"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"--Provided by publisher.
Foreword / Jenny Dixon -- Changing and unchanging things : Noguchi and Hasegawa in postwar Japan : an introduction with editors' notes / Dakin Hart and Mark Dean Johnson -- Modernist passions for "Old Japan" : Saburo Hasegawa and Isamu Noguchi in 1950 / Bert Winther-Tamaki -- "Accumulated impressions" : a photographic travelogue of Noguchi and Hasegawa in Japan / Matthew Kirsch -- Regretting the future : Noguchi, and Hasegawa consider the direction of postwar Japanese art / Koichi Kawasaki -- Isamu Noguchi's memorial to the dead of Hiroshima : the monument that never was and an artistic vision shared with Saburo Hasegawa / Naoaki Nakamura -- Hasegawa in America : a wide open road / Mark Dean Johnson -- The true development of an old traditions : Isamu Noguchi's work in the 1950s / Dakin Hart -- Toward abstraction : Saburo Hasegawa's exploration of the photogram / Yasufumi Nakamori -- Primary sources : Remembrance of Sabro Hasegawa / Isamu Noguchi ; Noguchi in Japan / Saburo Hasegawa -- Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa : Chronology, 1904-April 1959 / Matthew Kirsch.