“The spirit, Chinese mountains seen in mist, as shadow, as setting for a distant trip—the different moods of nature were in my thoughts.”

— Isamu Noguchi [1]

Rain Mountain belongs to a series within Isamu Noguchi’s mature oeuvre that focuses on mountain forms, topography and other natural phenomena. Immersing himself within nature was at the heart of Noguchi’s work since the beginning of his career: in applying for a Guggenheim fellowship in 1927, Noguchi wrote, “It is my desire to view nature through nature’s eyes, and to ignore man as an object for special veneration... Indeed, a fine balance of spirit with matter can only concur when the artist has so thoroughly submerged himself in the study of the unity of nature as to truly become once more part of nature.” [2] This desire permeated his work up until the last decade of his life, when Noguchi began this steel-mountain series. In the spring of 1982, he sent fabricator Peter Carlson twenty-six Styrofoam sculptures to be realized in hot-dipped galvanized steel. Noguchi was famous for experimenting with various mediums throughout his career, and this was his first foray into galvanized steel. He saw the fabrication of the sculpture as a way of provoking nature, proclaiming , “[the] Industrial process has its own secret nature—its own entropy, its own cycle of birth and dissolution.” [3]

[2] D. Apostolos-Cappadona and B. Altshuler, eds., Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, New York, 1994, p. 16