Hideo Noda

Hideo Noda (野田 英夫), also known as Hideo Benjamin Noda and Benjamin Hideo Noda, was a Japanese-American modernist painter and muralist, member of the Shinseisakuha movement in Japan, student of Arnold Blanch, and uncle of Japanese printmaker Tetsuya Noda, as well as alleged communist spy recruited by Whittaker Chambers.

Noda was born on July 15, 1908, in Agnew's Village, as the second son of Eitaro Noda, who had emigrated from a small village in the Kumamoto Prefecture of Japan.

He returned for some years to his home prefecture in Kumamoto, where he attended junior high school.

Returning to California, he graduated from Piedmont High School in Oakland in 1929.

Noda soon attended the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA—now San Francisco Art Institute. There he met Arnold Blanch, who taught at the Art Students League in New York. Noda saw Diego Rivera paint The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, April–June 1931, at the school.

Later in 1931, he was studying mural-tempera painting there under Blanch, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and George Grosz.

He lived for a time at the Woodstock Art Village with fellow students Sakari Suzuki and Jack Chikamichi Yamasaki.

(A fellow student of the Art Students League, member of the John Reed Club, and artist concerned with African-American rights was Esther Shemitz, by 1931 wife of Whittaker Chambers. ) In New York, Noda became acquainted with leftist American art historian Meyer Schapiro, a classmate of Chambers at Columbia, and they corresponded between 1934 and 1936.

In 1932, he won a prize from the Chicago Art Institute and exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Washington, DC.

He was a member of the Mural Painters Guild and the Woodstock Artists Association

In 1933, Noda became one of several assistants to Rivera on the artist's work for Man at the Crossroads in Rockefeller Center Plaza in New York City.

(Other assistants included: Lucienne Bloch, Stephen Pope Dimitroff, Lou Block, Arthur Niendorf, Seymour Fogel, and Antonio Sanchez Flores.)

Photographer Walker Evans knew Noda in New York in 1933.

Estelle Hama, wife of painter Art Hama, recalled of 1933-1934 "I met Art in New York at the John Reed Club. They had just formed. He was a protege of the artist Kuniyoshi. I knew Kuniyoshi. Well, everyone knew Yasuo in those days. They were friends Isamu Noguchi, Hideo Noda, and Eitaro Ishigaki."

In 1934–1935, Noda's work appeared in the Whitney Museum's "Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting" along with Kuniyoshi's. According to an entry, "Hideo Noda participates in Whitney Second Biennial; his painting 'Street Scene' is purchased by the museum."

Noda was involved in a conflict over a mural he designed for Ellis Island in 1934–1935.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted, "Look for Hideo Noda's 'Street Scene.' Noda is a mural painter and a real modern, immensely responsive to the daily sorrows and beauties of people in 1935."

In 1935, Noda's murals lost out to those of Edward Laning for Ellis Island: It was a great relief to PWA, to the College Art Association, to Architects Harvey Wiley Corbett and Chester Holmes Aldrich and to Edward Laning last week to learn that Commissioner of Immigration & Naturalization Rudolph Reimer at Ellis Island had finally approved Artist Laning's designs for murals for the dining hall at New York's immigrant station.

Cheered, Muralist Laning and his two assistants, James Rutledge and Albert Soroka, hustled to get his cartoons on tempera and gesso panels as soon as possible ...

No sooner was Muralist Hideo Noda's cartoon submitted to him than Commissioner Reimer blossomed out as a stickler for artistic detail.

The Noda mural was promptly rejected because Negro cotton pickers were shown wearing turtlenecked sweaters and creased trousers, because the creature pulling a poor blackamoor's farm cart seemed to be a full-blooded Percheron stallion.

Artist Noda threw up his hands and his job, went back to California.

Sherman and Noda spent an unsuccessful year (1935) in Tokyo, at the end of which the cell closed suddenly and both returned to New York.

Chambers provided perhaps the longest description of Noda by a contemporary.

He claims he was a member of the American Communist Party.

He says he was a relative of one of Japanese premier, Prince Fumimaro Konoe.

"He was extremely intelligent, alert, personable and likable."

Noda agreed to go to Japan to work for Sherman, who gave him the underground name "Ned".

In 1936, upon Noda's return to New York from the failed Tokyo cell, Chambers gave him his next instructions, namely to go to Southern France (Nice or Antibes) and wait until contacted.

At that time, Chambers advised him to get out of the underground: Noda reacted by denouncing Chambers as a "Trotskyist wrecker".

Returning to California in 1937, he painted the mural School Life in the Piedmont High School.

Returning to Japan, he continued his work "in the modern art, art societies, Shinseisakka (ja:新制作協会) and Nikka".

Noda joined the John Reed Club of New York, where Eitaro Ishigaki and "Chuzo Tomatzu" (Chuzo Tamotsu) were founding members.

Chambers records his last sightings: "Some time in 1937 or 1938, Hideo Noda ... flitted through New York again. Before Noda had been alert, somewhat as birds are, as if in him mental and physical brightness were one. Now he seemed a little faded and tired. Our brief meeting was stiff. Perhaps he still considered me a 'diversionist mad dog' and was disappointed to find that I had not, after his denunciation of me to the Party, been purged. But I suspect that Noda was so silent because, had he begun to speak, the words that came out would have been: 'Oh, horror, horror, horror!' I stood and watched Ned as he walked away, something that I did not often do. I never saw him again."

Noda died of a brain tumor on January 12, 1939, in Tokyo.

According to The New York Times, he had been "visiting Japan for about a year".

In his 1952 memoir, Whittaker Chambers claimed to have recruited Noda, who he said was a communist, in late 1934 as translator for the head of a Tokyo spy cell.

Helping him were either J. Peters or Meyer Schapiro.

Chambers organized the cell from New York City with the help of John Loomis Sherman, who would head the Tokyo cell, and Maxim Lieber, whose literary agency would provide cover for an "American Feature Writers Syndicate".

In 1970, Laning told American Heritage magazine a somewhat different version of events: "Audrey McMahon told me that Hideo Noda, a young Japanese who had been assigned to make sketches for a long wall in the Administration Building at Ellis Island, had disappeared without leaving any word. Hideo, a gentle boy of poetic temperament, had found the resident commissioner of immigration impossible to cope with and in despair had run away. 'The commissioner is difficult,' Mrs. McMahon added, and I thought to myself that if she thought so, he must be a dragon."