A photograph shows two men sitting on tatami mats in the shelter of a Japanese-style garden pavilion. This image commemorates the consequential meeting in 1950 of two artists, one Japanese American but drawn to Japan, the other Japanese but influenced by the West, both in search of a new direction for modern art in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The photograph was taken when U.S.-born sculptor and designerIsamu Noguchi (1904–1988) and Japanese artist, theorist and teacherSaburo Hasegawa (1906–1957) were traveling together to visit historicsites around Kyoto. They both believed that by immersing themselves intraditional Japanese culture they could find a way to propel modern artforward in the nuclear age.

Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan traces the work, ideas and mutual influence of these two artists,one well known as a sculptor and designer and the other a painter little known outside Japan but who had strong ties to San Francisco. Focusing on artworks made in the decade following their meeting, the exhibition is organized around a series of themes that bring out the resonances between Noguchi’s sculptures and design work and Hasegawa’s explorations in painting, printmaking and photography. Situating the work of both artists side by side forcefully reveals their innovative fusion of Japanese tradition and modernist form.

During their exploration of historic gardens, palaces and temples in Japan, Noguchi and Hasegawa discovered their shared passion for classical Japanese culture and their remarkably similar aesthetic sensibilities. It was the Los Angeles–born Noguchi’s first visit since 1931 to the country where he spent his childhood. Hasegawa, who was enlisted as his guide, was raised in Japan in a cosmopolitan household and had spent several years in Paris beginning in the late 1920s. He was a leading proponent of abstraction in the Tokyo art world of the 1930s, but during the war he had retreated into the study of Zen and the traditional tea ceremony. Noguchi, for his part, was seeking to view Japanese art in its original context to discover the “spirit of things past.”

Noguchi and Hasegawa both reacted to the catastrophic effects of the war by questioning how art — and society — could balance tradition and modernity, Japanese culture and foreign influences, past and present. They were both committed to modernist practices, such as the removal of the inessential, truth to materials and a utopian belief of the power of art to improve society, but felt that modernism needed a new direction, one that could be provided by a deep exploration of Japanese art, design and culture.

Around the time he met Noguchi, Hasegawa abandoned oil painting in favor of ink (sumi); he employed traditional materials and techniques to create abstract imagery. His work from the 1950s includes abstract calligraphy, rubbings, brush paintings, monotypes and block prints and he often employed traditional formats such as folding screens and hanging scrolls. In The Butterfly Dream — from Zhuangzi (1956), an example of Hasegawa’s abstract calligraphy, ink characters are dispersed on the paper in a way that suggests the movement of the butterfly described in the poem. Several series of photograms Hasegawa made in the early 1950s show related explorations of abstraction and composition.

Noguchi’s work was also profoundly impacted by his time in Japan with Hasegawa. He saw his ceramics from this period as a “true development of an old tradition,” modern takes on tea ceremony vessels. The iron, wood and rope sculpture Calligraphics (1957) shows the influence of Hasegawa’s abstract calligraphy. The stele-like works Sesshu (the title is a nod to Hasegawa’s favorite ink-wash painter) and Orpheus (both 1958) are made of folded sheets of aluminum inspired by origami and kirigami.

Hasegawa spent the last years of his life in the United States,where he played a key role in transmitting Japanese philosophy andculture to the American avant-garde. After a year of professionalsuccesses in New York in 1954, Hasegawa moved to San Franciscoto teach drawing and Asian art history at the California Collegeof Arts and Crafts (now CCA) and lecture and teach the practiceof tea ceremony at the now-defunct American Academy of AsianStudies. Hasegawa felt more appreciated in the U.S. than in hisnative Japan and believed that it was only in America that he coulddevelop an abstract art rooted in Asian tenets.

Hasegawa’s death from cancer in 1957 at the age of 50 put astop to that trajectory. It is fitting that San Francisco, the city wherehe left a strong legacy as a teacher and where his work was firstexhibited (in 1952, at the Legion of Honor), is a venue for this firstsubstantial consideration of Hasegawa’s work outside Japan.

The story of the friendship between Noguchi and Hasegawaand their shared artistic concerns adds nuance to the usualnarrative of postwar art. Their practices do not fit neatly into anygroup, movement or style — in part because their profound interestin tradition was shared by few of their peers — but Noguchi’sand Hasegawa’s concern for balancing old and new, local andglobal, abstraction and representation seems as pressing, andcomplicated, today as it was in 1950. n