Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan

Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan

Hart, Dakin
Johnson, Mark Dean
Kirsch, Matthew

Hardcover

Art HistoryAmerican Art - Asian-AmericanJapanese Art

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0520298225
ISBN13: 9780520298224
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: Mar 15 2019
Pages: 240
Weight: 3.85
Height: 1.20 Width: 9.80 Depth: 10.80
Language: English
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 attention: 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.

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