Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years 9780824841492

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A r t in the Encounter of Nations

Bert W i n t h e r - T a m a k i

Art in t h e

Encounter of Nations Japanese and American Artists in t h e E a r l y P o s t w a r Years

University of Hawai'i Press Honolulu

©2001 University of Hawai'i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 06 05 04 03 02 01 5 4

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Library of C o n g r e s s Cataloging-in-Publication

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Winther-Tamaki, Bert. Art in the encounter of nations : Japanese and American artists in the early postwar years/Bert Winther-Tamaki. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-2306-0 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8248-2400-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Art, Japanese—20th century. 2. Art, Japanese—American influences. 3. Abstract expressionism—Influence. I. Title. N7355.W56 2001 709'.52'09045—dc2i

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University of Hawai'i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Diane Gleba Hall Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Title-page illustration: Isamu Noguchi. Studio of the Noguchi/Yamaguchi House. 1951-1952. See Figure 34.

Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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A Note Regarding Transliteration and Citation of Names Introduction Chapter l

1 Relations of Japanese a n d A m e r i c a n A r t

Artistic Nationalism Early Formations Changing Fortunes

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T h e Japanese M a r g i n s of A m e r i c a n A b s t r a c t Expressionism

National Flavors of Abstraction

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Okada Kenzo: Oriental Abstraction

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Hasegawa Saburo: Ambassador of Japanese Art Mark Tobey: A Janus-Faced America Franz Kline: American Graphology Artists Typecast by Nationality Chapter 3

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East-West Rhetoric

Chapter 2

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T h e Calligraphy a n d Pottery W o r l d s of J a p a n

Art Worlds within Nations

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Morita Shiryu: The Lexical Basis of Calligraphy

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CONTENTS

Yagi Kazuo: The Attachment to Clay Proprietorship of Clay and Ink Chapter 4

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I s a m u N o g u c h i : P l a c e s of A f f i l i a t i o n a n d D i s a f f i l i a t i o n Changing Places, Changing Skin Hiroshima: To Build a Nation

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Kita Kamakura: To Dwell in a Nation

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Paris: To Pay Homage to the Japanese Garden Manhattan: To Possess the Japanese Garden The Ground as a Modern Medium Conclusion: Patterns of Interactivity Notes

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Select Bibliography Index

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Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Okada Kenzö, Quality (So) 24 Okada Kenzö, Height ( Taka) 26 Okada Kenzö, By the Window (Madobe) 29 Hasegawa Saburö, Metropolis ( Tokai) 36 Hasegawa Saburö, Yügen 37 Franz Josef Kline, Cardinal 38 Hasegawa Saburö, Supreme Goodness Is Like Water (Jö zenjaku sui) Mark Tobey, Universal Field 44 Mark Tobey, Broadway 47 Mark Tobey, Space Ritual No. 1 48 Mark Tobey, E Pluribus Unum 53 Franz Josef Kline, Untitled 59 Wujun, Enni 60 Hidai Nankoku, Work 1: Variation on "Den" 75 Morita Shiryü, Freeze (Köru) 80 Inoue Yüichi, Work A 84 Hidai Nankoku, Work 22 85 Morita Shiryü, Dragon (Ryu) 88 Yagi Kazuo, Jar with Inlaid Figure 95 Isamu Noguchi, Mrs. White 96 Yagi Kazuo, The Walk ofSamsa (Zamsa no sanpo) 98 Yagi Kazuo with his large Shigaraki jar of 1966 101 Yagi Kazuo, Portrait (Shözö) 102

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Miwa Ryosaku, Black Sonatina (Kuro no sonachine) 105 Isamu Noguchi, Deepening Knowledge and Breakthrough Capestrano 115 Isamu Noguchi, Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars 121 Isamu Noguchi, Model for Bell Tower for Hiroshima 122 Isamu Noguchi, To Build (Tsukuru) 123 Isamu Noguchi, Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima 125 Isamu Noguchi, Mother Goddess No. 1 126 Isamu Noguchi, Clay Studies 127 Shirai Seiichi, Atomic Bomb Hall (Genbakudo) 130 Isamu Noguchi, Big Boy (Oki na ko) 133 Isamu Noguchi, Earthen Wall in the Studio of the Noguchi/Yamaguchi House Isamu Noguchi, Gate (Mon) 143 Henry Moore, Reclining Figure 144 Isamu Noguchi, Waterfall Rock, Delegates Patio 152 Isamu Noguchi, Jardin Japonais 153 Isamu Noguchi, Horai Grouping at Jardin Japonais 154 Isamu Noguchi, Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza 158 Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, One Chase Manhattan Plaza 159 42. Isamu Noguchi examining stones in Japan for his sculptures for First National City Bank, Fort Worth, Texas 160 43. Kondo Hidezo, "You could try and make a stone garden in a place like this, b u t . . . " 161 44. Isamu Noguchi, The Texas Sculpture 162 45. Isamu Noguchi, Sunken Garden at Chase Manhattan Bank 164

