[3] Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.

Yone had ended his relationship with Gilmour earlier that year and planned to marry The Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes.

In 1912, while the two were living in Chigasaki, Isamu's half-sister, pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement Ailes Gilmour, was born to Léonie and an unknown Japanese father.

As one of Borglum's apprentices, Noguchi received little training as a sculptor; his tasks included arranging the horses and modeling for the monument as General Sherman.

Noguchi arrived in Paris in April 1927 and soon afterward met the American author Robert McAlmon, who brought him to Constantin Brâncuși's studio for an introduction.

[16] Meanwhile, Noguchi found himself in good company in France, with letters of introduction from Michio Itō helping him to meet such artists as Jules Pascin and Alexander Calder, who lived in the studio of Arno Breker.

Noguchi's next major destination was India, from which he would travel east; he arrived in London to read up on Oriental sculpture, but was denied the extension to the Guggenheim Fellowship he needed.

A 1930 exhibit of several busts, including those of Martha Graham and Buckminster Fuller, garnered positive reviews,[23] and after less than a year of portrait sculpture, Noguchi had earned enough money to continue his trip to Asia.

[24] Even before his arrival in Kobe, Japanese newspapers had picked up on Noguchi's supposed reunion with his father; though he denied that this was the reason for his visit, the two did meet in Tokyo.

Here he took note of local Zen gardens and haniwa, clay funerary figures of the Kofun period which inspired his terracotta The Queen.

Though very few sold, Noguchi regarded this one-man exhibition (which began in February 1932 and toured Chicago, the west coast, and Honolulu) as his "most successful".

[25] Additionally, his next attempt to break into abstract art, a large streamlined figure of dancer Ruth Page entitled Miss Expanding Universe, was poorly received.

In early 1935, after another solo exhibition, the New York Sun's Henry McBride labeled Noguchi's Death, depicting a lynched African-American, as "a little Japanese mistake".

The 20-meter-long History as Seen from Mexico in 1936 was hugely political and socially conscious, featuring such modern symbols as the Nazi swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the equation E = mc².

The first of these, a fountain built of automobile parts for the Ford Motor Company's exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair, was thought of poorly by critics and Noguchi alike[30][31] but nevertheless introduced him to fountain-construction and magnesite.

Conversely, his second sculpture, a nine-ton stainless steel bas-relief entitled News, was unveiled over the entrance to the Associated Press building at the Rockefeller Center in April 1940 to much praise.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment was energized in the United States, and in response Noguchi formed "Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy".

He later helped organize a documentary of the internment, but left California before its release; as a legal resident of New York, he was allowed to return home.

Although he created several plans at Poston, among them designs for baseball fields, swimming pools, and a cemetery,[34] he found that the War Relocation Authority had no intention of implementing them.

In June, Noguchi applied for release, but intelligence officers labeled him as a "suspicious person" due to his involvement in "Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy".

The most famous of these assembled-slab works, Kouros, was first shown in a September 1946 exhibition, helping to cement his place in the New York art scene.

This relationship was to prove very fruitful, resulting in several designs that have become symbols of the modernist style, including the iconic Noguchi table, which remains in production today.

During this period he continued his involvement with theater, designing sets for Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring and John Cage and Merce Cunningham's production of The Seasons.

Near the end of his time in New York, he also found more work designing public spaces, including a commission for the ceilings of the Time-Life headquarters.

[39] Following the suicide of his artist friend Arshile Gorky in 1948, and a failed romantic relationship with Nayantara Pandit (the niece of Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru), Noguchi applied for a Bollingen Fellowship to travel the world, proposing to study public space as research for a book about the "environment of leisure".

[50] In its obituary for Noguchi, The New York Times called him "a versatile and prolific sculptor whose earthy stones and meditative gardens bridging East and West have become landmarks of 20th-century art".