Academic Art (1924-1926)

In 1924, while Isamu Noguchi was a pre-medical student at Columbia University, his mother Leonie Gilmour returned to New York after many years in Japan. She encouraged him to turn his attention to art, and he enrolled in an evening class with sculptor Onorio Ruotolo at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Noguchi achieved immediate success in the figurative sculpture taught by Ruotolo, holding his first exhibition at the school within three months and soon leaving college to devote himself to art. Isamu Gilmour became Isamu Noguchi, taking his father's name for the first time, and in the next three years exhibiting his sculpture at the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Noguchi took a studio at 127 University Place, where he modeled figures in clay and plaster, including the tour de force of his academic style, Undine (Nadja). But he was discontent with academic sculpture, and Noguchi attended exhibitions of modern art in the city's more progressive galleries. His aspirations were transformed by an exhibition of the abstract sculpture of Constantin Brancusi at the Brummer Gallery in December 1926, and he successfully applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to study sculpture in Paris.

Chronology