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Acknowledgments

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he advice, assistance, encouragement, and expertise of many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances shaped this study at various stages during the long process of its research and writing. I owe thanks to Bruce Altshuler, Ted Fowler, Fujieda Teruo, Amy Hau,

Rebecca Jennison, Kaneko Masaaki, Kawasaki Kôichi, Kômoto Shinji, Kuwabara Sumio, Robert Lubar, Alexandra Munroe, Murayama Yasuo, Okada Takeshi, Ônishi Hiroshi, Sano

Midori, Satô Dôshin, Gert Schiff, Sally Stein, Dickran Tashjian, Tsuji Futoshi, Anne Walthall, Akira Yagi, Sakiyo Yagi, Emiko Yamanashi, and Mimi Yiengpruksawan. Patricia Crosby at the University of Hawai'i Press was uncommonly attentive and supportive. The reviewers for the University of Hawai'i Press spurred the text to greater accomplishment. Starting in the 1980s, I had the honor of meeting numerous individuals who had themselves experienced transactions of art between Japan and the United States in the early postwar years. Sadly, some of them have since passed away. The memories and thoughts that these individuals shared with me, whether in the context of formal interviews or in more casual conversations, were indeed a formative influence on this book, and I would like to express my appreciation to them: Asada Takeshi, Dore Ashton, Gordon Bunshaft, Mildred Constantine, Dômoto Hisao, Enomoto Kazuko, Kiyoko Hasegawa, Hiroi Tsutomu, Ed Ifshin, Inokuma Gen'ichirô, Ishimoto Yasuhirô, Izumi Masatoshi, Kamekura Yusaku, Kanashige Michiaki, Kubota Shigeko, Porter McCray, Moriguchi Akira, Morita Shiryu, Nakamura Kinpei, Nakaya Fujiko, Noguchi Michio, Shoji Sadao, Sano Tôuemon, Shiraga Kazuo, Suzuki Osamu, Tange Kenzo, Taniguchi Yoshio, and Teshigahara Hiroshi. This study has benefited enormously from the stimulating criticisms and encouragements of scholars and colleagues who have listened to my slide lectures on most of the topics addressed in this book at various programs at the following institutions: Art Historians of

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Southern California; the Association for Asian American Studies; the Association for Asian Studies; the Getty Research Institute in Santa Monica, California; the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University; the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York; the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey; the Los Angeles County Museum; Tama Art University in Tokyo; Syracuse University; the University of California at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and San Diego; the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California; the University of Southern California; the University of Colorado at Boulder; and the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Sections of this text are revised from earlier articles: "Yagi Kazuo: The Admission of the Nonfunctional Object into the Japanese Pottery World," Journal of Design History, vol. 12, no. 2, (1999): 123-141; "Mark Tobey, White Writing for a Janus-Faced America," Word and Image, vol. 13, no. 1, (1997): 77-91; and "The Rejection of Isamu Noguchi's Hiroshima Cenotaph: A Japanese American Artist in Occupied Japan," Art Journal, vol. 53, no. 4 (1994): 23-27. I thank the editors and reviewers of these journals for their responses, which often led to extensive revisions. I also thank the publishers of these journals for their permission to use these articles here in revised form. They are, respectively, the Design History Society, Taylor and Francis, and the College Art Association. My research in Japan was supported by fellowships and grants from the Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbusho), the Kajima Art Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and the School of Humanities Committee on Research and Travel of the University of California, Irvine. The perspectives reflected in this book developed in what can be described as an evolving personal position between pasts with the Tamakis of Tochigi and the Winthers of Pennsylvania. Keiko is my partner in creating this position. This book is dedicated with love to her. It is also dedicated to our children Mia and Cy with hopeful thoughts of the new positions they are sure to define for themselves: may they contend with their bicultural beginnings with greater ease than their worthy forebear Isamu Noguchi.

A Note Regarding Transliteration a n d Citation of Names

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ransliteration of Japanese words follows the system used in Kenkyusha's New JapaneseEnglish Dictionary, which indicates elongated vowels with macrons. However, macrons

have been eliminated from those words, mostly place names, where custom has dictated

ease for reading in English, such as Tokyo and Kyoto for Tokyo and Kyoto. The citation of names is complicated by the fact that this study requires as precise a rendition of American and Japanese perspectives of one another as possible. Japanese personal names are given in the Japanese order: family name first, followed by

the given name. The names of Japanese American individuals are given in the order they used, which was usually given name first, followed by family name; hence Isamu Noguchi. It should be noted that Japanese-language references to Japanese Americans such as Isamu Noguchi usually observed this order as an indication of a difference in their position from that of Japanese nationals. Japanese artists and other individuals typically used both name styles depending on whom they were addressing; thus one of the artists discussed in this volume was Okada Kenzo in Japan and Kenzo Okada in the United States. Since a stronger sentiment of affiliation with Japan emerges in this artist's own testimony, I refer to him as Okada Kenzo. Similarly, although his American friends and readers knew him in the 1950s as "Sabro Hasegawa," I refer to this artist as Hasegawa Saburo. However, English-language publications on these and other Japanese artists are cited as they appeared; hence the exhibition catalogue Kenzo Okada, Paintings, 1931-1965. Although many Japanese museum catalogues have an English subtitle, it is frequently not a translation of the Japanese main title. Therefore, unless the catalogue text is fully bilingual, I cite it by its Japanese title.

