Exploring Isamu Noguchi’s Relationship with Greece

A new work by Greece- and New York-based Objects of Common Interest interpolates the artist’s longstanding Greek inspiration

‘Greece… Oh, it’s my love. I feel as if I were born here. I think that every artist who discovers Greece must feel the same.’

These are the words of Isamu Noguchi, the iconic Japanese-American artist, reflecting on his creative connection to Greece, a country he described as his ‘intellectual home’ and to which he returned countless times following a 1949 trip in search of marble.

Mythical gods, white sunlight, stone hillsides, temple columns, ancient philosophy, island winds, contemporary art: for Noguchi, Greece was a multi-layered world that inspired him deeply and left a rich creative imprint on his own borderless work that went far behind the beauty of its marble.

Now, the little-known threads that connect Noguchi and Greece have been illuminated in a series of creative projects led by Objects of Common Interest (OoCI), a Greek design unit based in Athens and New York.

Image by Eliot Elisofon. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 04336. ˝ Shutterstock / The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Image by Michio Noguchi. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 03498. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Noguchi and Greece, Greece and Noguchi, published by Atelier Éditions and D.A.P., and edited by Ananda Pellerin, is a two-volume book project reflecting on the artist’s decades-long exploration of the country’s culture, landscape, materials and creative communities.

The publication comes two years after OoCI’s celebrated exhibition Hard, Soft, and All Lit Up with Nowhere to Go at the Noguchi Museum in New York. The visually conceptual journey into the artist’s Greek ties included a scattering of the firm’s own works — tubular lights, fabric columns, opal resin ‘rocks’ — positioned in dialogue with Noguchi’s creations.

The book dives even deeper. Tapping into the museum’s extensive collection of archival pieces, it traces the journey of Noguchi’s love of Greece — from the seeds planted by his mother reading him Greek mythology when he was a child, and his explorations of these stories through stage sets with choreographer Martha Graham, to his early post-war travels (with Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi always in his pocket) and his decades-long friendships with contemporary Greek creatives.

Letters, photographs, notes, postcards, essays, artworks: layers of words and images are combined to create an ‘archival exploration’ that results in an atmospheric and textured visual collage of the dynamic interplay between Noguchi and Greece.

Image by OoCI. Works by Isamu Noguchi © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Image by Isamu Noguchi. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 08269.3. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

‘This is our personal interpretation of Noguchi’s relationship with Greece through images, work, documents and contributions, published as a creative project rather than an academic book,’ Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis, the husband and wife duo behind OoCI, tell us. ‘It sheds light on facts, but also talks about feelings, memories and abstract notions, of how we see Greece and how we understand Noguchi saw Greece, through his travels and personal relationships.’

Noguchi returned to Greece often while on his way to Japan, making stops ‘not just for stone search, but for friendships and for Greece, showing an affection that goes beyond work,’ the two point out. ‘He was like a sponge absorbing elements from bits and pieces of his travels and various cultural encounters, Greece included.’

The book’s tracing of Noguchi’s creative footprints in Greece also shifts into focus the artist’s in-between identity and his timeless quest to transcend the limitations of creative boundaries and definitions — a journey that resonated with OoCI as they pieced together the project.

‘We believe that the respect with which Noguchi approached Greece, its people, its sacred places and the land in general reveals a common sensitivity and pride for the land, also a certain interiority that Greek and Japanese cultures may share, different that the rest of Europe and the US,’ they explain. ‘Noguchi often spoke about his dual identity, Japanese and American, without immersing in either of the two, but both identifying him and his creative practice.’

Text by Danielle Demetriou

Image by Isamu Noguchi. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 143879. É The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS)