When the names Isamu Noguchi and Hasegawa Saburo are mentioned together, the former is likely received with knowing nods by those familiar with mid-twentieth-century art; the latter, less so. Noguchi's art and design work, known for combining traditional Japanese aesthetics with Western modernist principles, has remained relevant in the half century since the two artists met and collaborated, while Hasegawa's art and ideas have been largely forgotten. Addressing this imbalance was one of the goals of the exhibition Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, the catalogue for which is the subject of this review along with The Saburo Hasegawa Reader (hereafter the Reader), published by the exhibition organizers in both print and digital formats.
The body of the catalogue features seven essays on Hasegawa and Noguchi, their brief period of personal and artistic interaction in the early 1950s, and their ongoing relationship beyond this collaborative period. It is richly illustrated with color artworks ostensibly included in the exhibition, as well as with monochrome photographs, including several charming snapshots of the two artists taken together during their tour of Kyoto and Nara. The first essay by Bert Winther-Tamaki narrates the circumstances that first brought the two artists together and describes the cultural conditions on the ground in Japan, including the larger postwar debate on whether Japan should foster knowledge and appreciation of premodern “traditions” (broadly defined) or whether these should be ejected along with other problematic values embraced during Japan's imperialist period. Concurrent with the “tradition dispute,” as Winther-Tamaki calls it, was the United States’ “Japan boom” of the 1950s, during which Western artists, architects, and critics lauded the model of traditional Japanese culture as a forerunner of modernist art and design. It is an effective introduction to the two artists and their fruitful interactions, by an author previously known for excellent scholarship on Noguchi.
Matthew Kirsch focuses on Noguchi's Japan tour from 1950 to 1952, with special emphasis on a visit to Nara and Kyoto organized by Hasegawa. The essay is illustrated with striking photographs, including many images taken by Noguchi indicating special access at such famous temples as Hōryū-ji, Yakushi-ji, and Daitoku-ji (one depicts a priest perched atop one of the garden stones Daisen-in, reflecting a much looser attitude toward the famed garden than is prevalent today). Both Kirsch's text and the accompanying photographs help explain why the Nara-Kyoto excursion was so inspirational not just for Noguchi's future art, but also for Hasegawa, who evidently found the role of cultural interpreter for non-Japanese visitors extremely rewarding.
Koichi Kawasaki's “Regretting the Future: Noguchi and Hasegawa Consider the Direction of Postwar Japanese Art” seems imperfectly titled, as it focuses primarily on Hasegawa's life and practice, with little consideration of Noguchi or postwar Japanese art. Still, it is an important contribution toward the publishers’ stated goal of bringing Hasegawa out from under Noguchi's shadow. Kawasaki's capsule biography traces Hasegawa's education (including his early scholarly focus on Muromachi-era ink painter Sesshū at university), his postgraduate travels in Europe, and his advocation upon his repatriation for abstraction and avant-gardism in Japan. Kawasaki also explains how Hasegawa's relocation during the Pacific War from Tokyo to rural Shiga coincided with or possibly catalyzed his discovery and subsequent devotion to Zen, Daoism, tea ceremony, haiku composition, and other traditional aspects that Hasegawa bundled together under the mantle of “Orientalism.” This same period is simultaneously marked by Hasegawa's turn away from oil painting, abstraction, and Western-style modernism and toward the expressive potential of sumi ink explored through painting, calligraphy, prints, and rubbings. It ends with a discussion of the work that Hasegawa performed for New York and Bay Area museums, galleries, and art schools near the end of his life, initially as curator, then as exhibiting artist, and finally as teacher, attaining a level of recognition and celebrity in the United States no longer possible for him in Japan.
Other essays work to contextualize specific artworks featured in the exhibition. Naoaki Nakamura discusses Isamu Noguchi's Bell Tower for Hiroshima, one of two models created and displayed in Tokyo in 1950 (the version illustrated in the catalogue is a reconstruction dating to 1986) in the context of memorial designs for the Hiroshima atomic bomb site. Nakamura's contribution includes impressive detailed primary document research, and credits Hasegawa with introducing Noguchi to teahouse architecture and aesthetics, which informed his memorial designs. Mark Dean Johnson's essay discusses Hasegawa's activities in the United States in his last years of life, with special focus on the reception of calligraphy and calligraphy-inspired artworks he exhibited in New York City in 1953. It includes discussion of several works illustrated in Changing and Unchanging Things and expands on Hasegawa's self-reinvention in the Bay Area as a teacher, promoter, and performer of East Asian culture, similar to roles he played as Noguchi's cultural guide during the latter's Japan visit.
Dakin Hart's essay focuses on Noguchi's sculpture, especially on examples inspired by Japanese aesthetics and practice associated with the world of tea. Hart is careful to note, however, that these interpretations were sculptures first, and that they departed from the sourced traditions as much as they preserved them, in a manner Hart characterizes as “forward-looking continuities” (p. 139). The last essay by Yasufumi Nakamori takes up Hasegawa's photography works, particularly his photograms. Since there appears to be no clear record attached to the examples illustrated, they can only be attributed to Hasegawa, but the well-documented circumstances of their recent discovery make a good case for his authorship. The photograms are some of the most surprising examples of Hasegawa's artwork from the 1950s and demonstrate that he was not finished with modern art and abstraction just yet, despite his hard turn toward Japanese traditionalism.
