Third Noguchi

Every San Franciscan knows the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, an imposing colonnade in Lincoln Park. In it was exposed last week an exhibition of much local importance, the first California showing of a native though wandering son, Sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Sculptor Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904, son of a Japanese father and a U. S. mother: Leonie Gilmour. He is no relation of famed Microbe Hunter Hideyo Noguchi w:ho died of yellow fever in 1928, but his father. Yone Noguchi, is a poet almost as well known in Japan. Isamu Noguchi was taken to Japan when (wo years old. After a few years of Japanese school he was sent to the Interlaken experimental school in Rolling Prairie, Ind. and subjected to the ideas of Edward Aloysius Rumely, its director. It was here that young Noguchi first decided to be an artist. In 1922 he apprenticed himself to Gutzon Borglum. Six months in the Borglum studio convinced him that he ought to be a surgeon. He took a number of premedical courses at Columbia University in 1922-23, there met and gained the friendship of his great namesake the bacteriologist.

Medicine was harder ploughing than he thought. Isamu Noguchi drifted back to sculpture, attending night classes at Manhattan's Leonardo da Vinci Art School, where he was discovered with loud hosannahs by Director Onorio Ruotolo who took him into his home, gave him his own studio to work in. worked over him as hard as any horse trainer with a promising yearling. In 1927 the colt came through with a Guggenheim Fellowship. Isamu Noguchi went to Paris and immediately apprenticed himself as a stone cutter to Constantin Brancusi. one of the few sculptors to have a piece of pastry named after him.--

From then on Sculptor Noguchi piled up an ever-increasing amount of critical praise. He returned to New York, made a series of excellent portrait heads. Crop-headed Lincoln Edward Kirstein, esthetic son of the vice president of Filene's Department Store, introduced him to Harvard University where his exhibition was considered important enough for the Crimson, undergraduate daily, to run a front-page headline: NOGUCHI AT HARVARD. The Arts Club of Chicago took him up. In 1930 he started around the world, saw his family in Tokyo for the first time in years. He showed some Japanese portrait heads in the Tokyo Salon which were instantly pounced on by French Critic Elie Faure.

The exhibition which opened last week will move to San Diego, to Los Angeles, to Portland. Ore. The Honolulu Museum is calling for it. It includes 15 huge Kakemono-like drawings which Sculptor Noguchi made in Peiping and about 20 of his well-known portrait heads: Dancer Martha Graham, Mystic Nicholas Konstantin Roerich. Authors John Erskine and Thornton Niven Wilder, Mexican Muralist Jose Clemente Orozco. Left out of the California exhibition is the newest Noguchi, a great white plaster shape something like a starfish and something like a woman which he has named "Miss Expanding Universe" (see cut).

Not very intelligibly, but with contagious enthusiasm he tried to explain last week how much she meant to him. "Miss Expanding Universe" is the end of a triptych, the last of three figures that he has modeled at what he has felt were critical moments in his development as an artist.

"So much modern stuff is so bitter, so hopeless." explained Isamu Noguchi. "To me, at least. Miss Expanding Universe is full of hope."

*A Brancusi roll, sold in Greenwich Village bakeshops, is S shaped, pointed at either end. suggestive of the ultra-simplified fish and bird shapes Sculptor Brancusi makes.

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