Introduction

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rmed with a bachelor's degree in art history and some Japanese language training from

the University of Pennsylvania, I moved to Tokyo in 1982 to become a "salaryman" on the staff of an art museum operated by a large department store. By introducing a few

foreigners into its vast all-Japanese work force, the Seibu Group pursued what the Japanese

business world regarded as an innovative program of "internationalization." I found myself in an environment where all eyes sought to constitute my presence as evidence of the difference between the United States and Japan. The desire of so many to see me as an illustration of cliched features of American identity was irritating. Equally dictated by stereotypical thinking were the incessant expectations of visiting American curators, critics, and artists that I provide them with an insider's account of unique or strange aspects of Japanese culture. I developed an aversion to the ongoing entreaties for intimate perspectives verifying a priori native-alien difference. Though savored like keys to some existential reality, the coveted signs of difference were more like the stock images of travel advertising. Artists, I discovered, were besieged by demands for national representation far more intimately biographical and more public in address than those I encountered. Conversations with artists of the generation that came of age in the early postwar years were both fascinating and frustrating; they spoke like veterans of a conflict, deeply invested in the truth of the us-them divide for which they had fought. Sensing my impatience with his culturalist stance, one Japanese abstract painter warned me that a work of art can never be truly understood without a deep appreciation of the cuisine of the artist's nation. He had spent many years in New York, and the political tensions harbored in the close formal relationship of his work to American abstract painting seemed more interesting to me than the esoteric relationship to Japanese diet.

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The unquestioned and essentialistic national identity of the artist was a principal rationale for artists of many nationalities for much of the twentieth century. The ideal of an unimpeachable, nation-based authenticity provided a scaffolding for the development of individualistic originality in a world dominated by a Eurocentric modern art. My suggestion that cross-cultural experience might sustain a greater influence on the content of a work of art than the artist's national identity was irritating to this rationale. I characterize this prevailing mode of thought as "artistic nationalism" in my first chapter. This ideology determined the aesthetic significance of the work of art (in its creation or reception) according to beliefs about national identity in a project driven by the partisan interests typical of nationalist rhetoric. Thus constituted as national self-expression or as expressive foreign object, the artwork performed as a ravishing material embodiment of the desired national identity. Today, however, the extraordinary rise of multiethnic and diasporic identity formations is undermining the system that assigns one and only one inalienable national affiliation to each individual. This paradigm shift demands a reexamination of art in the period when artistic nationalism was so pervasive as to be unnamed and hardly noticed. This study is a critical history of what museum directors and grant proposal writers often refer to as "Japanese-American artistic exchange." Chapter 1 outlines some developments in the longer history of this relationship since the late nineteenth century. As is often the nature of borders, however, greater intensity of contact created higher demand for declarations of difference. Hence, this book deals primarily with the early postwar decades, a period when, as my first chapter relates, the U.S. military defeat of Japan in World War II had the effect of riveting these cultures to one another in a dramatically unequal relationship. My second chapter interrogates the role of Japanese art as a peripheral and exotic foil for the movement of Abstract Expressionist painting in New York in the 1950s. For the first time, New York became a metropolitan destination for Japanese artists fleeing what seemed like the provinciality and backwardness of the Japanese art community. Some Japanese immigrant painters discovered and developed a small niche in the United States for a mode of abstract painting inflected by references to Japanese tradition. The acceptance of their art in European America rested on their presumed combination of a modernity credited to the vital influence of American art and a sense of authenticity dependent on associations with the Sino-Japanese past. Okada Kenzo was the most successful painter working in this niche, while Hasegawa Saburo was the most theoretically and critically astute. Meanwhile, a too conspicuous expression of a fascination with East Asian tradition was a liability for European American artists working in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism. The painter Mark Tobey made a bid for a central role in the New York avant-garde in the 1950s with a style of abstraction developed as an American absorption of Sino-Japanese calligraphy. But the perceived Asian inflection of his style marginalized it in New York to the favored rougher script of Abstract Expressionism, which was more gratifying to Ameri-

