It took a half century for a concept on paper to become a 58-ton sculpture to commemorate an event that took place on June 10, 1752.
Isamu Noguchi submitted an idea for a work of art to honor Philly’s most famous resident, Benjamin Franklin. The submission was delivered in 1933 (some accounts say 1934) to a Philadelphia agency preparing to commemorate the city’s founding.
Back then, Noguchi’s suggestion never really panned out.
But in 1979, the idea resurfaced at an exhibition of his work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Noguchi was commissioned by the Association for Public Art to make the sculpture as a present to Philadelphia to mark the city’s tricentennial in 1982. By that time, Noguchi had earned a reputation as one of the world’s great sculptors.
On June 23, 1984, the sculpture was completed, and Noguchi titled it “Bolt of Lightning. . . A Memorial to Ben Franklin.”
“It’s beautiful. Now it begins to relate to the sky and to us and our looking at it. It’s really extraordinary. I must say it — even if I say it,” Noguchi said at the time.
It took nine hours and two large cranes to install it.
The work illustrates Franklin’s flying a kite in a thunderstorm — an experiment whose mythos is perhaps Franklin’s most well known tale. It now stands on a plaza at the base of the Ben Franklin Bridge.
“What’s so interesting is that an idea lives… You can’t kill it so easily,” Noguchi was quoted as saying at the sculpture’s nighttime unveiling on September 18, 1984, in the New York Times.
“When I designed it, I never thought it could be built, structurally. But one can dream things, yes?”
Noguchi and then-mayor Wilson Goode spoke at the ceremony as the sculpture was illuminated with lights. It is 101 feet tall and 60 feet wide.
According to Mark Kirsch, Curator and Director of Research at The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, NY, its location was chosen by Noguchi.
“I’m sure that the idea of the bridge plaza being one of the first glimpses of the city for drivers exiting the Ben Franklin bridge would have been an attractive option.” Kirsch told Billy Penn.
Kirsch said the sculpture was constructed in sections— the base/framework, the key, the “lightning” element (the only element that is stainless steel) and the kite, and these pieces are stabilized by guy cables. The completed design had to be engineered by Paul Weidlinger, who worked with Noguchi on a fountain in Detroit.
The sculpture received mixed reviews when it debuted.
“Around the time “Bolt of Lightning” was dedicated, it seems there was a lot of debate in Philadelphia about the city reaching its threshold for public art, I think especially after all the different bicentennial commissions, the Oldenburg ‘Clothespin’ and because of the Rocky statue,” said Kirsch. “Part of that debate was that lesser known artists lost out on commissions that went to more established artists like Noguchi and Oldenburg, which is a valid point, of course.”
“‘Bolt of Lightning’ was the subject of dismissive letters to the editor and op-eds, some saying it was a bit outdated and staid, others saying that it was dwarfed by the bridge and lost in its surroundings. It did have its defenders, too,” said Kirsch. “Noguchi would have been somewhat used to these kinds of criticisms. The ‘Landscape of Time’ commission he did for Seattle in the mid 1970s was criticized as a waste of taxpayer dollars (for ‘a bunch of rocks’) and just a few years earlier, ‘Shinto,’ a commission for lobby of Bank of Tokyo in New York, had been removed (with Noguchi finding out after the fact) because customers felt it was vaguely threatening.”
“Noguchi was aware that it wasn’t typical of his work at that moment, because it was a callback to a period when he was still finding the right balance of recognizable imagery for his work, particularly in the era of Public Works of Art Project, when he would have been especially concerned about communicating a message to the greater public. That said, he did manage to economically distill the basic iconographic elements of the (disputed?) story of Ben Franklin’s experiment similar to the way he approached the set design work he did for choreographer Martha Graham (and others),” said Kirsch.
“I went to grad school in Philadelphia at Temple University for two years and I have to admit that although I did see the Bolt of Lightning as I passed on the bus exiting the bridge however many times, it really only registered to me as public art and it wasn’t until years later that I learned it was by Noguchi. I think that maybe lends some truth to this idea that Philadelphia is a city that is somewhat saturated with public art,” said Kirsch.
“But I do recognize it now as a kind of a monument to Noguchi’s persistence. He pitched a lot of designs over his lifetime – playgrounds, parks, memorials – that went unrealized, but he recognized that they were still milestones in his personal development as an artist and, occasionally, an older idea might take a little longer for him to adapt into something else or to be understood on its own terms and valued by others.”
Isamu Noguchi died on December 30, 1988, at 84 of heart failure. In its obituary for Noguchi, The New York Times called him “a versatile and prolific sculptor whose earthy stones and meditative gardens bridging East and West have become landmarks of 20th-century art.”
