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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

ISAMU NOGUCHI

Isamu Noguchi, sculptor, designer, photographer, writer, was born in Los Angeles November 17, 1904 of Japanese-American parentage.  He lived in Japan until the age of 14, attending school in Yokahama.  In 1918 he was apprenticed to a cabinet maker.  Returning to the United States, he attended school in Indiana.  He was apprenticed to Gutzon Borglum while tutoring the latter's son.  In 1923 he took a pre-medical course at Columbia University in New York.  In 1924, his interest in sculpture increasing, he studied at the Leonardo da Vinci School and East Side Art School, New York.  In paris, 1927-28, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, he worked for Brancusi, but was also influenced by Calder and Giacometti.  In 1929 he was back in New York, and from 1929-31 in China and Japan.  He studied drawing in Peking and worked as a potter in Kyoto.  He returned in the United States in 1931.  In Merica, 1936, he constructed a relief 65 feet long in coloured concrete.  In 1938 he won a competition for a relief for the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center, New York and the following year was commissioned to design a fountain for the Ford Motor Company pavilion at the New York World's Fair.  In 1941 he voluntarily entered a Japanese segregation center in Arizona.  In 1948-50 he travelled in France, Italy, Spain and the Far East.  Noguchi has done a number of sets for Martha Graham, the most recent being Embattled Garden.  Within the past three years he has completed the garden the garden for the UNESCO Building in Paris; a major piece for the American Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair; gardens for the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company in Hartford, Connecticut; ceiling and fountain for 666 Fifth Avenue; projects for Lever House and Idlewild Airport, etc.  His most recent one man show of sculptures in marble, iron and bronze was held at the Stable Gallery in May, 1959.  His other one man shows include: Schoen Gallery, New York, 1929; Marie Storrer Gallery, New York, 1930; Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, Cambridge, 1930; Mallon Gallery, Philadelphia, 1933; Sidney Burney Gallery, London, 1934; Museum of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco, 1942; The Stable Gallery (ceramics) 1954.  Examples of his work are owned by the Albright Art Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Toronto Art Gallery and many other museums.