cut this piece out of [he gets a book, there’s the sound of pages turning] to find a cancer cure, it says here, for instance [reading]: “Among the remarkable new discoveries, “he explained,”…are the hardy microbes that live happily in nuclear reactors, virus that beat Buckminster Fuller’s idea by several million years.” I mean these ideas have been kicking around for a long while. But, suddenly, someone perceives them again all of a sudden, sees them from a slightly different angle, you know. I know a lot of mathematicians say about Bucky, “Well, it’s not nothing new. We know it all the time.” However he maybe talked about it a little more than somebody else. He kept on pointing at it, you know. So it becomes important enough that it’s known – it probably was known – maybe there’s nothing new. In fact, there’s nothing new under the sun anyway. But it’s a continuous discovery by an artist. I think that an awful lot of art today is learned by a sudden discovery and people pointing and saying, “Look! Look at that! That’s a cube. Have you ever seen a cube?” That’s sort of the thing, you know. And I think an awful lot of it is a terrible bore because I mean, yes, all right, you don’t have to tell me once more. And especially I find that true of young artists today. I mean they just discover something and do it a little worse that it was done not very long ago, let’s say, not more than twenty or thirty years ago. Suddenly a lot of traditional and ordinary knowledge is dished up anew. They say, “My God! Look, you can cut a piece of wood with a chisel!” I mean, so what? But, on the other hand, I do respect a person who transmits his discoveries. They’re getting sort of worn out by now. But I mean a man like Gorky, you know, discovers Ingres and he wants to convey this discovery of his about Ingres. Before that he was discovering Picasso and Miro. For the longest while, he was simply discovering things that had already been discovered and that everybody already knew about, but he was conveying it to us. And it was really only after the war started and people like Andre Breton came here that Gorky became free to discover directly from nature than through other people.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you get to know Breton during that period?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. I came to know Breton through certain Surrealists like, for instance, David Hare. They were all here. And Duchamp. In fact, I introduced Breton to Gorky because I thought they could do something. And it did indeed. It worked exactly as I thought.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That’s great. What about somebody like Duchamp who had been there on and off for many, many years? Did you know him?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I knew him from the time when he first…He was probably here for the Armory Show, was he not? I didn’t know him then.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It was probably after that.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I first met him at Brummer’s. He was there with the Brancusi exhibition. I think it was in 1926. He was there in Brummer’s office sort of looking after the exhibition.

PAUL CUMMINGS: He had some strange arrangement with Brancusi, didn’t he?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, apparently. I don’t know what it was. I understand he was sort of involved in trying to prove some mathematical relationships, that is, that what Brancusi may have done instinctively in the Bird actually certain…

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, like a graph.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: A graph – a certain mathematical flow of relationships which he was studying. Which I’m sure could be worked out. I mean, like people who work out airplane wing sections and so forth, they don’t do it by guess, they do it by mathematics. But apparently it was originally done by an artist. That is to say, the Wright Brothers I think were artists, were they not? I’m not quite sure. But I have been told that artists have the capacity to find things instinctively. I remember that Sterling Burgess, who designed the Enterprise, the American Cup defender, was a friend of Buckey’s an they built a boat together during the 1930’s. He was a sort of an artist. He said that as an artist, he was able to make proper shapes. Of course nowadays it’s all done by computers. But I mean probably before computers existed it was too tedious to try to do it by mathematics so they did it by eye, so to speak.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That’s fascinating.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: For instance, they had a shop up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Because of the Depression, everything was up for grabs so they got an old factory there and built their boat there. And Buckey did his Dymaxion Car there. I did the plaster model for him. It was quite early it must have been around 1933 maybe. I would say I made the plaster cast during that time. I think it was before I went to Mexico. I’m not quite sure. But I remember doing it on 75th Street where I had a studio in a shop. Next door to me was Anton Baski, a plaster caster. And I remember doing them there. I was installed there actually from 1932 to 1933. Either I did it then or went back and did it. It was quite early.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were they made from drawings? Or what was the evolution of the casting?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well I believe he had some drawings and then we talked about it. That’s how we did it, I think. Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And then you just made the images, the shapes. To kind of go back to Gorky and your relationship with him, there was another fellow around, John Graham.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you know him? Was he part of the milieu you were in?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Sure. Oh, very much. He was a sort of, you know eminence gris. He was older, of course. He had a reputation for being sort of a real connoisseur of African antiques and things like that. I mean I used to see him independently. I may or may not have seen him with Gorky. But, you know, there were all these émigrés, real or fake. Nobody ever knew, or really cared very much. In Paris, for instance, there were all these White Russians. They were all princes at least. I remember the Grand Duke – what was his name? I mean they were all grand dukes and so forth. We used to go to the Russian Christmas as the Hotel Lutetia – I think it’s in January, but I’m not sure – the Greek Orthodox Christmas, I used to go with various people. I remember I used to go with Zatkine. You know, he would take me. So that one more Russian prince didn’t mean that much, you see. So John Graham was an officer in the Czar’s army, as we understood it. I mean I never went there, but I understood that on Tuesdays he would get all dressed up in his officer’s uniform and go down to the meetings of the Russian officers’ corps. We understood he was quite an important officer, not just an ordinary officer, and probably a prince, you know. He had the military bearing of a prince. Of course, with Gorky, there was a kind of embarrassment there on his part I presume, because he was really – his name was not Gorky and he was not a Russian. So that I mean for him to meet a real specimen might have been a little bit embarrassing, you know, so that I never really pushed that angle as to whether Graham really was of was not a Russian prince. So apparently it was quite deliberate on Gorky’s part to be sort of misunderstood a bit. It wasn’t beyond him to pit on a bit of mystification. He probably thought it was a good thing. I think he enjoyed it. He probably thought it was good business, you see. In fact, probably that’s why…You know, I never found out until long after his death that… Well, I mean I went to his funeral, of course, and then met his sister and so on and discovered that he had an Armenian name. And then I met various other relatives of his, I believe one was a son of his sister who wanted to write a book; he came by and interviewed me at one point. I think it was he who told me that Gorky’s father lived near Chicago. It was a complete surprise to me that he had kept him hidden. I mean he had never le on that he had any relatives in this country at all.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, he did have at one point.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: But he had his father and sister and other relatives and he had them carefully.

