From lamps to playgrounds, Isamu Noguchi believed sculpture should be omnipresent

Noguchi himself attributed some of his fascinations with playground design to his childhood. Born in Los Angeles in 1904 to a white American writer mother, and Japanese poet father, he and his mother moved to Japan when he was two, following an already estranged father who deserted them again soon after they arrived. He returned to the US alone at 13 to attend high school, again feeling like an outsider. He wrote of Play Mountain that it was his “response based upon memory of my own unhappy childhood… It may be that this is how I tried to join the city, New York. To belong.” In fact, Florence says that throughout his life Noguchi travelled extensively, “stating he felt at home everywhere and nowhere.” In the exhibition is a self-portrait shown publicly for the first time, a sculpture showing a naked boy bent double looking through his own legs, “seeing the world upside-down”. He does so through searing blue eyes, depicted using bright blue beads that poignantly stand out against the dark wood of the figure, “a reminder of his dual identity,” Florence notes.

Setting out as a young aspiring sculptor, in the late 1920s, Noguchi trained with Constantin Brancusi, who is known as the father of modernist sculpture. It was a stint that Florence describes as an “awakening” that shaped his approach to abstract form, setting the artist on a course towards the biomorphic designs he is known for. Brancusi also encouraged Noguchi to employ truth to materials, and so the artist spent much of his traineeship learning how to carve wood and stone, and polishing Brancusi’s artwork Leda. The influence of this particular work, Florence says, can be seen in Noguchi’s piece Globular, a mirror-finish brass sculpture that reflects the viewer and their entire surroundings in its compound curves. “You get the idea that sculpture is not only the object but the entire space that surrounds it,” the curator explains, suggesting that the artist’s dedication to the civic duty of sculpture was ingrained from the start.

In 1938 he was commissioned to create a sculpture for the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Centre, and Noguchi began to gain higher status as an artist and designer. Then the Second World War hit, and after Pearl Harbour in 1941, anti-Japanese prejudice was rife across America. From 1942-1945, around 122,000 people of Japanese descent were imprisoned in ten internment camps across the States. By this point, Noguchi had established confidence in his work and his beliefs in the power of social design and art, and optimism about the role of artists as activists in society, and set out to use his position to help. He interned himself in one of the camps, despite being exempt from internment, with the intention to redesign the gardens and recreation areas, and introduce arts programmes, all for the wellbeing of the prisoners. “He wanted to participate in the community,” Florence says, and though he had been told by officials beforehand that he would be supported to create work for the camps, once inside, Noguchi’s attempts were repeatedly refused. In fact, officers treated him like any other prisoner, and so he experienced firsthand the racism and awful conditions of the camp, and actually found it difficult to leave, finally being allowed out after six months. “He left feeling very disillusioned,” Florence says. “He went back to New York disappointed that his ideals and beliefs in the social function of sculpture had not been recognised or achieved in the way he wanted to.” While inside, Noguchi wrote an essay titled I Become a Nisei, an emotive text that describes daily life in the camp alongside personal reflections on cultural identity.

And so Noguchi pieces made their way into millions of homes around the world, and while this went towards his vision for sculpture being everywhere, for everyone, it was in his large-scale, public pieces where his dreams of sculpture being “a common and free experience” were truly made real. In the second half of his life, Noguchi created dozens of civic sculptures (many across the US) and public spaces, including gardens – such as the Jardin Japonais at the Unesco building in Paris, which again brought traditional Japanese ideas into the western cultural landscape. However, most of his playground designs remained merely concepts, until finally in 1975 he was commissioned to create a playground for Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, called Playscapes.

It brings together many of the ideas Noguchi had honed over his career, including some from Play Mountain, namely the pyramid and surrounding triangular steps that seemed carved from the playground’s surface; and from Contoured Playground, another concept creating freeform play areas out of the topography. Playscapes, though, distils these ideas into individual, sculptural pieces of play equipment – swings, seesaws, climbing frames, slides – which might be why it was the one that actually got built during his lifetime (another was built in Sapporo, Japan, in 2005), and thank goodness it did. Boasting eye-popping primary colours and geometric shapes, it is not only a visual feast, but it also guides kids to explore and use their imaginations to interpret the space. Noguchi said he liked to think of playgrounds as “a primer of shapes and functions; simple, mysterious, and evocative: thus educational,” and this perhaps explains his lifelong interest in designing them, a key part of his dedication to making sculpture a fundamental part of our environment. In his playgrounds, he said: “I wished to show my long-held belief that play could lead to a new appreciation of sculpture.”