INTRODUCTION

can self-perceptions. The resistance to Tobey's experiment with East Asian calligraphy in New York sheds some light on why the painter Franz Kline insisted on the error of those of his admirers who claimed to see an interesting relationship to East Asian calligraphy in his bold black and white abstraction. Even Japanese artists who stayed at home and practiced traditional art forms that might seem remote from foreign pressures could not retreat from the power associated with European and American modern art. In my third chapter, I examine the responses of the potter Yagi Kazuo and the calligrapher Morita Shiryu to what seemed to them an irresistible and sometimes suffocating modernity. To forestall the obsolescence that appeared to threaten their ancient arts of pottery and calligraphy, they assimilated elements from foreign modern art, notably abstraction. New genres that could be identified as modern and indigenous resulted. Crucial to the success of their sense of indigeneity, however, was the consolidation of these novel hybrids within media-defined communities, the pottery and calligraphy worlds. The borders of these art worlds were defended as though they were homological with the borders of the Japanese nation within which they were situated. In the cases I examine and indeed in the vast majority of artistic transactions across the U.S.-Japan border in the postwar years, one of the two national cultures was invariably subordinated to the other. The foreign culture may have been appealing, inspiring, or threatening, but one clutched to the seat of one's identity in the home culture. My final chapter is devoted to an exceptional border traveler whose feeling of affiliation was directed to both nations in shifting ratios. The career of the Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi developed along an erratic itinerary through a series of scattered places, each posing unique opportunities for exploring national distinctions. These places, which he designed in the form of plazas, fountains, homes, gardens, or monuments, were rarely of a sort that could be described as rooted concentrically in their cultural surroundings. For example, many of his place designs were accomplished by removing tons of rocks from Japanese soil and installing them in sites in Europe and the United States in a manner conveying some impression of their distant source. Although biculturalism of the sort Noguchi experienced and practiced has become common in the past decade or two, it was quite unusual among Japanese and American artists in the early postwar period. Yet the mobility of his position between nations was not unrelated to the international encounters of many of his contemporaries. Although they seem to have been more resolutely situated in singular national affiliations, their work was similarly catalyzed by radical dislocations across borders. To be sure, many were at pains to represent the fruits of border crossings as the indelible visage of native identity. But even the likes of Franz Kline and Morita Shiryu, who sternly repudiated Japanese and EuroAmerican influence, respectively, reveal the strength of their concern for the foreign in the very defensiveness of their rhetoric. In effect, this book maps out an extensive topography of US.-Japan artistic interactivity

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in the early postwar period. This terrain has typically been overlooked by views from nation-centered positions that peer anxiously at "the other side" and reflexively at "this side." Placing this interactivity itself under scrutiny brings to light transnational contradictions that destabilize the mythography of artistic nationalism. How are narratives of the national "triumph" of Abstract Expressionism affected by divulging the marginalization of Japanese subjectivities that helped confirm its ascendancy? Similarly, how does disclosing the debt to American positions incurred in the historical process of forging the Japanese perspectives of modernity that sustain contemporary practices of calligraphy and pottery force new appraisals of those perspectives? Isamu Noguchi was exceptional in that the binational combinations of much of his work could not be concealed, yet in some ways the border-crossing mode of his innovation elucidates similar hybrid patterns of creative work among his Japanese and American contemporaries. The common political map is a very poor model of the relationship between these two national contexts of art. They were not two separate homogenous fields of distinct colors; rather, they were dependent on a third ambiguous and fertile zone of intercultural friction, commerce, and innovation. Most who operated in this interstitial zone believed that Japan and the United States were profoundly separated by a cultural, civilizational, political, and racial chasm. The most common terms for this assumption of supranational difference were "East" and "West." This binary was regarded as transhistorical and self-evident, but it was hardly a stable construct. Indeed, the extraordinary effort focused on the production, embellishment, and interpretation of contrasting images of "East" and "West" suggests an ongoing need to buttress and revitalize this distinction in such a way as to insulate the homologously conceived national distinction between Japan and the United States from scrutiny. The historical project of this study is resiting a class of expressive visual images associated with the American and Japanese nations in the complex formations of the contentious interdependency that created them, formations far out of line with political borders as they are commonly mapped.

Chapter 1 Relations of Japanese and American Art

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he art objects and artistic practices that resulted from transfers of ideas, motifs, personnel, and materials between Japanese and American cultural contexts were hybrid formations. New forms and values were obtained through the combination of components from what were regarded as distinct entities. While much of this study focuses on the analysis of the hybrid form and the distinctiveness that separates it from its cultural sources, I am also attentive to the reception of such formations. What did contemporary artists, art critics, journalists, and others whose opinions have been recorded say to each other about these works of art? The concept of "hybridity," with its contemporary connotations of "forcing momentary forms of dislocation and displacement into complex economies of agonistic reticulation,"1 was not a measure of praise for artistic innovation in this milieu. Moreover, while Homi K. Bhabha's influential use of the term "hybridity" points to the formation of a subversive space challenging the strength of the border to divide culture,2 the reception that accompanied these developments in art along the U.S.-Japan border does not suggest that this art was associated with a blurring of the distinction between American and Japanese identities in the minds of people who cared about it. How is it that artistic innovations that may now retrospectively be understood as fundamentally hybrid formations were unable in their time to dislodge perceptions of tautly drawn native-alien difference? The pervasive ideology of nationalism exerted a powerful disciplining force on the potential of hybrid art forms to effect a blurring of the difference between Japanese and American art.