PAUL CUMMINGS: He really created a mysterious life for himself.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: He created this character Gorky. And he had the physique and the posture to carry it out and get away with it. Excepting he was always, in a sense, playing a part, a role. And you felt that he was playing a role.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you find that in private discussions with him that there was this kind of role-playing going on? Of did it sometimes drop away?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I think that he was very keen on being accepted as an artist. And when Breton sort of took him up and helped him and he became apart of Julien Levy’s Gallery, that was, for him, arriving. It was very important for him to arrive. You should interview Julien Levy if you are interested in Gorky. Because Julien Levy…I mean everybody in New York, in a sense, plays a role. They are all sort of not exactly what they appear to be. I mean in fact they are all making their own roles. For instance, Julien Levy is the son of a real estate man. But he had ambitions to be an intellectual among the artists. So, although he had money, that wasn’t his chief aspiration, to be just the son of a rich man. Now he lives in the country and….

PAUL CUMMINGS: In Connecticut, yes. One of the things that has sort of struck me in reading about the 1930’s and, say, up to the time of the beginning of the war, was that the art world seemed very small – in the number of people, you know. It wasn’t as immense as it is today, there weren’t as many galleries or as many artists, the museums were not as ambitious. There was the Whitney Museum downtown. The Museum of Modern Art was not too concerned with what Americans were doing. Do you think that that kept the artists together in a way?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, first of all, there was no such financial remuneration to being an artist so that there wasn’t this sort of enticement for all kinds of people to get into the act, so to speak. And the key to what would go and what wouldn’t go hadn’t been supplied yet. So that it wasn’t that easy to be an artist. Now all you need is a little gimmick and you’re in.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you think it’s better for it to be more difficult than as easy as it appears to be today.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I would think so, yes. I would think so for the reason that I think art is nurtured in a certain isolation anyway. When people are isolated or they are alone rather they tend to become more and more peculiarly themselves. Whereas not I think the peculiarities are more fashionable than original.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So that you mean the individual living and working by himself generally is more imaginative and productive that a public person?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I think so, yes. I think a public person is already – I mean unless he’s just a charlatan or an actor becomes constrained by that rather than freed. But, you know, this business of success, I mean I have a deep sort of suspicion about it. Now it’s easy to be successful and therefore….

