By Alex Ross

Alex Ross, Managing Editor of The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné, explores the creation of Noguchi’s monumental sculptural frieze History Mexico, of 1936. Located in an upper landing of the Mercado Abelardo L. Rodriguez in the historic center of Mexico City, History Mexico is Noguchi’s first realized public artwork, predating the artist’s iconic News for the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center by almost four years. Readers will learn about new research into this important moment in the artist’s career, when Noguchi’s own artistic interests found dramatic expression through the themes of Mexican muralism, creating one of the great anti-fascist works of the last century.

Several early surveys that discuss Isamu Noguchi’s first efforts at creating public art understandably have focused on his iconic News of 1940, a monumental relief sculpture in stainless steel that Noguchi designed and installed over the entrance to the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center. Certainly, winning such a prestigious commission for a prominent New York City building became a turning point in the establishment of Noguchi’s national reputation as an artist. In terms of its position in the development of his artistic ideas, however, Noguchi would later refer to his model for News as “a kind of hangover” from another public mural he had sculpted several years earlier in Mexico City.¹ Noguchi’s History Mexico, a monumental relief mural completed in 1936, predates the Rockefeller commission by almost four years and is, in fact, Noguchi’s first realized artwork designed specifically for a public space. 

History Mexico is the equal of News in both its scale and as a technical achievement. Just under eight feet tall and almost 72 feet wide, the mural extends over three adjacent walls. Noguchi was able to sculpt this massive work by hand over an eight-month period between 1935 and 1936, using concrete and pigmented cement. The mural was sculpted in very deep relief, measuring almost 20 inches at its deepest points. Certain elements of the composition extend up to 10 inches proud of the wall, and reach out dramatically into the space of the viewer.

The location of and restricted accessibility to this mural have limited both the popular awareness and critical recognition of History Mexico, which was designed and installed in a second-floor vestibule of the Mercado Abelardo L. Rodriguez in downtown Mexico City. The Mercado Rodriguez continues to be an active and busy public market building located just inside the outer limits of the Mexico City Historic Center. Noguchi’s History Mexico is part of a larger assembly of murals painted throughout the building during the 1930s by a group of international artists working under the general supervision of Diego Rivera. In all, some 1,450 square meters of the interior walls and ceilings of the building are decorated with mural paintings in varying styles and covering different subject matter.  

Yet the Mercado Rodriguez and its marvelous collection of mural art have tended to be overlooked by visitors in favor of other better-known tourist sites only a few blocks away. The Mercado building closes in the evenings, but even during the day, access to Noguchi’s mural may be difficult. There are no signs directing visitors, and the gate to the only stairwell to the second-floor vestibule is sometimes closed. Presently, many visitors—even those familiar with Noguchi—are unaware that one of the artist’s earliest and most compelling works of public sculpture was installed in this frequently overlooked market building.

The critical understanding and reputation of History Mexico were shaped in large part by several early authors and critics, particularly during the 1960s and ’70s when much of the scholarship on Noguchi mentioned his mural in Mexico City as almost incidental to the development of his later art. Early biographies of Noguchi give this work a few pages at most, and then mainly as the context for discussing his relationship with the remarkable Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). Sam Hunter, in his 1978 biography of Noguchi, acknowledged the artistic importance of History Mexico while dismissing its “dated character and naive social idealism.”² And in his 1968 autobiography, A Sculptor’s World, Noguchi himself described the mural’s composition as a list of clichés, writing:

When Noguchi discussed the mural later in his career, he often emphasized the process of sculpting History Mexico and the experience of working in Mexico in 1935 and 1936 as being as meaningful to him as the finished mural: 

Recalling that he only received $88 from the Mexican authorities for his work sculpting History Mexico, about half of the monies due to him, Noguchi was reflective:

It is revealing to consider that the opinions of many early critics, as well as Noguchi’s own attitude to the mural, were formed against the backdrop of the traumatic events of World War II and became further entrenched by the propaganda and political climate of the Cold War years after 1947. Initially, when Noguchi first completed History Mexico, he enthusiastically identified its broader themes with the hopes and aspirations of the working class. Upon returning to New York in 1936, he gave an interview to the leftist publication New Masses, saying:

The same article included several photographs depicting details of History Mexico. In one of these photos, presumably made to give readers a sense of the scale of the larger mural, one sees Noguchi smiling proudly while standing beside the enormous red fist of labor near the center of the composition. 

During the first decade after this interview, and especially during World War II, however, there was a noticeable shift in the critical reception of the mural and its themes. Author Carlos Merida, in his 1943 interpretive guide to the frescoes in the Mercado Rodriguez, described the theme of Noguchi’s mural as:

While Merida acknowledged that this was the only mural in Mexico at this time that rendered this message in high relief, in his closing comments he was generally dismissive of its artistic importance:

The shift in Noguchi’s own thinking about the mural’s message became evident as early as 1942, during his incarceration in the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona.⁹ In the New Masses interview of 1936, Noguchi had cheerfully identified the subject matter of History Mexico with the violent overthrow of capitalism along with the institutions which supported it. Only six years later, however, with much of Europe and parts of Asia occupied by the Axis powers, many of these same institutions were effectively the last defense for the freedoms and liberties associated with Western democracy. In a letter he wrote from the internment camp in August 1942 to Monroe Wheeler at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Noguchi avoided any mention of class warfare, preferring to describe History Mexico as a “polychrome sermon on Fascism the war and the peace.”¹⁰ This rebranding of the mural’s general message set the tone for much of the remainder of Noguchi’s career. When he discussed History Mexico within the context of his artistic practice, Noguchi often explained its themes in terms of universal human values, emphasizing its central message as being anti-war and anti-fascist.¹¹ To underscore this position, he frequently noted that History Mexico predated Pablo Picasso’s (1881–1973) Guernica (1937), a masterpiece on a similar theme, by several years.¹² 

The dismissal of History Mexico as more political statement than a serious work of art was formative to its critical reception during most of the first six decades after Noguchi sculpted it on the walls of the Mercado building. As Cold War tensions eased in the early 1990s, however, there was a renewed interest among researchers and scholars in the work of the Mexican muralists, and this gave way to a critical reassessment of Noguchi’s History Mexico. Several major surveys of Mexican muralism published during the last few decades have discussed this monumental mural within a broader context.¹³ In 2001, James Oles published a significant examination of the art-historical context and importance of History Mexico.¹⁴ Drawing on his extensive research on American artists working in Mexico during the 1930s, Oles’s essay remains one of the most thorough references for understanding Noguchi’s use of the symbolism of Mexican muralism and how the sculptor incorporated them into the larger themes of this mural. The present digital feature seeks to add to the understanding of History Mexico by considering new research conducted by The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné over the last several decades, in order to reposition Noguchi’s monumental relief sculpture within the still-evolving understanding of the sculptor’s artistic practice during the mid-1930s.   