Artistic Nationalism

If the nationalist is understood as one who aspires to "the control of the state as a vehicle for the furtherance of national self-expression,"3 then most of the artists, art critics, and patrons working in the contexts studied in this book were indifferent nationalists at best.

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To be sure, states played an important role in the development of postwar Japanese and American art as patrons of public works of art, sponsors of exhibitions and exchange programs, and employers of curators and art historians. But neither strengthening the state nor seizing control over it was a primary concern recorded in the art criticism, the art journalism, and the conversations that animated various art communities in postwar Japan and the United States. But in addition to the political movement focused on the acquisition or reform of a state, nationalism is also an ideology that promotes the sort of broad cultural homogeneity within a community that enables its members to recognize one another as fellow nationals. The state is just one focus of debates among various nationalist perspectives from within the nation about its parameters of inclusion and exclusion. Most definitions of "nation" pivot on the constitution of a community by its members' sentiment of belonging together.4 But together with this focus on sentiment, there has been continuing interest in a variable list of common properties advanced as definitive of the nation, such as its members' shared history, myths, destiny, homeland, ideals, and language. While the term "nation" points to a particular named human population, the term "national identity" shifts attention to the individual's or subnational group's sense of belonging to the nation and to the variable and contested criteria of inclusion within and exclusion from the nation. Such criteria may include diet, language, skin pigmentation, or religious belief.5 But in addition to such personal attributes, the feeling of attachment to a nation can be mobilized by cultural media such as holidays, institutions, elections, mass media, and artistic practices. Individuals, however, derive the sense of belonging through which they define their places in the world not just through national identity but through many other sorts of identity as well, such as family, region, gender, class, religion, and occupation. Nationalism grants a particularly exalted status to national identity, though typically national ideals are articulated by the expression of linked preferences throughout these other social categories.6 Diverse and competing nationalist perspectives within a single nation share the agenda of identifying, protecting, strengthening, or expanding properties assumed to define national identity. In this sense, nationalism was a sustaining and pervasive concern among artists, critics, journalists, and historians in various circles of art in postwar Japan and the United States. Passionate debates about the aesthetic merit of paintings and sculptures and other art objects were motivated, in part, by the assumption that they held great significance to the broader definition of national identity. By introducing the term "artistic nationalism," I wish to shine a stronger light than has been customary on the role of artists and art critics as well as the art and craft objects that they made and interpreted in the imaginative historical process of formulating and sustaining the cultural homogeneity among the large numbers of people that make up a nation. Artistic nationalism is not a rubric intended to verify a qualitative or hierarchical distinction between state propaganda and fine art, but

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rather an attempt to discern how diverse works of art have been energized by one of the most influential ideologies of modern history. Each of the following four propositions of artistic nationalism is derived by applying observations that have been made with some frequency regarding nationalism to the specific instance of discourses of art.7 In varying degrees, and not always coincidentally, the acceptance of these propositions was the basis for a wide range of aesthetic decisions and judgments in postwar Japanese and American contexts of art. I will not attempt to offer any parameters in time and space beyond which this scheme loses relevance, but the prevalence of artistic nationalism in the Japanese and American postwar contexts studied here suggests the breadth of their application to other contexts of modernity. Perhaps the central proposition of artistic nationalism is that artistic identity is fundamentally contingent to national identity. Many individuals construct meaningful places for themselves in the world by participating in the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of works of art or by belonging to the social and economic networks that collectively manage these tasks. Although such communities, discussed as "art worlds" in Chapter 3, often encompass considerable diversity, they also predict a set of values, canons, and goals shared by many of their members. In short, art can function as a kind of identity. Karl Deutsch supposed that artists (as well as engineers or stamp collectors) of different nations would be likely to understand one another in communication only about the "relatively narrow segment of their total range of activities" indicated by these avocations. Regarding the larger aspects of their lives that don't pertain to art, he suggested that they would be "far closer to mutual communication and understanding with fellow nationals than with fellow specialists in other countries."8 Deutsch's contention could be argued differently depending on the professional and national contexts considered, but I would like to propose artistic nationalism as an ideology that assumes a significant barrier in the mutual understanding attainable even about art in communication between artists (or art critics, art historians, curators, and other art professionals) who are foreigners to one another. This ideology does not claim that the nationalist has no message to transmit via art to foreigners, but rather that art should mobilize a meaningful bond between fellow nationals. In other words, artistic nationalism minimizes the transnational potential of artistic identity. A second and closely related proposition of artistic nationalism is that a primary value of the artwork lies in its capacity to represent national identity. Literary and other texts have typically rendered individuals as national (or alien) subjects through the narration of language, territory, religion, ideals, history, or myth. Paintings, sculptures, and buildings have traditionally served as some of the most venerated visualizations of such narratives. Beyond illustrative depiction, however, their styles, materials, and techniques have also frequently been interpreted as embodying some sense of the unifying "national character" or "national physiognomy" that Stalin mentioned in his influential definition of the nation. 9 The rhet-

