Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan

After this they became close friends, and Hasegawa served as an incomparable guide to the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Japan, including architecture, garden, calligraphy, painting, archaeological artifacts, the tea ceremony, Zen, and haiku, playing a crucial role in forming Noguchi’s understanding of the essence of Japanese aesthetics, while dialogues with Noguchi encouraged Hasegawa to extend the frontiers of his abstract art by working in traditional Asian media such as sumi ink, rubbings, and woodblocks.

This exhibition focuses on the friendship between these two artists, exploring what they saw, thought about, and aspired to do, through approximately 50 works by Noguchi and 70 by Hasegawa, particularly from the years of their association in the 1950s.


*Some works will be replaced with others while the exhibition is on view, for conservation purposes.

The goal Noguchi and Hasegawa shared can be described as the synthesis of “the old East and the new West,” reflecting Hasegawa’s own words. How could the art of the coming era balance tradition and modernity, indigenous culture and foreign influence? An ongoing interest in this challenging question characterizes the two artists’ work. Hasegawa went to the United States in 1954 and was warmly welcomed in New York, where Japanese culture was in vogue, practicing the tea ceremony and lecturing on Taoism and Zen while producing and exhibiting abstract paintings in sumi ink, and associating with Franz Kline and other American abstractionists. After temporarily returning to Japan and then immigrating to San Francisco in 1955, Hasegawa made an impact on young writers and artists of the Beat Generation with his lectures at California College of Arts and Crafts and the American Academy of Asian Studies. In addition to Hasegawa’s best-known 1950s works in Japanese collections, this exhibition presents many works produced in the US, quite a few of which have never been shown in Japan. Meanwhile, Noguchi’s works from the 1950s when he was traveling back and forth between the US and Japan, including sculptures in ceramic, stone, aluminum, cast iron, bell bronze, and balsa wood, and his extensive series of “Akari Light Sculptures,” show essential aspects of the traditional cultural heritage of Japan that Noguchi viewed with Hasegawa, and of Zen Buddhism and other East Asian philosophy, his understanding of which deepened during their dialogues. His works embody these qualities in the language of abstract art, but do not fall into a specific style or a superficial imitation of any Japanese object. Noguchi’s works in this show, which range widely in materials and sizes, from the small ceramic “Face Dish” to the larger than life size aluminum-plate “Sesshu,” the philosophically titled balsa wood “Mortality” and the carved stone “Garden Elements” with a height of 2.6 meters, reflect his ambitions to make a world art that addresses all people beyond temporal and cultural boundaries. At the same time we can say that the essence of Noguchi’s art as we perceive it today was forged during this period of engagement with Japan.

Hasegawa Saburo (1906 – 1957)

Hasegawa Saburo studied oil painting under Koide Narashige when he was a student at Konan High School. He went on to major in art history at Tokyo Imperial University and quickly became versed in both art technique and theory. Studying art in Europe for three years, starting from 1929, he made up his mind to devote himself to painting. He started creating abstract oil paintings in 1936 and was among the founders of the Association of Free Artists (Jiyu Bijutsuka Kyokai). He also produced photographic works from the time of the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937) until the end of World War II (1945). With increasingly severe suppression of speech and expression, he turned to studies of haiku, Zen, and tea ceremony. After the war, he resumed his activities as a painter with the Modern Artists Association of Nippon, founded in 1947. Meeting Isamu Noguchi in 1950 and traveling together with Noguchi in Kansai region, Hasegawa gained confidence in his long-held premise of a relationship between Abstract Art and traditional Japanese aesthetics. He shifted from oil painting to rubbings and ink painting. In 1954 he was warmly welcomed in New York, in the midst of a ‘Japan boom’ at the time. After briefly returning to Japan, he moved to San Francisco where he had an appointment as a professor and significantly influenced young artists until he passed away in 1957.