According to the organizers, The Saburo Hasegawa Reader was produced and made available as a free digital publication to help correct the neglect that Hasegawa suffers from today. As laudable as this is, Hasegawa is partly responsible for his own fall into obscurity in Japan, dating to his decision to largely withdraw from contemporary Japanese art circles in the 1940s to pursue his interest in traditional Japanese religion, thought, and culture. As much an act of self-erasure as self-exile, the new attitudes that accompanied this pursuit were received with puzzlement and even alarm by his peers, with art critic Segi Shinichi describing Hasegawa's fascination with tradition in terms of “fanatic Japanism” (Winther-Tamaki, p. 25), although “Self-Orientalism” might be a better description. This is because Hasegawa's idealized view of traditional Japan functioned as spiritual counterpoint to the materialist West.
Also, while much of Hasegawa's thought owes a debt to Okakura Kakuzō's (1863–1913) earlier exegeses of Japanese culture, I do not believe Hasegawa's thought should be characterized as “aesthetic nationalism,” as John Clark does of Okakura's.Footnote 1 Hasegawa's Japan was a philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic complex of his own curation, sometimes contradictory, always affirmatively spiritual, but in a realm apart from modern Japan's historical or political realities. Indeed, Hasegawa's concept of Japan prefigured the one taken up by Roland Barthes in Empire of Signs, about which Barthes states, “If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively like a romantic object . . . isolate a certain number of features . . . and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.”Footnote 2
In addition to a brief biography of Hasegawa, the Reader consists of four thematic sections featuring writings by and about the artist. The first two sections are thematically related, with the first, “Artist of the Controlled Accident,” featuring essays written by Hasegawa's friends and peers and collated in 1957 but never published, and the second being “Remembrances of Former Students” from Hasegawa's time teaching in the Bay Area. Both sections feature lauds of a sort exemplified by “Saburo Hasegawa as a Leader of Modern Art in Japan,” by Elise Grilli. Her essay offers an image of an Eastern sage equally versed in Western modernism and “the Oriental tradition” and, despite its title, only briefly touches on Hasegawa's significance as a contemporary Japanese artist by describing his calligraphy works as “pure abstract art,” merging sensibilities of the traditional Eastern with the modern Western. This explanation may well have come from Hasegawa himself, as it features the kind of reasoning, often selective, that characterizes much of his thought (after all, a concept like “calligraphy as pure abstraction” will only make sense to an audience unlettered in Japanese, since a reader of the language would reflexively perceive even experimental calligraphy as text, not abstraction). Alan Watts appears to have understood that Hasegawa's reasoning often relied on intuitive or idiosyncratic rather than fact-based readings, noting in his contribution that Hasegawa's “abstraction” does not correspond to the way the term is normally understood, but rather to Daoist or Zen inflected ideas of simplification or abbreviation as a path to deeper understanding or reification.
The second half of the Reader is organized into two sections, “Selected Letters to Isamu Noguchi” and “Selected Essays by Saburo Hasegawa.” While essays in the catalogue tend to emphasize Noguchi's dependence on Hasegawa for knowledge and insight on Japan's thought, art and culture, Hasegawa's letters to Noguchi suggest how much the former came to depend on the latter for sympathetic affirmation of his views, something not forthcoming from his Japanese colleagues and peers. The style and contents of Hasegawa's letters might be characterized in Japanese as zappitsu or “idle jottings” flowing from topic to topic, including anecdotes about lives of Zen priests and Daoist eccentrics, reflections on the art of calligraphy, descriptions of local art exhibitions, and samples of poems written by former students. For Hasegawa, these sundry topics could, and should, all be unified under the rubric of “Orientalism,” which he believed to be the greatest gift Japan had to offer Noguchi, and the West in general.
“Selected Essays by Saburo Hasegawa,” the most substantial section, features more of Hasegawa's ruminations on a wide array of subjects, including the ink painter Sesshū Tōyō, Song and Yuan dynasty bird-and-flower painting, the art of Piet Mondrian, the architecture of Katsura Imperial Villa, realist painting versus photography, among many others. Sometimes these essays serve to clarify Hasegawa's ideas, sometimes they further obscure or even contradict them. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in his consideration of Sesshū, the subject of Hasegawa's Tokyo University of the Arts graduation thesis and the focus of continuous personal and scholarly interest for the length of his life, so much so that Hasegawa carried a reproduction of Sesshū's Long Landscape (Sansui chōkan) painting like a talisman whenever he traveled abroad (Reader, p. 61). Yet the facts and images of Sesshū that Hasegawa conjures for the reader are often wildly at variance; for example, in one instance he notes that Sesshū “followed in the footsteps of the admirable Chinese painters” (Reader, p. 68), and in another that, “Except for the most superficial resemblance in appearance, Chinese ink paintings and Sesshū's are completely unrelated,” (Reader, p. 54) finally concluding that “Sesshū was a painter born in Japan. That is all we need to say” (Reader, p. 54). Like the greater “Japan complex” from which he is drawn, Hasegawa's Sesshū is an idealized creation derivative of but not dependent on the historical version, useful to fulfill whatever anecdotal function Hasegawa requires of him. Yet as capricious as Hasegawa's views of Japan and its traditional culture may have been, their power to inspire many in the West cannot be questioned.
Perhaps Hasegawa's true legacy is not to be found by parsing his ideas as preserved in the Reader, but rather by exploring their impact on the output of artists like Isamu Noguchi, poets like Gary Snyder, and philosophers like Alan Watts in the 1950s, a time when Western fascination with things Eastern allowed for closer resonance with Hasegawa's passionate, idiosyncratic “Japanism.”