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oric of artistic nationalism often assumes an artistic portrayal of some facet of national identity not as the creative aim of the artwork, but as the passive, inevitable, and natural reflection of the national identity of the artist and/or the theme he or she takes as the focus of the artwork.10 The very term "artistic nationalism" goes against the grain of this passive notion of reflection by inviting the question of who has invested what particular national interest in the positioning of an art object as a representation of a national identity. A third proposition of artistic nationalism is that the nation's art must achieve international recognition. It is difficult to conceive of artistic nationalism without some basis in a keen concern for foreign art, however distorted the impression of that foreign art may be. Herder was one of the earliest to develop the notion that each nation possessed a distinct character relative to other nations. Todorov points to a contradiction that arises with the acknowledgment of this relativism; while the "consistent" nationalist would be one who honors each nation's equal right to its distinctive position, nationalists tend in practice to assume an absolutist stance in their struggle to assert the superiority of their own nation above rival foreign nations.11 In spheres of art, ambivalence between the ideal equivalence of nations and their competitive ranking is manifested most clearly in the international exhibition, where the art of different nations is juxtaposed for comparison. But there are many other international venues, including imagined criteria of aesthetic judgment as in the rubric "art of world importance." Typically, art is positioned as a representative of its nation strategically aimed at securing the favorable recognition of foreign viewers. In other words, it is a medium of foreign diplomacy. Art criticism facilitates this aim, for such judgments as an aesthetic intensity, avant-gardist originality, or lyrical beauty are relative judgments often presumed to redound on the nation represented. This international rivalry is of enormous consequence; foreign art can become so powerful a figure with which native art must contend that it can exert a definitive influence on the creation of native art, either through negation or emulation. The notion of competitive emulation is related to a fourth proposition of artistic nationalism, namely, that the nation's art should be fundamentally indigenous. This proposition denotes a bias favoring those elements in an artistic development that can be located within national parameters defined variously in terms of media such as character, history, territory, and myth. Nationalism, however, is rarely content to limit itself to the protection of current property; it typically targets new areas of expansion for the absorption of other cultures into a more exclusive sense of national possession. The desire to compete with foreign art often stimulates the appropriation of aspects of the art of nations perceived as rivals. The practice of incorporation is undertaken through a paradoxical process that might be designated with a corollary to the proposition that art be indigenous, namely, that foreign influence must be rendered indigenous. "Influence" is a common art historical term through which the appropriation of foreign artistic properties has been conducted. Elements that

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cannot be neatly traced to sources within national boundaries are traced to sources without. This balance between indigenous and foreign sources has been managed so as to protect works coveted as national property by maintaining that such foreign influences as may have been received were decisively mediated by, for example, "national character." Conversely, works that do not support the desired view of national identity can be marginalized as "derivative" of foreign sources. In this sense, on the one hand, art history and criticism have traditionally been closely concerned with policing national borders. On the other hand, the capacity of artistic nationalism to aggrandize the nation by absorbing patently foreign art histories, artifacts, traditions, and even artists should not be underestimated. Such transfers can be enacted by strategic erasures of diacritica of the foreign source, thereby enabling national identification of a hybrid historical formation as though it were an indigenous property. But artistic nationalism can operate from more than one political perspective, and the same property can, in effect, be possessed by opposing nationalisms. While many studies of nationalism focus on a single national context, the second two propositions outlined above suggest that a focus on the interface between national cultures would be more rewarding. For if national art is conceived and conceptualized in terms of its rivalry with that of foreign nations and if national art is commonly strengthened by the incorporation of foreign art into indigenous art, then surely key discoveries are to be made by examining the interaction between national communities of art that are closely engaged with one another. A binational focus can be expected, for example, to illuminate the mutual benefits of a given representation of national identity to opposing nationalist perspectives. The contrapuntal movement between Japanese and American national contexts in this study is also intended to avoid the tendency of the focus on a single context of nationalism to produce exceptionalist exaggeration. While a critical mass of individuals in both American and Japanese circles subscribed to the propositions of artistic nationalism outlined above, the pervasive acceptance of these propositions should not be taken to suggest that either national culture of art was univocally nationalistic. There was considerable disagreement and difference of position among fellow nationals about which strategies of art promised to be the most advantageous to the nation. I shall consider intranational differences of style (Mark Tobey's abstraction versus that of Franz Kline in Chapter 2), media (calligraphy versus painting as well as pottery versus sculpture in Chapter 3), and locale (Texas versus New York as well as Tokyo versus rural Japan in Noguchi's itinerary in Chapter 4). While I wish to bring the nationalisms of such diverse positions into clear focus, more than condemning particular artists, critics, or curators as "artistic nationalists," my greater interest is in tracing the changes in their national sense of belonging, typically changes that were abetted by encounters with foreign American or Japanese art. Artistic nationalism provides a heuristic for understanding the force of such encounters and the pattern of their impact on a diverse range of artistic practices.

