[Isamu Noguchi, full-length portrait, facing right, standing by his sculpture of a nude woman]

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Standing full length and turned to the right, the young Isamu Noguchi poses beside one of his own sculptures, a figure of a nude woman, in this portrait made around 1927. Noguchi, born in 1904 to a Japanese father and an American mother, was then building his reputation as a sculptor in the United States and Europe, and he spent part of that period working in Constantin Brancusi's Paris studio. The picture shows him presenting himself as an artist first, with his work in the frame as evidence of his ambitions. Portraits of sculptors beside their work were a common way for artists of the 1920s to introduce themselves to critics and patrons.

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