To support the renewed interest and ongoing scholarship around History Mexico, in 2018, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum commissioned photographer Rafael Gamo to create new, high-resolution digital images of the mural as well as its surrounding architectural context. Much of the available photography of History Mexico consisted of older, black-and-white images that depicted selected details and partial views from the larger composition. Few of these historical images conveyed a sense of the full scale of Noguchi’s accomplishment or the visual impact of this enormously impressive mural.

The size and scale of Noguchi’s installation on the second-floor landing of the Mercado Rodriguez have always made this a difficult work to photograph. The mural is extremely wide relative to its height, extending over three walls that are at slight angles to one another, each of which is pierced by a window. The shape of the room is a compressed hexagon with two large stone support columns in the center, which makes it impossible to view, let alone photograph the entire work, from any one position. Gamo’s experience as an architectural photographer was critical to producing images that give a sense of how Noguchi’s mural interacts with viewers as they move through and experience the space.

The commissioning of high-quality photography of all of Noguchi’s artworks is one of the major priorities of the cataloging and research process of The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné. The site visit in 2018 was also an opportunity for representatives from The Noguchi Museum to meet with the authorities in Mexico City responsible for maintaining the city’s many art treasures, including the collection of murals in the Mercado building. Noguchi’s History Mexico is clearly appreciated as an important work within the larger collection of treasures, not only by the Mexico City authorities but also by the Mercado staff who maintain the many works of art throughout the building.

History Mexico is in very good condition, notwithstanding its location within a working market building. The Mercado Rodriguez houses multiple food vendors, some of whom prepare meals on cooktops near certain frescoes. There was recently a small fire on the ground floor, which was fortunately contained and did not cause any severe damage to the building or its art. Another constant concern is the earthquakes that occur frequently in the Mexico City region. 

The second-floor landing where Noguchi installed his mural is also a multi-purpose public space. Over time, this room has served various functions, including as a yoga studio. The windows within the walls containing the mural appear to be original to the Mercado building, which was constructed in the early 1930s. Over the years, leaks from the flat roof directly above the mural have required limited restorations to both the ceiling and to certain areas of the upper parts of Noguchi’s mural. Several other frescoes in the building have come under similar stress from water damage. History Mexico, like so much public art around the world, is always at risk of being damaged or destroyed.  

Noguchi visited the Mercado several times in the last decades of his career. In a 1973 interview with Paul Cummings, Noguchi mentioned that he had just seen the mural a few years previously and that it was holding up remarkably well.¹⁵ In 1982, Noguchi visited the Mercado again during a restoration of the mural that was overseen by Lucila Rousset Harmony on behalf of the Mexico City Historic District. We know from photographs taken during this visit that there were several changes made to the room after 1982. At some point, the clay tiled wall below the mural was painted a bright red. A low platform was installed in front of the mural, also painted red, which steers pedestrians around the mural toward the office doors on either end of the vestibule.

Another significant change to the original layout of the room since Noguchi first visited this space in 1935 is that the second stairwell on the left side of the room was bricked in at the entrance level on the first floor. Such ostensibly minor alterations have probably protected the group of murals throughout the vestibule area—not only Noguchi’s History Mexico but also the important series of fresco paintings by sister artists Marion and Grace Greenwood located on the walls and ceilings of both stairwells. Judging from his work on other public art installations, however, we may assume that Noguchi carefully considered the original architectural features of this vestibule area and how it was likely to be used by the public. His understanding of the viewer’s experience would have shaped the way he designed and installed his massive mural at the Mercado. Today’s viewers should be aware that later alterations to the room have, to some degree, distanced contemporary visitors from the experience that the artist originally intended.  

To better understand the achievement that History Mexico represents it is necessary to consider the circumstances that led Noguchi to his first visit to Mexico City in 1935. Why was an ambitious young sculptor based in New York City not only available but also motivated to devote months of his life to the creation of this massive work of public art?

Perhaps the most important circumstance that prompted Noguchi to leave for Mexico City was his disappointment in the public and critical reception of an exhibition of his work in January–February 1935 at the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York. This ultimately would be Noguchi’s last solo exhibition in New York for over a decade. The Harriman Gallery was one of the most prestigious venues for modern art in New York City during the 1930s, offering Noguchi access to an audience of urbane and wealthy collectors as well as the city’s critical elite. He had, therefore, taken this opportunity to present a selection of his most significant work to date and dedicated much of the previous year to creating work made specifically for this exhibition. 

The brochure for the Harriman show reveals the ambitions Noguchi had for his artistic practice by the early 1930s. The first four of the fourteen sculptural works listed in the brochure are, in fact, models for works of public art, with the first two being proposals for massive land-art projects. The artist’s statement printed at the bottom of the brochure speaks to Noguchi’s commitment to creating art with a civic purpose: “Sculpture can be a vital force in our every day [sic] life if projected into communal usefulness.”¹⁶  

As early as his time working in Constantin Brancusi’s (1876–1957) Paris studio during the late 1920s, Noguchi had begun to question the role of the artist and the artist’s work in daily modern life. Throughout the 1930s, he designed multiple proposals for public art projects, only a few of which were ultimately realized, and some of these much later in his career. Between 1933 and 1934, Noguchi was briefly employed by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP)—a pilot program that in 1935 became the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Art Project. He was apparently suspended from PWAP because the projects he submitted were deemed unfeasible and not quite works of sculpture as it was understood at the time. To his great frustration, the fees Noguchi received from sculpting portraits exceeded the income limits set by the WPA and excluded him from receiving commissions from this vital New Deal agency. His decision to exhibit four proposals for public art so prominently at Harriman speaks to his determination and commitment to make art with a social purpose a major focus of his artistic practice.

Several other works exhibited at the Harriman Gallery, and one that Marie Harriman excluded from the exhibition, are worth considering here because they reappear later in various forms in the composition of History Mexico. Harriman declined to exhibit Birth (1934)—a work inspired by a live birth Noguchi witnessed during a visit to Bellevue Hospital.¹⁷ One may guess that Harriman felt the depiction of this moment in the progress of labor was too vivid for her gallery’s audience. And, in fact, Noguchi later acknowledged that Birth was a deliberate effort on his part to provoke “polite society,” an intention that suggests his growing frustrations with the norms of the New York art world at the time.¹⁸ (Noguchi later reworked the original sculpture into its present edited form, which now resides in the permanent collection of The Noguchi Museum.)