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East-West Rhetoric While the mediation of the relationship between Japanese and American art by artistic nationalism frequently operates in what might be regarded as the subnational differences of position between fellow nationals, there is also a common supranational rubric that seems vastly out of scale with the national grouping of art. References to a binary opposition of oriental and occidental cultures have been largely discredited owing to their totalizing sweep as well as their historical complicity with imperialism. Nevertheless, assumptions regarding broad polarizing distinctions between "the East" (Toyo) and "the West" (Seiyo) enjoyed wide currency among many generations of Japanese and Americans, including almost every individual considered in this book. Indeed the habitual framing of Japan-U.S. relations in a rhetoric of East-West difference gave this bilateral relationship a very different set of tensions as well as opportunities than were characteristic of relationships between nations regarding themselves as possessors of overlapping cultural identities. While the aims of invocations of this polarity were often expressed in terms such as "bridging" and "mutual understanding," the notion that the enormous gap to be bridged was a fundamental structure of world culture was rarely doubted. Moreover, although American and Japanese assertions of East-West difference were often molded in cultural terms that seemed at a remove from national politics, they served political goals by imagining one's own nation in the forefront of a supranational assembly. The postwar period, after all, was the time when much of what had recently been the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led by Japan was reimagined by Douglas MacArthur as "an Anglo-Saxon lake" led by the United States. 12 This climate may explain some of the ongoing appeal of East-West rhetoric to Japanese nationalists such as, for example, the scholar of Zen Buddhism D. T. Suzuki. Suzuki was an influential source of ideas about Zen and Japanese culture for many of the Japanese and American artists I shall examine. His rendition of Zen and "oriental thought" was, as Robert Sharf has demonstrated, deeply permeated by a nationalistic agenda that often took the form of "grotesque caricatures of'East' versus 'West.' " 1 3 Yet many in Suzuki's American audiences in the early postwar years found his opposition, for example, of a "spiritual East" and a "materialistic West" inspiring. Indeed, American and Japanese nationalists alike could imagine the benefits of supplementing their respective cultures with the strengths of their apparent civilizational antipode. One of the more elaborate early postwar efforts to theorize East-West civilizations from an American perspective was that of the philosopher F. S. C. Northrop, who advanced a philosophical system for "merging" these two "ultimate and irreducible" principles. 14 Michael Sullivan's The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, published in 1973 and reissued in an expanded and revised edition in 1989, is a relatively recent art historical text in this tradition. Sullivan regards the East and the West as "the great civilizations" and investigates "the eternal, dynamic interaction of these opposite but complementary forces." 15 He arbitrates artistic transactions between "East" and "West" by castigating some for what

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he regards their superficiality and privileging others for their presumed profundity. Such judgments presuppose the existence of transcendent core characteristics of Eastern and Western artistic and cultural identity. Sullivan identifies these characteristics with Chinese art (Japanese art being a "special case") and European art since the Renaissance (not medieval art). On this framework, he charts many centuries of diverse artistic interactions between Europe and Asia, concluding with "the American response to oriental art." This book goes against the grain of such approaches as Sullivan's by exposing the nationalistic agendas that were served by the ideology of racial hemispherical antipodes. In my analysis of interactions between artistic practices in Japan and the United States, assumptions about opposing monolithic civilizations are regarded with skepticism. I use the term "Euro-American," which corresponds to the Japanese "Obei," to designate Japanese and American perspectives that conflated Europe and America in a climate where Asian American social and cultural positions remained unnamed and virtually unimaginable. 16 The rubric of East and West was a heterogeneous and multivocal discourse that tended to naturalize and aggrandize the national difference between the art of Japan and the United States. Typically, characterizations of the relationship between Japanese and American art in terms of East-West rhetoric had the effect of inflating a conventional opposition of SinoJapanese tradition with Euro-American modernity to a universalizing dyad. But as I shall show, this dyad was strategically interpreted and contested from a diversity of nationalist perspectives within the Japanese and American communities of art. Early Formations

