MacDougal Alley (1942-1949)

In November 1942 Isamu Noguchi returned to New York after six months in a Japanese-American relocation camp , and he moved into a studio at 33 MacDougal Alley in Greenwich Village. Much of Noguchi's work of the Forties was highly influenced by Surrealism, and it was at the MacDougal Alley studio in 1944 that he carved the biomorphic sculptures of inter-locking elements that established his reputation in the growing New York School, and created the self-illuminated sculptures that he called Lunars. In 1947-48 Noguchi developed his lunar wall reliefs into interiors for the American Stove Company Building in Saint Louis, New York's Time-Life Building and the ocean-going S.S. Argentina . In addition to his sculptural work, during this period Noguchi was very active in furniture and stage design, creating many pieces for the Herman Miller Company and his best-known dance sets for choreographers Martha Graham and George Balanchine. After he was included in the important 1946 exhibition Fourteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, Noguchi had his first one-person exhibition in fourteen years at the Charles Egan Gallery in March 1949. But disenchanted with the New York art world, Noguchi left the country in May on a grant from the Bollingen Foundation to study pre-modern sculpture in Europe and Asia.

Noguchi on inter-locking slab sculptures  |  Bollingen Proposal  |  Chronology