Marie Harriman’s apparent discomfort with exhibiting Birth in her gallery is surprising from today’s vantage point, given that she allowed Noguchi to exhibit Death (Lynched Figure) (1934). This was a controversial sculpture from the moment it was first shown to the public and is another indication of a shift in Noguchi’s work during this period toward themes of social activism.¹⁹ Interestingly, in an undated letter in the Gershwin papers in the Library of Congress, Noguchi discussed the possibility of George Gershwin acquiring one of his works and offered Gershwin Death (Lynched Figure) for his personal collection.²⁰ Ultimately, Gershwin did not acquire this work, which is also now in the permanent collection of The Noguchi Museum.

Gershwin, however, did buy or had recently acquired another work exhibited at Harriman, titled Black Boy (1934). This large figurative work, which Noguchi carved from a single block of ebony, was only located in 2015 in a private collection. Black Boy had ostensibly disappeared following the Harriman exhibition and no images from the time had been identified in later research. It was only known to The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné by its title, which appears in inventories Noguchi’s studio began compiling in the 1950s.

Earlier scholars who wrote about History Mexico were, therefore, not aware of the visual link between Black Boy and the figure Noguchi identified as an “Indian boy”²¹ on the far left of the mural’s composition. As will be discussed, the three works Noguchi intended to show at the Harriman exhibition—Birth, Death (Lynched Figure), and Black Boy—appear again in different forms in the composition of History Mexico, which he was planning and sculpting only months after the exhibition closed. 

The Harriman exhibition was both a financial and critical disappointment for Noguchi. It is not clear if any artworks were sold, and one reviewer singled out Noguchi’s “various elaborate monumental projects” for particularly negative mention. The reviewer questioned the balance of utility and design in Noguchi’s proposals, and even the sincerity of the sculptor’s convictions for making “this type of work.” Today, one can discern the author’s ambivalence about the trend during the New Deal years toward large and small public art projects. Citing the artist statement printed at the end of the Harriman brochure, the reviewer dismissed “communal usefulness” as a justification for proposing such projects and called this phrase little more than “one of the latest cliches in our heterogenous art world.”²²

While The Noguchi Museum Archives continue to collect documentation concerning Noguchi’s life and career during the 1930s, there is still little definitive information about Noguchi’s movements between the close of the Harriman exhibition in mid-February 1935 and the sculptor’s return to New York City from Mexico in the summer of 1936. Much of what is known is anecdotal, including recollections from Noguchi about this period of his life and career. In his autobiography of 1968, he gives us a sense of his state of mind and motivations during that year. He mentions making several additional unsuccessful applications to the WPA for support of one or more of his design proposals for public art projects. And while it is generally understood today that sponsorship by the WPA during the 1930s had little connection to artistic merit, Noguchi took this rejection and his disappointment around the Harriman exhibition very hard, becoming generally disaffected with the New York art world:

Mexico was an especially attractive destination during the 1930s for any artist interested in making socially relevant public art. The Mexican muralist movement had been born out of the political and social upheavals in Mexico between 1910 to 1929. Under the influence of Diego Rivera (1886–1957), David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974), and José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949)—known together as Los Tres Grandes—Mexican muralism in the late 1920s began to create a new mythology around the achievements of the Mexican Revolution, featuring themes of social justice and resistance to oppressive political and economic structures. A fiercely independent movement, Mexican muralism rejected many of the traditional structures of the art world, including the galleries, private collectors, and critics who interpreted the merit of an artist’s work to the wider public. This would have been particularly appealing to Noguchi following his disappointment at the reception of the Harriman exhibition.  

The movement and its leading artists were the subject of much discussion in the U.S. media during this time. Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco were all working in the United States in the early 1930s, creating powerful murals with often controversial political and social themes. These provocative works were being installed (sometimes infamously) in institutional spaces on both the west and east coasts of the country.

By the early 1930s, Noguchi was already aware of the work of Mexican muralist artists, and he had met at least two members of Los Tres Grandes—Siqueiros and Orozco. Siqueiros, whom Noguchi first encountered at the Hotel des Artistes in New York City,²⁴ was already known to advocate for the use of modern materials as essential to the creation of authentically modern art. This would have resonated with Noguchi who, as early as 1929, had begun making portrait busts in copper, aluminum, and iron—the materials of the modern industrial age. Siqueiros’s ideas might also have encouraged Noguchi’s later use of concrete and cement in the sculpting of History Mexico.

Noguchi had met Orozco by 1931, when he sculpted the artist’s portrait in terra-cotta. Orozco was in New York in 1930 to work on a cycle of five large murals for the dining rooms of the New School for Social Research. The murals were inaugurated in January 1931.

Between 1932 and 1934, Orozco painted The Epic of American Civilization—a cycle of twenty-three murals in fresco for the Baker Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Nelson Rockefeller, then a student at Dartmouth, had convinced his mother to underwrite the cost of this commission. Members of the Dartmouth faculty had originally approached Diego Rivera to teach fresco painting at the college, but Rivera declined because he was already at work on the ceiling paintings for the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Center. The Rockefeller ceiling project, Man at the Crossroads, would ultimately, and notoriously, be removed and destroyed in 1934 when Rivera refused to paint over the image of Lenin he had included in the composition. Rivera’s defiance of his wealthy patron’s wishes and the subsequent destruction of the murals further cemented the rebellious reputation of Mexican muralist artists and their commitment to their artistic ideals.

Noguchi was also aware that many American artists, including personal friends, were traveling to Mexico City during this time to train and work on mural paintings under some of the leading figures of Mexican muralism. These included Marion Greenwood, whom Noguchi met in Paris in 1928. In an interview she gave to the Archives of American Art in 1964, Greenwood said she began visiting Mexico in 1932, drawn by the work of Los Tres Grandes.²⁵ She learned the art of fresco painting from another American artist, Pablo O’Higgins (1904–1983), who had trained under Rivera during the early 1920s and immigrated to Mexico in 1924. By 1934, she had established enough of a reputation in Mexico for her mural projects that she and her sister, Grace, were invited back to work at the Mercado Rodriguez. The Greenwood sisters were assigned the walls and ceiling areas of the stairwells as well as the walls of the upstairs vestibule where History Mexico was eventually installed.

Noguchi implies in his autobiography that he decided to go to Mexico City almost immediately following the close of the Harriman exhibition. Although there is very little specific documentation about his exact movements for much of 1935, a group of artworks and various project proposals created by Noguchi on both U.S. coasts during the spring and summer of that year suggest that between February and possibly as late as October of 1935, he was actively pursuing a number of other commissions. It is instructive to consider a few of these projects because Noguchi incorporates aspects of their designs into the composition of History Mexico.

In an unpublished manuscript he worked on during the late 1970s, Noguchi recalled leaving New York in 1935 for Hollywood in the hopes of securing portrait commissions in order to finance a later trip to Mexico.²⁶ By this time, he had several connections in Hollywood and came to an agreement with Los Angeles gallerist Earl Stendahl that allowed him to live and work in a tent set up on the patio behind Stendahl’s gallery.²⁷

In addition to carving portraits of prominent members of the Hollywood film industry, Noguchi also designed a swimming pool for a house that Richard Neutra was building for movie director Josef von Sternberg. Like so many of Noguchi’s early designs involving recreation and play, this pool, featuring a biomorphic form, was not built.

According to Noguchi, at some point during his time in Los Angeles, probably in late summer of 1935, he made an exploratory visit to Mexico City.  

It was during this first visit that Noguchi, through his connections with the Greenwoods, became involved more formally with the decoration of the Mercado Rodriguez. 

The Greenwoods were part of a group of ten artists working on murals throughout the Mercado building. When Noguchi made his first visit to Mexico City, they were well advanced in their individual projects, having started some eight to ten months before. At that time, the Greenwoods had apparently realized that they were not going to be able to complete the decoration of all the wall areas allotted to them and negotiated with Diego Rivera, who was acting semi formally as the art director of the larger Mercado project, to assign Noguchi the three walls on the upper landing.

By 1935, Mexico City had become an important cultural and artistic center, and this had encouraged many Mexican nationals working abroad to return. Noguchi recalled that he met Frida Kahlo when he jumped into a Mexico City taxi with Miguel Covarrubias and Covarrubias’s wife, Rosa Rolando.³⁰ Rolando was a lifelong friend of Kahlo. Noguchi had already met Covarrubias, an artist and illustrator for Vanity Fair, in New York, possibly at a dinner party for George Gershwin. Covarrubias and Rolando had only just returned to Mexico City with the intention to make it their permanent home.

The city was also becoming a popular destination for many international figures from various cultural and political circles, especially those seeking to escape the increasing tensions in Europe. Members of the Bauhaus, for instance, came to settle and work in Mexico during this period. Josef Albers began visiting during this time and discovered the forms in Aztec and Mayan art that would influence his later work. There was also a large expatriate community from the United States working for a variety of political and economic interests. Mexico City had acquired the kind of cosmopolitan atmosphere in which Noguchi tended to thrive, as he had while living in Peking, Paris, and New York, moving easily among different social, artistic, and cultural circles. By the end of this first visit to Mexico City, Noguchi decided to travel home to New York with the aim of earning sufficient funds to return to Mexico for an extended period of work.³¹

Even with the incentive of returning to Mexico City to work on a mural for the Mercado, however, Noguchi continued to pursue other major projects. Back in New York, he submitted a model for a competition to design a sculpture that embodied the figure of Justice for the newly built courthouse and post office building in Newark, New Jersey.³² Noguchi’s vision was a radical departure from traditional precedent, reimagining Justice as a youthful male nude holding a dagger. Instead of the traditional blindfold, the eyes and face of the figure are covered by an open book, presumably symbolizing the impartial application of the law. While Noguchi’s submission was not ultimately selected by the competition judges, this image of a figure blinded by an open book would appear shortly after in the composition of History Mexico.  

From what is known of the deadline for submissions to the Justice competition, it is likely that Noguchi was still in New York through much of the late summer of 1935. Noguchi wrote that during this time, he secured a loan of $600 from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the purposes of returning to Mexico City. However, he also related that he then approached the WPA again and offered to remain in New York if the agency would fund a proposal he had for “a sculpture to be seen from the air on the large triangular lot at the road intersection in front of Newark Air Terminal.”³³

These three design proposals from 1935—the pool he designed for von Sternberg’s home in Los Angeles, the competition for a sculpture depicting Justice at the Newark Courthouse, and the massive land-art project he proposed for Newark Airport—indicate that Noguchi was actively pursuing other projects which, had any one of them materialized, might have distracted him from returning to Mexico to sculpt the mural at the Mercado.  

While the exact dates of his return to Mexico City in 1935 are unknown, Noguchi remembered certain details about this trip, including that he borrowed Buckminster Fuller’s (1885–1983) “big Hudson sports car” and drove directly to Mexico City, surviving several near accidents with the car close to Harrisburg and Texarkana.³⁴ Noguchi wrote that the process of sculpting History Mexico took eight months to complete, and it is known that he returned to New York on July 7, 1936, on the S.S. Orizaba. One can, therefore, surmise that Noguchi returned to Mexico City in early autumn and began sculpting History Mexico by the end of October 1935.

By the autumn of 1935, most of the other artists working at the Mercado building were nearing completion of their own murals. Covarrubias and Rivera were able to convince the governmental authorities managing the expenses for the building’s decoration to allow Noguchi to join the project. The agreement was predicated on the understanding that Noguchi would create a sculpted mural on the same pay scale as the other fresco painters, which Marion Greenwood remembered as being 13 or 14 pesos per square meter. Greenwood also recalled that the relative cost of living in Mexico at this time made these wages feel very generous. While Noguchi later insisted that he did not sign a contract with the authorities in Mexico City, there seems to have been some understanding on the part of the administration that the murals needed to be completed by a certain date for an artist to receive full payment.  

Even with the loan from the Guggenheim Foundation and the low cost of living in Mexico City during this time, however, Noguchi would eventually need to take on additional portrait work:

New research at The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné has revealed that Noguchi sculpted four portraits while in Mexico City. Two of these portraits, of Kent Leavitt, American Vice Consul at Mexico City, and his wife, Molly Boocock Leavitt, are now in the permanent collection of The Noguchi Museum. Noguchi’s portraits of wealthy industrialist Walter P. Douglas and his wife, Edith Margaret Bell Douglas, remain with the family. 

The Douglases were living in Mexico City during this time with their free-spirited daughter, Naomi Douglas (later Kitchel). According to family lore, Naomi Douglas began training to be one of the few female bullfighters in Mexico City, an activity her parents only discovered when they were called to the hospital after she was gored by a bull. In one photograph in the Kitchel family’s collection, Naomi is seated beside visiting Spanish matador Domingo Ortega (1906–1988), and friend Pepe Madrazo, whose family supplied the fiercest bulls for the Mexico City arenas.

Another photograph, taken by Naomi Douglas, depicts Noguchi sculpting the portrait of Walter P. Douglas in clay. Naomi Douglas was also training as an artist with the Spanish painter Carlo Ruano Llopiz (1978–1950), who was working in Mexico City at this time, and it is possible that Noguchi and Douglas met through mutual acquaintances in Mexico City and that she later introduced Noguchi to her parents and to the Leavitts. 

With the proceeds from these portrait commissions, the monies Noguchi finally received from the Mexico City authorities, and from the sale of the car he had borrowed from Fuller, Noguchi was able to fund his stay in the city and later finance his return to New York when the mural was eventually completed.

Even while History Mexico was Noguchi’s first realized public art project, his sensitivity to the history, meaning, and purpose of the architectural context of the mural already suggests the thoughtful and considered approach of many of his most successful designs for public spaces. The Mercado Abelardo Rodriguez, completed in 1934, had been built in the style of the surrounding colonial-era buildings. In the years following the Mexican Revolution, Mexico City had seen waves of workers from the countryside migrating to the city looking for work. This new covered market building replaced the haphazard maze of stalls in the open streets, offering such basic improvements as garbage collection services. The Mercado building was a symbol of the social and economic reforms of the Rodriguez administration, which was in power between 1932 and 1934. The original plan for the mural scheme had been to emphasize scenes of health, hygiene, and nutrition. But after 1934, under the subsequent regime of Lázaros Cádenas del Rio (1895–1970), the emphasis in subject matter shifted from depicting the social benefits brought about by the revolution toward scenes of the social and economic injustices that had made the revolution necessary. Marion Greenwood spoke about this shift in an interview with Dorothy Seckler for the Archives of American Art in 1964:

Noguchi would later acknowledge this as well, explaining:

While he was never a member of the Communist Party, Noguchi did acknowledge that during this period he turned toward Marxism out of sympathy for some of its larger aims. During the most difficult years of the Depression, Noguchi had been able to sustain himself and his artistic practice by carving portrait heads. Not only did he come to resent the time he spent pursuing and sculpting these commissions as being a distraction from creating more innovative modern art, Noguchi also later recalled that by the mid-1930s he had become “sort of disgusted or disillusioned with the social crust.”³⁸ His awareness of the relative disparities between the lifestyles of his wealthy patrons and the living conditions of the working class became particularly acute during his time working in Hollywood as a guest of the glamorous actress Miriam Hopkins. The movie business was one of the few profitable industries during the 1930s, and the contrast between life in Hollywood (“that glittering mirage”) and the widespread unemployment in New York City would have been sobering to the young artist.³⁹

Another difficult irony of this period for Noguchi is that the minimal income he earned carving portrait heads excluded him from receiving commissions from the WPA for public art projects. Many artists during this period spoke of the spirit of camaraderie which developed within the artistic community, but especially among artists working for the WPA. Noguchi had already recognized the practical need to join with other artists in order to promote his work with galleries and collectors. During the 1930s, he joined several loosely organized groups in the hope of collaborating with other artists to secure work from the government through proposing ambitious public projects.  

One of Marion Greenwood’s particular memories of being an artist in Mexico City in 1935 was that artists stood in the same line as any other laborers on payday.⁴⁰ For Noguchi, this equal treatment of artists and the respect they received for their contributions was a revelation:

Although Pablo O’Higgins was officially responsible for overseeing the decoration of the Mercado building, Noguchi noted that each artist had been required to submit a plan for designs to Diego Rivera for approval. Noguchi remembered that Rivera accepted his design without comment. Noguchi’s early painted sketch for History Mexico, unfortunately, has disappeared, so it is not possible to assess if or how the original design evolved before completion. Noguchi recalled that he started by sketching his design onto the walls, and from there, built up the substructure with a layer of brick, over which he then added a layer of concrete filler. The final surface was formed by adding a smooth layer of pigmented cement.

As Noguchi described it:

The Greenwoods were still working on their own murals and witnessed Noguchi at work. Marion Greenwood recalled that he “hacked out with an ax on built up brick a big relief, half sculpture, half painting, and then covered it with fresco paint. It was a very interesting technique.”⁴³

Both the technique and the materials used to sculpt History Mexico speak to one of the central motivations of Noguchi’s artistic practice. Over a career of more than six decades, Noguchi continually searched out new and innovative ways to employ established techniques and familiar, often humble materials to create art and design that was essentially modern. The traditional method of fresco painting, in which pigment is mixed with wet lime plaster and applied to interior walls and ceilings, was known as early as ancient Egypt and achieved particular technical and expressive excellence during the Renaissance. In order to sculpt History Mexico, Noguchi reengineered traditional fresco painting through his use of pigmented cement and concrete, the materials commonly used in industrial construction, and thereby created a boldly innovative hybrid of fresco painting and modern sculpture.  

This same drive for reinvention also motivated Noguchi’s treatment of the mural’s subject matter and the way in which it was integrated into the mural’s composition. While Noguchi consciously referred to the thematic and symbolic vocabulary of Mexican muralism during the 1930s, his interpretation of these references transformed their local and historical connotations. Rather than quoting directly from recent events in Mexican history, he drew on his international perspective and charged History Mexico with telling the larger story of humanity’s struggle toward social justice in the modern age.

This approach is manifested throughout the narrative of History Mexico. The opening scenes of the composition on the right-hand wall establish the setting as New York’s Wall Street, complete with the spire of Trinity Church and the Stock Exchange building. Bags of money sit nearby, ready to be used as cannonballs. In the upper left of the scene, a skeleton is poised to drive a spike through the throat of the “fat Capitalist.” Noguchi acknowledged in his autobiography with an allusion to “shades of Posada!” that this skeletal figure was a conscious reference to the work of the popular Mexican political lithographer José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar (1852–1913).⁴⁴ One is also reminded of Noguchi’s contemporaneous sculpture, Death (Lynched Figure), where the artist used another disturbing image of a human corpse as a statement about social injustice. The figure of the Capitalist, Noguchi later explained, was a caricature of American banker and financier J. P. Morgan, who is easily recognized by his profile and formal attire.⁴⁵

The next image of the narrative depicts the disembodied arm of “capitalism” as it wields the whip that drives the military-industrial complex. In fact, the Mexican economy at this time was still largely agrarian, so Noguchi’s point of reference, again, is the workings of the international political economy rather than the local situation in Mexico. It was global capitalism that he saw as feeding the rising tide of fascism in the West during the 1930s.  

Just visible in the corner below the image of the hand and whip of capitalism we see the bundled wooden rods and axe forming the ancient Roman symbol of power and authority known as the fasces. The fasces became one of the emblems adopted by the National Fascist Party in Italy under Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). Also included in this scene is an image of a large black swastika. This ancient symbol appears in several other murals throughout the Mercado building, including one of the ceilings painted by Pablo O’Higgins. However, Noguchi’s muscular version of the swastika is a clear reference to the symbol as coopted by the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s. Noguchi’s interpretation of both the fasces and the swastika (in foreshortening) owes much to contemporary news stories reporting on the increasing militarization of Europe. In the mural, the fasces and swastika hover ominously over an army of marching soldiers. 

Next, we see a fallen cross crushing humanity under its weight. This is an image Noguchi borrowed from Mexican muralism, specifically Orozco’s Migration of the Spirit (1934) which is one of the twenty-three mural panels forming The Epic of American Civilization. Noguchi also placed a prone corpse below the fallen cross.  

Recalling the symbolism of Noguchi’s submission to the Newark Courthouse competition, the face of the corpse is shielded by an open book. The inference is a comment on the control that organized religion has had over the course of human history.

As the mural’s narrative proceeds, these opening scenes of oppression and violent conflict culminate in the defeat of fascism and the collapse of capitalism along with the many attendant social and political institutions that support it. Noguchi seems to use the bright daylight entering through the central window to punctuate this climactic moment. In the aftermath of the collapse of the old order, a new era dawns under the red banner of socialism. Labor unites to rescue humankind and carry it into a more rational future. Noguchi included the head of a bull above the cross so that the red banner has a dual meaning as a local reference to the toreador’s red cape.

Yet, although History Mexico contains many specific references to Mexico and the themes and symbolic language of Mexican muralism, Noguchi’s mural is unlike any of the other murals in the Mercado Rodriguez. The most obvious difference is that History Mexico is a sculptural relief—the only such example in the building. Many of the murals in the Mercado take advantage of the building’s two-story-high ceilings, but Noguchi responded to the particular space he was assigned by squeezing his mural into a relatively narrow eight-foot-high band so that certain elements appear to bulge under the weight of the ceiling, thereby heightening the sense of tension taking place in the drama of the first scenes. Even the whip in the hand of capitalism extends emphatically beyond the frame of the mural and into the ceiling area of the room, drawing the eye up and leading the narrative forward.

It is worth noting here that while many of the other murals in the building could be lifted out of the context of the Mercado and still make sense as largely independent works of art, History Mexico is very much a product of, and is bound to, its architectural context. In fact, Noguchi used the logistics of the room to manage the way the viewer experienced his composition. His singular ability to respond to both the restrictions and possibilities of a given space and to mold that space to the needs of his art is visible in his many clever acknowledgments of the existing architectural details of the room.

For example, he used the two pilasters on either side of the room to frame the action of the mural’s narrative, treating the pilasters as curtains being drawn back to reveal a staged tableau. Noguchi’s long involvement with the theater remains one of the most creatively inventive areas of his artistic practice, and it is no coincidence that his first stage set design for Martha Graham’s Frontier (1935) was mounted earlier in the same year that he designed and sculpted History Mexico.

Art historian Ellen Landau argues that Noguchi’s awareness of contemporary innovations in modern dance is visible in the positioning of some of the figures in the mural, which can be read as deliberately arranged to suggest dance poses and foot positions that Noguchi would have become familiar with through working with dancers such as Graham.⁴⁶

As he explained in his interview for New Masses in 1936, Noguchi believed that global political and economic trends were evolving away from capitalism and toward a new socialist order. This evolution is echoed in the direction of the narrative of History Mexico which moves from the right-hand panel of the composition where the interests of capitalism are in control, toward the left-hand panel, which envisions a more equitable future under socialism.  

Following the climactic scenes in the middle panel, the turbulent and crowded scenes of the right-hand section of the composition finally give way to depictions of peaceful agrarian abundance. Although Noguchi would have been aware that the Mexican economy of the 1930s was still largely agrarian, he included images of a future Mexico where modern farming techniques, factories, and oil derricks improve the collective prosperity of the Mexican population.

The relatively limited palette Noguchi used is another example of the ways in which History Mexico is a departure from the often brightly colorful murals throughout the Mercado. His sophisticated juxtaposition of bold colors like black, white, and red heighten the sense of drama in the scenes on the right. By contrast, the more muted pastels in the scenes on the left, which are also sculpted in comparatively shallow relief, emphasize the dawning of a new era of peace and prosperity.  

In many ways, the final panel of History Mexico is especially aligned with Noguchi’s interests and some of the central themes of the sculptor’s artistic practice. The transition into the last scenes of the mural is visually delineated by a thin white vertical form in the shape of a plane propeller which was a reference to the expanding accessibility of commercial aviation during this time. Noguchi’s general fascination with technology and contemporary advances in modern science are also evidenced in the inclusion of the symbols of all three fields of scientific inquiry: chemistry, biology, and physics. Some of these motifs and forms are borrowed from earlier works. The vital processes of biology are represented by three biomorphic shapes suggesting single-cell organisms observed under a microscope. The second of these three forms is reminiscent of the model Noguchi made of his unrealized design for the von Sternberg pool, rendered here as a reverse mold. And recalling the original version of his sculpture Birth that so offended Marie Harriman, Noguchi placed an equally vivid portrayal of the act of birth over the window in the far left wall of the mural. This scene depicting the renewal of human life is juxtaposed with the scene showing the death of the capitalist over the far-right window.

Noguchi also reused ideas developed for the composition of History Mexico in his later work. The motifs of the test tube and beaker that reference the study of chemistry, for example, reappear in his composition for a proposed mural design for the Medical Building at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The narrative of the mural culminates in the figure of an “Indian boy” standing in profile on the far left of the final scene. This figure recalls Noguchi’s earlier sculpture Black Boy, but both examples are steeped in the tradition and symbolism of the kouros from ancient Greek sculpture.  Noguchi’s understanding of art history, literature, and the stage resonates throughout the composition of History Mexico, infusing such symbols and motifs with layers of deeper significance. Typically, the kouros would take the form of a standing nude male youth with his arms held to his sides, usually with his left foot striding forward. As opposed to any particular individual, the kouros is understood to have represented an ideal of male youth, and it is this symbolic meaning that Noguchi invests in his “Indian boy.” Similar to an unnamed narrator who appears on stage at the end of a play, the boy gazes back across scenes of the mural and invites the viewer to consider its lessons and larger themes.  

The immediate focus of the boy is on Einstein’s famous formula for special relativity, E = mc2. It was only during the early 1930s that new scientific research began to find evidence that ultimately proved the theory that Einstein first posited in 1905. Noguchi had written to Buckminster Fuller from Mexico about using the formula and received a fifty-word telegram in response where Fuller explained its meaning and importance. Given both men’s enthusiasm for the humanitarian uses of scientific innovation, Noguchi’s inclusion of Einstein’s equation in such an optimistic scene within the composition of History Mexico has a certain tragic poignancy. Neither Noguchi nor Fuller could have known that within ten years this same research into the fundamental properties of matter would enable humankind to harness the awesome potential of the atom to create a weapon of mass destruction and death.

In an interview Noguchi gave in 1978 for an unrealized documentary by Bruce Bassett, the sculptor acknowledged that his view of the world as expressed in History Mexico, including the mural’s “optimistic” last scenes, had been colored by his youthful enthusiasm as well as his perspective as an American. Rather than endorsing leftist politics, however, Noguchi maintained that his objective in creating the mural was to provide a view of “history as seen from Mexico in 1935–36.”⁴⁷ This distinction concerning the larger meaning of the mural is also evidenced in the way that the title of this work evolved during Noguchi’s lifetime. The original title, History as Seen from Mexico in 1936, changed several times, and by the publication of his autobiography in 1968, the title had been distilled into the one by which the mural is known today: History Mexico. As he explained in his autobiography, the subject of the mural “was history as I saw it at that time, from Mexico.”⁴⁸ 

James Oles has remarked that the way in which the title of History Mexico changed over time is an example of Noguchi’s sophisticated understanding of history itself, which is always determined by context.⁴⁹ This awareness of how our own perspectives determine the way we understand the present moment was formative to the way that Noguchi interpreted the subject matter of the mural. Noguchi seems to have drawn on the examples of various established formal narrative models from art history, including traditional Chinese painted handscrolls. As in History Mexico, the narrative in such paintings proceeds from right to left through a sequence of scenes that depict the beginning, middle, and end of the tale being illustrated. These scenes appear to take place simultaneously within the same picture plane. The artist assumes that the viewer’s familiarity with the storyline will enable them to recognize these autonomous moments in the narrative as being part of a larger story that had played out over time. 

Another model Noguchi may have been considering is the example of medieval and Renaissance religious paintings. The way he incorporated the angles of the three walls of the stairwell landing into the mural’s composition suggests the open wings and central panel of a painted triptych.  The triptych was used from early Christian times as both a private and public devotional object and traditionally comprised three hinged wood panels decorated with painted scenes from the Bible or other religious texts. When opened, the scenes depicted on the interiors of the side panels were engaged to deepen the viewer’s understanding and appreciation of the primary scene that appeared on the central panel. 

In History Mexico, Noguchi created a similar sense of revelation in the way the right and left “wings” of the mural relate to the center wall. Perhaps most telling of Noguchi’s awareness of Renaissance religious art and iconography, however, is how the three main scenes of the mural’s narrative appear to draw parallels between the course of human history and the three main events in the life of Jesus Christ: his birth into an age of cruelty and corruption, his crucifixion and death, and finally his resurrection and the promise of redemption for humankind. In this context, the fallen cross in the central panel of History Mexico becomes an especially prescient reference point given the number of human lives that would be sacrificed on the battlefields of Europe in the decade after the mural was completed. 

Even while Noguchi adapted certain formal narrative techniques from past artistic traditions, his interpretation of the themes and concerns that are at the center of the mural’s composition was critically informed by many of the revolutionary ideas circulating in contemporary artistic and intellectual circles in Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. For many members of the European intelligentsia, the scale of the destruction during World War I and the enormous dislocations that followed had signified a definitive break in the traditional course of human history. This was reflected in the radical ideas, art, and literature of a series of avant-garde artistic movements that arose during the interwar period. These included the jarring formal abstractions of Cubism, the deliberate irrationality of Dadaism, and the introspective explorations of Surrealism. While each of these artistic movements was a distinct manifestation, they all shared a conscious rejection of traditional artistic norms in their search for an appropriate artistic response to the dehumanizing effects of the modern industrial age.  

Noguchi’s interest in the formal, stylistic, and theoretical innovations of early-twentieth-century modernism is visible throughout the composition of History Mexico. His choice to portray this moment in history in 1935–36 as a series of scenes from the past, the present, and a theoretical future suggests the fracturing of time and perspective that is so central to Cubist art. In the same way that Cubism attempted to depict the experience of a three-dimensional object as it might be observed by the viewer as they move through space, Noguchi attempted to portray a specific period in history by unfolding multiple perspectives of a transient experience over the flat walls of the Mercado.

The ideas and formal experimentation of Dadaism were also significant influences on the development of the mural’s composition. The way that Noguchi juxtaposed groupings of motifs and symbols on the walls of the mural suggests the influence of Dadaist collages. Many of the chaotic scenes in the opening panels of the mural, for instance, especially the vignette depicting the violent death of the Capitalist, evoke the exaggerated gestures of Dadaist art and its embrace of anarchy as a means of representing the absurdity and impersonal cruelty of the modern age. 

Surrealism’s explorations of the landscape of the human psyche appear to have had an especially profound influence on History Mexico’s composition and thematic agenda. A central belief of Surrealist ideology was in the power of dreams and the unconscious mind to reveal and explain the deeper significance of our daily experiences in the so-called rational world. Noguchi’s professedly subjective interpretation of the unfolding course of modern human history suggests an examination of the artist’s own psychological experience of this period in Mexican and world history. His later explanation of History Mexico’s subject as being a depiction of ‘history as I saw it at that time, from Mexico”⁵⁰ offers the mural’s composition as a stream of images that had appeared spontaneously in his semiconscious mind and then flowed uninterruptedly onto the walls of the Mercado. 

While the mural features certain superficial references to the culture and recent history of mid-1930s Mexico, Noguchi’s inclusion of scenes drawn from contemporary international news media is revealing of his own deep sense of unease and anxiety about the devolving global political and economic situation of the late interwar years. The first panels of the mural depict the kind of nightmarish scenes of systemic violence and oppression that often appeared in the novels of such Surrealist writers as Franz Kafka (1883–1924). These images are contrasted with the final scenes of the mural, which evoke a vision of a utopian future as might materialize in a particularly vivid dream. History Mexico, like the work of many Surrealist artists, may therefore also be read as a portrait of Noguchi’s own mental and emotional state in which his fears and anxieties about this period in history inhabit the same dreamscape as his hopes for the future and the improvement of the human condition. 

This interpretation of History Mexico as a glimpse into the artist’s personal worldview during the mid-1930s is particularly poignant in that Noguchi seems to have continually reassessed the mural’s message throughout his long life and career. In the interview he gave while standing in front of the mural in 1978, Noguchi acknowledged resignedly that socialism had failed to achieve the future as predicted in final scenes of the mural. More than forty years after finishing the mural, he noted that many of its central concerns about the modern human condition were still relevant and pressing. Reflecting on the mural’s themes against the backdrop of the late 1970s, Noguchi observed, “you might say, that the situation isn’t too different today, . . . we still see the same forces, . . . contending.”⁵¹ 

Today, History Mexico is increasingly appreciated as an enormously complex and ambitious work of art. It is not only a tour de force in sculpture, but also a deeply personal statement created by a singular artistic mind during a relatively brief interlude in his life and artistic career. While this mural is closely identified with a particular moment in Mexican art history, Noguchi’s skillful handling of the themes and symbols of Mexican muralism within the context of his own artistic agenda created a synthesis that connected local preoccupations with an exploration of more universal concerns about the human condition in the modern age. The renewed attention History Mexico has recently received is long overdue and will continue to play a vital role in the preservation of Noguchi’s remarkable sculpted mural, installed into and onto the walls of a modest workers’ market in downtown Mexico City.   

