France

Isamu Noguchi first traveled to France in 1927 on a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, where he worked in Paris as an assistant to sculptor Constantin Brancusi . In Paris Noguchi drew posed models in the academies attended by other visiting Americans, and he created his first abstract sculptures . Noguchi visited France in 1949 on a Bollingen Foundation grant to study pre-modern sculpture, traveling to the Dordogne to see the prehistoric caves, to Brittany to view the Neolithic stones around Carnac, and to Provence and the Riviera. Between 1956 and 1958 Noguchi worked in Paris on his first major garden commission at the new UNESCO Headquarters.

Essay on Noguchi's early abstraction