Italy

Although Isamu Noguchi planned to travel to Italy when he was in Europe in the late 1920's, his first visit was in 1949 on a Bollingen Foundation grant to study what he called "environments of leisure."  During this trip he traveled to Naples, Pompeii, Paestum, Rome, Florence, Sienna (during the Palio), Arrezo, Assisi, Pisa, Venice, Padua, Milan and Ravenna. In the old piazzas and public spaces he saw an art that went beyond the individual object, and a lifestyle that remained attractive to him for the rest of his life. In 1962 Noguchi worked in Rome casting sculptures made in clay and balsa wood, but he soon traveled to the marble quarries of Tuscany where he established a studio for use in the summer months. Noguchi worked in Pietrasanta and in Querceta, carving large sculptures of white marble and creating multi-colored works assembled by a tension-compression system that he developed. As Noguchi began to work more frequently in Japan after 1970 he worked less often in Italy, but he was carving marble in Querceta immediately before his death in 1988.