Alex Ross is Managing Editor of The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné.

Copyediting by Stephanie Salomon. 

Transcripts of archival materials are available by request to accessibility@noguchi.org.

¹ Interview with Isamu Noguchi, Oral history interview with Isamu Noguchi, conducted by Paul Cummings, conducted at the artist’s studio in Long Island City, New York, November 7, 1973, transcript, 23. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

² Sam Hunter, Isamu Noguchi (New York: Abbeville Press, 1978), 62.

³ Isamu Noguchi, Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 23.

⁴ Isamu Noguchi, draft of “A Sense of Place,” c. 1979. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_BOL_017_001, 99.

⁵ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 99.

⁶ Interview with Isamu Noguchi, “Cement: Noguchi’s polychrome relief achieves a powerful effect,” New Masses, September 15, 1936, 10. The Noguchi Museum Archives, B_CLI_1000_1936.

⁷ Carlos Merida, Frescoes in Rodriguez Market by Various Artists: An Interpretive Guide with 16 Reproductions, Mexican Art Series, 9 (Frances Toor Studios, 1943). The Noguchi Museum Archives, B_PA_1000_1943.

⁸ Merida, Frescoes in Rodriguez Market, B_PA_1000_1943.

⁹ Noguchi’s apparent discomfort with the leftist themes in History Mexico during and after World War II are completely understandable. By the early 1940s, his reputation for creating art with socially conscious themes, his involvement with activist artist organizations, and especially his own racial identity following the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan had made the sculptor the focus of attention by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Author Amy Lyford was able to obtain copies of parts of Noguchi’s much-redacted FBI file, including an index card from the War Relocation Authority (WRA) Evacuee Case File, now in the National Archives, Washington, DC. Dated December 12, 1942, the card notes that on April 1 of that year “a confidential informant” had described Noguchi as “an artist, a Communist, and anti-Japanese.” See Amy Lyford, Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 3. Following his release from the Poston War Relocation Center in Yuma County, Arizona, in November 1942, Noguchi took a studio in MacDougal Alley where the FBI began secretly interviewing his postman about the source and number of letters he was receiving. Even in early 1945 when he was living and working in New York City, because of the WRA, Noguchi was still in danger of being confined at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. 

Perhaps the most painful legacy of the lingering suspicion around his political inclinations by governmental authorities was the difficulty he had during the early 1950s in securing a U.S. visa for his new bride, the actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi, whom he married in 1951. Her own complicated identity as a Japanese citizen born and raised in China, her propagandistic film work during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, and her personal resistance to swearing loyalty to the U.S. government were significant factors in Yamaguchi’s visa application to the United States being refused. In terms of the larger impact of these experiences on Noguchi’s artistic practice however, during the decades that followed the sculptor’s incarceration at Poston, a shift away from overtly political statements in Noguchi’s art is discernible. And as can be seen in his later explanations of the themes of History Mexico, Noguchi tended to minimize the leftist ambitions in the subject matter of the composition, preferring to emphasize his general concerns for the human condition in the modern world.  

¹⁰ Isamu Noguchi, letter to Monroe Wheeler, August 6, 1942, MoMA Exhs., folder 209.5, MoMA Archives, NY.

¹¹ Interview with Isamu Noguchi by Bruce Bassett, conducted January 21, 1978, The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_048_001, transcript, 109–111.

¹² Noguchi interview by Bassett, MS_WRI_048_001, 109–111.

¹³Among the recent publications focusing on Mexican muralism and Noguchi’s History Mexico are James Oles, “International Themes for a Working Class Market: Noguchi in Mexico City,” American Art 15, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 10–33; Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adele Greely eds., Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012); and Ellen G. Landau, Mexico and American Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). See also the accompanying catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2020 exhibition VIDA AMERICANA: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art 1925–1945.

¹⁴ Oles, “International Themes for a Working Class Market,” 10–33.

¹⁵ Noguchi interview by Cummings, 22. 

¹⁶ Marie Harriman Gallery exhibition brochure, 1935. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_EXH_014_001.

¹⁷ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 92. 

¹⁸ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 22.

¹⁹ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 91.

²⁰ Isamu Noguchi, letter to George Gershwin, undated. The George and Ira Gershwin Collection, 1895–2008, Correspondence, box 64, folder 49, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

²¹ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 23.

²² “Sculpture by Noguchi at Harriman,” exhibition review, New York Post, February 2, 1935. The Noguchi Museum Archives, B_CLI_0423_1935.

²³ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 23.

²⁴ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 91. Here, Noguchi misspells “Hotel des Artistes” as “Hotel Des Artist.”

²⁵ Oral history interview with Marion Greenwood, by Dorothy Seckler, January 31, 1964, transcript, 2. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

²⁶ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 94.

²⁷“Agreement between Mr. Earl L. Stendahl and Mr. I. Noguchi, July 30, 1935.,” Stendahl Art Gallery Records, 1907–1971. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, box 2, folder 26. The agreement letter that set out the terms of this arrangement is preserved in the Archives of American Art and is dated July 30, 1935. This is one of the few documented dates we have for Noguchi’s movements in 1935. 

²⁸ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 95.

²⁹ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 95. 

³⁰ Isamu Noguchi, interview by Katie David for National Public Radio on Frida Kahlo, Mexico, and the art world. The Noguchi Museum Archives, AV_MAR_012_1988.

³¹ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 96.

³² The cornerstone of this New Deal Era building was laid in 1933 and opened in 1936. In 2000, by act of Congress, the building was renamed the Frank R. Lautenberg U.S. Post Office and Courthouse.

³³ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 96.

³⁴ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 96. 

³⁵ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 99.

³⁶ Greenwood interview by Seckler, 6. 

³⁷ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 97.

³⁸ Isamu Noguchi, interview by Nancy Grove, July 5, 1988. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_092_001, 15.

³⁹ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 94. 

⁴⁰ Greenwood interview by Seckler, 4.

⁴¹ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 23.

⁴² Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 98.

⁴³ Greenwood interview by Seckler, 6.

⁴⁴ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 23.

⁴⁵ Noguchi, “A Sense of Place,” MS_BOL_017_001, 99.

⁴⁶ Ellen G. Landau, “Noguchi, Mexico, and Martha Graham,” in Mexico and American Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 2.

⁴⁷ Noguchi interview by Bassett, MS_WRI_048_001, 110–11.

⁴⁸ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 23.

⁴⁹ Oles, “International Themes for a Working Class Market,” 10–33.

⁵⁰ Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 23.

⁵¹ Noguchi, interview by Bassett, MS_WRI_048_001, 111.