The Jantar Mantars of Northern India
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The Jantar Mantars of Northern India Noguchi as Photographer January 8 - May 31, 2015 “My educational process has always been sort of his ambitions to design playgrounds and proto- earthworks, was captured by Berenice Abbott and backward. It’s the opposite of the way that people F.S. Lincoln. As he developed from an emerging artist generally learn. You know, for instance, people learn into an artist’s artist and then became one of the preeminent American sculptors of his generation in language by studying grammar and so forth but I the 1940s, his work and studio life were chronicled never did. I speak French fairly fluently and so do by Rudolph Burckhardt, André Kertész, Ezra Stoller, Arnold Newman, and Eliot Elisofon. Noguchi often I speak Japanese but I couldn’t write a sentence in acted as his own agent and promoter, and he used either language. I just know the idea, so to speak. And the photographs taken by these superb artists extensively for publicity and marketing. While he was I think that’s how I look at things too. I mean, I know sometimes photographed for national publications, it by looking rather than through any knowledge.”1 Noguchi often paid photographers to record his studio work and, later, his public commissions. In 1950, Noguchi was reunited with his younger half- his exhibition marks the first brother, Michio Noguchi, a skilled photographer installment of Noguchi as who effectively became the official documenter of Photographer, a planned series that his career and personal life for nearly four decades. will plumb the depths of The Noguchi By the 1980s, Noguchi’s stature as a living master Museum’s extensive archive of the precipitated a friendly working relationship with other artist’s photographs. For the first well-known photographers, such as Shigeo Anzai and two decades of Isamu Noguchi’s a young Robert Mapplethorpe. career, his work was documented by well-known Tphotographers. His transition from figurative to In 1949, Noguchi embarked on a period of travel for abstract sculpture in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a proposed book on public spaces throughout the the lean years when Noguchi balanced the portrait world, and he purchased a Leica to record what he commissions that were his bread and butter with encountered. While the book was never completed, Cover: Samrat Yantra (foreground) and Misra Yantra (background), Delhi observatory, 1949 Fig. 1: Inside one of the Jai Prakash Yantras (armillary spheres) Jaipur observatory, 1960 1 Fig. 2: Great Samrat Yantra at Jaipur observatory, 1960 Noguchi made the occasional print or slide from his trove of negatives, and he occasionally loaned them A Visit to India out. He photographed mostly for his own use, with no Noguchi’s visits to Delhi and Jaipur in the autumn of real intention of exhibiting his photographs publicly. 1949 were brief stops on a tour throughout India, as part of an even grander tour of Europe and Asia. In a bid to The photographs were a visual well that he could uproot himself from what he saw as a limited trajectory return to. Many of the sites he visited—documented as a studio artist in New York, Noguchi obtained a grant as air travel opened the world and collapsed from the Bollingen Foundation in 1948. He had been boundaries—became important fodder in his wide- itching to secure public projects but had found little ranging practice. This stockpile is a unique window success, remarking, “in the creation and existence of a into the career of one of the most well-traveled artists sculpture, individual possession seems less significant of his time, a one-man UNESCO who considered than public enjoyment.”3 He outlined an itinerary that himself a citizen of the world. would allow him a one-year period of intense travel, the result of which was to be a book on what he termed the Noguchi as Photographer: The Jantar Mantars of Northern “environment of leisure”: how the built environment in India documents Noguchi’s visits to two 18th-century public spaces (such as plazas, ceremonial sites, and sites in Delhi and Jaipur. These sites, the largest of temples) shaped communities and fostered culture and the five campuses constructed under the aegis of a how sculpture and architecture reflected man’s concept Rajistani governor named between 1710 and 1728, are of himself in relation to religion and nature. In that first part of a long lineage of venues built throughout Europe, year, he visited France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, India, the the Mediterranean, and the Middle East for collecting Far East, and finally, Japan. Travelling light, a sculptor astronomical data and measuring time.2 By Noguchi’s without a studio, he took up sketching and photography era, the Jantar Mantars were thriving tourist curiosities. to capture what he saw, and these sources made up the His photographs from visits in 1949 and 1960 are bulk of his notes for the intended