“I am not a designer,” said Isamu Noguchi in 1949, even though he was in the middle of a career designing furniture, lamps, ashtrays, a cemetery, bridge railings, parks, public spaces for skyscrapers, and groundbreaking sets for the dances of Martha Graham. He explained that design tended to imply an accommodation to “quixotic fashion,” while he saw himself, a sculptor, as dealing with “fundamental problems of form.” Using his provocative declaration as its title, the exhibition “Isamu Noguchi: ‘I Am Not a Designer’” opens Friday at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta. Organized by Monica Obniski, the High’s curator of decorative arts and design, and Marin R. Sullivan, an art historian, it is the first Noguchi design retrospective in nearly 25 years, and it features around 200 objects.
Born in 1904 in Los Angeles, the son of a Japanese poet and an American writer, Noguchi committed himself to a life in sculpture in 1924. Struggling for any work in 1930s Depression America, he brought a singular advantage to competitions for design jobs. After growing up in both Japan and the U.S., and with significant time spent in Paris and China, he came equipped with a vast knowledge of Western and non-Western styles.