PAUL CUMMINGS: What kind of suspicion do you have about it? In terms of what?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I think success like what we were just talking about – the easy possibility of being an artist today – is it that success seems to fix a person, or tends to fix a person. It may free him to a certain extent, but it also tends to make hi continue in that success; he just doesn’t want to have it one day and hive it up the next.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You mean his ability to take chances…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. Yes. He doesn’t want to blur his image once it’s been established so that he tends to be less experimental and creative, I think. I think there’s a tendency for success to inhibit people. I don’t know – some people it doesn’t seem to. For example, Picasso is an example of where success doesn’t stop him one bit. I mean he goes on and on. The bigger the success the better he was. But I think a lot of people get a style and they stick to it. That’s their style and they’re not going to throw it away.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But don’t you think it’s possible for an evolution of style once you’ve formed it?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, in Picasso’s case, he did. Even in Matisse’s. But I think, in the case of Americans, it just doesn’t seem to work that way. I mean it hasn’t. In fact it all seems to end up in their untimely death through their not being able to surmount the success; that is to say, that having gotten success, it’s so dreadfully difficult for them to free themselves from it. I mean I would attribute the death of all those artists from Pollock to Gorky to Kline to Rothko, all of them – it may have been a heart condition or something else – but essentially I mean – in Gorky’s case, let’s say it was aggravated by emotional distress and family situation – but success which demanded of him to have a certain stance and it , for one reason or other he felt he was unable to deliver, it was just too bad.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Why do you think that is?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I mean I attribute it to that. Maybe psychologists will tell you something else. But it’s remarkable hoe many of my friends have died violently at the peak of their success; always at the peak.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s fascinating because Motherwell said a very similar thing about the very same people, many of whom were friends of his.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. It’s true.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s very strange. It’s like you always have to strive.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. And those who do not die are under a kind of pall. I mean they’re already like dead people.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In what way though, because, you know, so many have gone on to…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, ask Motherwell.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I mean, what’s your point of view, though?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I don’t consider myself a dead person, by the way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Good.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: But I’m not speaking of Motherwell.

PAUL CUMMINGS: One of the things I have found to be curious – and I’m curious from your point of view, It seems that, during the end of the 1930’s and early 1940’s, the American artists was reading Cachiers d’Art and listening to Breton and still looking very, very much to Europe, but it seems there was some tendency to also become individualistic in a way and kind of break the bonds with Europe. Is that an accurate generality…?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I tell you, during the WPA days, there was an effort to be different from Europe in a nationalistic sense and to be “American scene,” “Hudson River scene,” and this and that.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Folk image and all that stuff.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: And folk image. To be American meant to be non-experimental, non- nothing at all. I mean just being…. I imagine Stuart Davis was about as much as you could get….Or Sandy Calder, you see.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But Calder was very flamboyant compared to, say, Reginald Marsh.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Well, I mean people would say they were Parisian, you see.

PAUL CUMMINGS: He could fit one way or another.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes, both ways, of course. And, you know, people in Europe who had and idea of what it was like to be American, like Leger, for instance. He thought to be American was to be like a machine, that is, the people became like machines. And so he came over here and he was rather non-plussed. I remember in 1941, that summer before the war had broken out, I did a head of Leger, He was in Hollywood and what he was doing in California in those days was to paint his parrots, his birds. He wasn’t painting any machinery or bicycles and so forth. He was painting parrots. Of course he was already then quite socially conscious, I mean he was giving interviews to Humanite.

PAUL CUMMINGS: One of the things that I find interesting is that you continued to produce heads of people for years and years, but then also you designed that great playground.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: You know, the question of making abstract art such as…. You know, I had a period of it in Europe because of Brancusi. But it didn’t last very long because I suppose – it must have had something to do with my American background perhaps, you know, rather skeptical and tendency to think of it in a Puritanical way, feeling a little indulgence. The truth of the matter was much more that it was a personal idiosyncrasy; was, let’s say, looked upon with a certain attitude of skepticism on my part. I’m not saying that it was good; I think it’s bad. But this skepticism – which pervaded the atmosphere – after all there weren’t many people who could override it – my only way of overriding it was to find a reason for doing it other than that of art.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, I see.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It had to have a purpose. So that in 1993, I think, it was when I did Play Mountain, and Monument to the Plow, and those things, it had a purpose. It was not art and that’s what gave me the right to do it, in a sense. It’s this bad upbringing, and Puritan attitude, intolerant attitude toward art. But I think that sort of thing is what underlies the anti-art aspect of American art today. It may very well come from that sort of thing. I don’t know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It’s true because there are a number of artists who make art but don’t want to be called artists.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Not only that but artists who are selling art as art which is not art. There are an awful lot of people whose art is so obviously not intended to please in any way as art but as some kind on – you know, everything from diagrams to craft and to anything at all, but they just say it’s not art. And them in a sense, it’s excusable. Otherwise it’s inexcusable; it’s a stylistic sort of play and it’s not countenanced.

PAUL CUMMINGS: During the 1930’s, after you came back and you were around New York, you had the heads and abstractions and various things going back and forth. How was that to maintain as an activity? I mean doing two things.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I must be very frank, you know – and I don’t know whether this sort of take is ever published, I mean I don’t think it is; it’s a private archive…

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: …so that in case one wants to find out the secret facts behind the facts.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I mean, you know, I personally had this moment of liberation in Paris for two years with the Guggenheim Fellowship. It was like a trip to Paradise and then coming back to the cold world, and one doesn’t suspect it to be transferable. And the one person who apparently was able to transfer it as an American was Sandy Calder. And, frankly speaking, I resented him very much because I was very poor, I had to make a living. Sandy somehow, whether he was or wasn’t rich, was able to get away with it. So I didn’t like him at all. I knew his father, Sterling Calder – he had a studio underneath me on 14th Street where I first started. And I knew his mother. We were very friendly. In fact, I was very friendly with Sandy. So I consider myself to be – well, an American with the problems of being an American. And of course in 1929 I had met Buck Fuller and he is a typical American. He has exactly the same kind of hang ups in his attitude toward art which I am not mentioning.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, really?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It’s not different. You know, not outstanding American really sorry of went in for abstraction per se as being really excusable.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right

ISAMU NOGUCHI: It was one of those European indulgence that we didn’t equate with real invention or real progress or real anything. And therefore everything I did outside of just doing heads for a long time had to have a very definite excuse. I mean my sort of leftist leanings precluded my doing anything other than that. For instance, I used to think of Sandy as terrible reactionary. It turns out now that he’s more liberal than I am. But, in those days, I used to think of him, and I think quite correctly, that he was just a plaything of the rich and I was on the side of the downtrodden.

PAUL CUMMINGS: He’s always been able to attract rich people for some reason.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes. But, you see, I associated myself with the laboring class; with the less fortunate people. And probably it comes from many different sources but I suppose my background of not belonging, as I mentioned in the other tape, had something to do with it. My mother, for instance, not being of the wealthy of fortunate ones. And I think that children, young people, tend to maybe over associate in that sense; I mean that is to say, they feel very strongly injustice in the world and want to be on the side of fixing it up a bit. That’s why they have all these demonstrations and what not. Otherwise, they don’t feel they want to be here very much.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It gets more difficult as they grow up, too.

ISAMU NOGUCHI: Yes.

PAUL CUMMIGNS: Your mother lived in New York for a long time, did she not?

ISAMY NOGUCHI: She was born here. And then she came here in 1922, I think it was.

PAUL CUMMINGS: 1922 or 1923, somewhere in there.

ISAMU NOHUCHI: She died in 1933, I think. So that she was here those years –about ten. She lived in the Village. She was not well off. She had difficulty making a living. So I felt guilty about that and I very strongly sort of associated myself with less fortunate people. I still do, by the way.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In what way? How do you mean that?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: I would say that, for instance , the fact that I occupy myself as much as I do with art which in a sense is not definable as art as such, as, for example, these lanterns even, or playgrounds, or parks for people and so forth. There’s still a streak of suspicion and ill will toward, you know, calling something art and thereby getting away with it, you know.

PAUL CUMMIGNS: How did you get into designing the lanterns and the furniture and all of these things?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: That’s part of that kind of motivation. And also I mean it’s an understandable field. You know the American idea – every American in a sense is an inventor. After all, that’s how America was made, by invention – a screwdriver, a gear, of what have you. Recently I did a nozzle for the fountain I’m doing in Detroit. It’s a real invention. I mean it’s a special type of new nozzle. That sort of thing pleases me a lot. And of course, Bucky – it’s the inventor, the American inventor. We admire people like Alexander Graham Bell. Those are the real artists of America really. These people who come in and weave a pattern of so-called art, in a sense, we look upon them with a certain suspicion. We expect them to look upon themselves with a certain suspicion. In fact, we think that they do, and that’s why they kill themselves.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, I don’t know, that’s a little romantic. You’ve known Buckminster Fuller for a long, long time. How had he been involved with your life? Have you done various projects of things with him?

ISAMU NOGUCHI: He’s been one of my greatest teachers, you see. But, as I say, a man who accepts success has to more or less accede to the myth. And he has acceded to the myth. And so have lots of other people. I mean I don’t blame him; it’s all right. But it’s based upon a fundamental American attitude I think of making do in an inimical world by a new and better way of making a mousetrap or finding a new way of living. I think Bucky it in that line of inventors, you know, from the Wright Brothers who invented the airplane, to Benjamin Franklin who made a stove or whatever. One of the things I did in 1933, by the way, was Monument to Ben Franklin which had lightening with a kite up above and a key below. Well, you say you could call it an abstraction, but to be it’s a very practical demonstration