book. evidence of the obvious attraction they held for him, a source for many of the ideas on sculpted space that he His visit to India had been long anticipated. In his would elaborate on, particularly in his public projects in 1927 application to the John Simon Guggenheim the second half of his career. Foundation, Noguchi had already demonstrated 2 Fig. 3: View of glimpses of a philosophy that extended beyond the India, but ultimately he managed to secure only one, Ram Yantra, making and exhibition of stand-alone sculpture. for a portrait bust of Nehru. Noguchi’s visit preceded Altitude/ Azimuth He requested support for three years of travel, the first waves of international interest in India, which instrument, Delhi, observatory, 1949 intending to study stone and wood carving in Paris exploded in the ’50s as the Cold War powers vied for for a year before spending the next two exploring an alliance with the burgeoning economic force. By Asia, specifically, India. He was granted a one-year 1958, Nehru’s government, as well as a few wealthy stipend, and his plans were further altered by his Indian families, sought out Western modernists apprenticeship with Constantin Brancusi in Paris in as sympathetic advisers—and in some cases, 1928. Before the stipend expired (his application for collaborators—in its attempts at decolonization. The a renewal was declined), Noguchi nevertheless made French architect Le Corbusier, American architect good on his desire to learn more about Asia, spending Louis Kahn, and designers Charles and Ray Eames, a few weeks combing the British Museum’s holdings among others, undertook projects in India within a on Asian art during a visit to London. few years of Noguchi’s visit.4 Noguchi arrived in India in September 1949, just Evidence of Noguchi’s initial stay in India consists over two years after the country’s independence. In primarily of his photographs and, to a lesser extent, the mid-1940s, he had been involved with the India a sheaf of notes from his travels and a few letters League of America in New York, a pro-independence to Bergstein that survive in The Noguchi Museum group through which he met a number of Indians, Archive. While he complained about its squalor, including the Pandit sisters (relatives of Pandit Noguchi found India to be an ideal model for the Jawaharlal Nehru, the eventual first Prime Minister of study of his concept of leisure. In notes recounting a independent India) and his friend Gautam Sarabhai’s stay at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, family, whose Ahmadabad-based Calico Mills he wrote, “The spirit of India is against change—the modernized India’s textile industry. While travelling in new is not a quality but a defect. Tradition defines the India, Noguchi took advantage of a network of hosts precepts of all life, it sets the cannons [sic] of beauty, through the Sarabhai family, as well as the classical the rhythm and meaning of every gesture within it is Indian choreographer Uday Shankar in Madras. In peace—here tradition is alive.”5 letters to his accountant, Bernie Bergstein, Noguchi revealed his hope of finding commissions while in 3 Fig. 4: View of translated as “instruments and formulae” and “magic Ram Yantra from The Jantar Mantars of sign”) observatory at Delhi from 1718 to 1724, Jai the steps of the Samrat Yantra, Northern India Singh built a grander version at his newly established Jantar Mantar Having already traveled throughout southern India, capital at Jaipur in 1728.8 observatory, Ceylon, and Sri Lanka, and to such ancient sites as Delhi, 1949 Ajanta, Ellora, and Kailasa, Noguchi made his way The campus at Jaipur was designed and built by the Fig. 5: Plaster north in December 1949. He used Delhi as a base Raja Guru Jagganath and Guru Vidyadhar, the latter of studies for Play and explored at least two of the five campuses whom was also the designer of the greater city plan Equipment, mid-1960s. constructed by the Raja Sawai Jai Singh II of Amber, of Jaipur. Jaipur remains one of the few rectilinear those in Delhi and Jaipur.6 As a governor in Agra and city plans in India—another of Jai Singh’s interests Malwa, Jai Singh, a Hindu, had successfully navigated was architecture—and the observatory was plotted a seemingly continuous succession of Islamic Mogul in an expansive courtyard adjacent to Jai Singh’s and then Persian rulers in the region, somehow palace at the city center. Jaipur’s Jantar Mantar’s holding on to his governorship and establishing Jaipur layout followed sacred precepts of the ancient Hindi as his capital in 1728.7 Jai Singh was deeply immersed architectural manuals that stressed the need for in the study of astronomy, and his library purportedly the first stones of its foundations to be laid east to included rare books from European and Middle west; this arrangement was supposed to ensure Eastern astronomers, including two who had already that its architecture was completed in harmony built measuring equipment on an architectural with the cosmos.