Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan

by Dakin Hart (Editor), Matthew Kirsch (Primary Contributor), Mark Dean Johnson (Editor)

In May 1950 Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) returned to Japan for his first visit in 20 years. He was, Noguchi said, seeking models for evolving the relationship between sculpture and society—having emerged from the war years with a profound desire to reorient his work “toward some purposeful social end.” The artist Saburo Hasegawa (1906–57) was a key figure for Noguchi during this period, making introductions to Japanese artists, philosophies, and material culture. Hasegawa, who had mingled with the European avant-garde during time spent as a painter in Paris in the 1930s, was, like Noguchi, seeking an artistic hybridity. By the time Hasegawa and Noguchi met, both had been thinking deeply about the balance between tradition and modernity, and indigenous and foreign influences, in the development of traditional cultures for some time. The predicate of their intense friendship was a thorough exploration of traditional Japanese culture within the context of seeking what Noguchi termed “an innocent synthesis” that “must rise from the embers of the past.”
 
Changing and Unchanging Things is an account of how their joint exploration of traditional Japanese culture influenced their contemporary and subsequent work. The 40 masterpieces in the exhibition—by turns elegiac, assured, ambivalent, anguished, euphoric, and resigned—are organized into the major overlapping subjects of their the landscapes of Japan, the abstracted human figure, the fragmentation of matter in the atomic age, and Japan’s traditional art forms.
 
Published in association with The Noguchi Museum.
 
Exhibition
Yokohama Museum of Art, January 12–March 21, 2019
The Noguchi Museum, New May 1–July 14, 2019
Asian Art Museum, San September 27–December 8, 2019

240 pages, Hardcover

Published March 15, 2019

Reviews

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Japanese-American sculptor Noguchi is the much more widely known of these two artists, at least in the United States, but I found myself more drawn to the paintings of the Japanese-born Hasegawa. Noguchi, who had been a student of Brancusi, whose influence clearly remained with him throughout his career, came to Japanese art almost as an act of protest against the US government's mistreatment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. His "Japanese-influenced" totemic works, while many of them are beautiful, felt a little artificial to me, like someone trying to fit on a heritage that no longer suited them.

Hasegawa is a painter whose work I would like to further explore and am very happy to have had the introduction to which this exhibit provided me. Steeped in the traditions of Japanese painting, he not only was not put off or threatened by western modernism, but felt that abstraction and surrealism, as being practiced in the west, were in some ways rooted in the Japanese tradition, or at least that Japanese art had always been, to some degree, abstract. His work, unmistakably rooted in ancient Japanese traditions yet utterly modern, convinces one of his thesis.

Perhaps predictably, the American sculptor spent much of his life traveling, but with a bulk of his later life in Japan, while the Japanese painter spent his last years hanging with beat poets in a house-boat off San Francisco.