Noguchi said some of his political fire was the result of his unsettled and precarious circumstances when he got back from the orient and had to face the problems of making a living and finding a place to stay. At one point sales were so bad that he was evicted from his studio. Certainly, a little first-hand rub with homelessness and the vicissitudes of life played their part.

But it was also during that period that he thought up the designs for some of his most ambitious, straight-forward and lavish (if unrealized) Americana works such as Monument to the Plow, Monument to Ben Franklin, Play Mountain and his Musical Weather Vane. These, he reported. were done in an atmosphere of despair and a search for a form of expression that would be "at once abstract and socially relevant."

One might suppose, then, that the $1000 commission from the Rose Marie Harriman Gallaries to do a one man show was a catalyst for bringing the mix of grandiosity and politics into a tight volatile package of social protest with his "Death" and "Birth" pieces done for the exhibit. Even he says of "Birth" (which was refused a place in the exhibit), "It was to shake up polite society."

There is another direction, however, that one might look for sources that energized those 'shocking' insertions into the political commentary of the time. His visit in the previous year to the Chinese painter, Chi Pai Shi may have played an even greater role. Chi Pai Shi gave Noguchi a painting of pale grapes and narcissus flowers on Noguchi's last day with the aging master. Along with it was the poem, "Who says that flowers have no passion?" and a carved seal.

As I contemplate Noguchi's works, I find it less convincing that his motive to statement in his "Death" and "Birth" works were simply impulsive implements for striking at the conventions of the time. More and more they begin to appear as logical steps in a continuous fabric of development from his earliest creations to his last. It is, I believe, the smoldering embers of Chi Pai Shi's message to the young sculptor that invite Noguchi, throughout his life, to seek out its hidden meaning; the passion of the ordinary flower. What better place for a bi-national adrift from both his countries of origin than to search for the flowering of this passion among kindred subjects caught in their own spaces of circumstantial exile?

Time and again we may discern the motif of the wanderer cut loose from traditional moorings of identity. His visit to a madwoman (?) giving birth at Belvue in 1934 and the lynched negro seen in some fading news photo also depict a measure of the mutual uncertainty they share with the Noguchi who carried an eviction notice in one hand and the mission of the stateless wanderer in the other....

Perhaps, after all, it is the fading echo of the meadowlark which they share in common . . . .

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