The particular pattern of interface between Japanese and American artistic nationalisms began to take form long before the postwar years that are the subject of this book. A detailed history of this relationship would be a vast undertaking including the study of numerous sojourns, exhibitions, patterns of reception, commerce of artifacts, and mutual images. My aim in this section is simply to identify the early emergence of characteristic patterns in Japanese and American approaches to one another's art. For nearly a century, the bilateral relationship between the Japanese and American art communities was strongly mediated by the perceived centrality of European art. The Eurocentrism of early artistic encounters between the United States and Japan can be gauged from various perspectives. First, the American movement of Japonisme, or the late-nineteenth-century taste for exotic Japanese aesthetic properties, had European sources that were as influential as their Japanese sources. This European derivation is inscribed in the very Frenchness of the term "Japonisme" applied to the American regard for Japan. 17 The painter John La Farge was one of the leading American proponents of Japonisme. While Henry Adams suggests that La Farge's Japonisme antedated that of his European colleagues in some respects, 18 if La Farge's accomplishment is considered in terms of which nation (France or Japan) played a greater role in his artistic formation, there can be no question

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that France loomed larger in his world than Japan. He spoke and read French; his parents were French émigrés; he studied painting in France; his artistic innovation was closely related to contemporary French art; and Americans regarded him as a somewhat "Europeanized" figure.19 Indeed, as measured by Japanese perspectives, "Japan itself" may well have played a relatively trivial role in La Farge's art, including his Japonisme. However, the insecurity of Americans regarding what they felt was their cultural inferiority to and their dependency on Europe gave Japanese art a unique appeal in their eyes. This pattern emerged notably at the Japanese display of the 1876 Centennial Fair in Philadelphia. The Japanese government devoted tremendous resources to stage an impressive show of Japanese arts and crafts for the first major introduction of Japanese culture to the American public, and the response was enthusiastically positive. The apparent excellence of Japanese arts and crafts was gratifying to Americans partly because it seemed to relativize the otherwise unrivaled authority of European culture, which had become a vexing measure of the relatively crude and primitive state of American culture.20 The Japanese art displayed in Philadelphia seemed to break the European monopoly on cultural sophistication and tradition of great antiquity. But if Europe played a formative role in the appeal of Japanese culture to Americans, it was also true that, from Japanese perspectives, American art seemed but a shallow offshoot of the accomplishments of European art. The burgeoning Meiji practice of yoga, or "Western painting" in oil on canvas by Japanese artists, was modeled on European masters, institutions, and canons. It was Paris, London, and Munich, not Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, that were the destinations of Japanese artists seeking a prestigious academic education. To be sure, Japanese artists did begin traveling to the United States at the turn of the century, but America was not where most of them really wanted to go; it was merely a stepping stone to Europe for Japanese students who did not have sufficient financial means to go directly to Europe. They brought watercolors painted to suit the well-known American taste for fanciful Japanese exotica to sell and, with their earnings, proceeded to cross the Atlantic and pursue their higher goals in Europe. Kuwabara Sumio remarks, "This demonstrates their feeling of ease regarding an artistically naive and economically powerful American society." 21 In short, the attention of the Japanese art community was riveted on Europe, and the art of the United States was a matter of indifference. Hence, the relationship between the Japanese and American art communities involved a dramatic imbalance; Japonisme constituted a vast transfer of antiquities, motifs, and aesthetic principles to the United States, but there was relatively little in the way of a similar flow of artistic properties from any perceived or real source in the United States (as opposed to Europe) to the Japanese art community. American Japonisme should not be equated with an unconditional embrace of Japanese culture. Among the most enduring stereotypes that regulated perceptions of the difference between Japanese and American culture was that of a disparity of physical scale. Thus,

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although John La Farge sincerely admired many of the Japanese art objects with which he came in contact, he tended to favor small, intricate objects such as sword guards of refined miniature metalcraft.22 Moreover, this focus on diminutive qualities of Japanese culture was often constituted as a gendered contrast with American masculinity. Regarding geisha entertainers he saw in Japan, La Farge wrote: They were absolutely incredible in the way of littleness. It did not seem possible that there were real bones inside their narrow little wrists and dolls'

fingers

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the tall youngsters, Americans, w h o m we had invited, began to romp with the playthings, late in the evening, I felt anxious about possible breakage, such as I remember, in nursery days, when we boys laid hold of our sisters' dolls. 23

In various ways, generations of Japanese artists and curators would struggle to obtain a sense of monumentality capable of countering such belittling representations of their culture. Two individuals whose personal and professional identities became unusually involved with both the Japanese and the American communities of art in this period were Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzo. Neither was an artist, yet each exerted enormous influence on the American and Japanese art worlds as a consequence of their work in government cultural bureaucracies, critical writing, art historical research, teaching, and curatorial work. The intensity of their foreign encounters and the impact of the accomplishments that proceeded from their crossings between American and Japanese spheres of art stand as both prophetic and prototypical, indeed caricatural of the outer rhetorical limits of crossings between these spheres by others later in the twentieth century. Ernest Fenollosa played a role unparalleled by any other American or European in the establishment of national institutions of art in Japan in the 1880s. One aspect of his leadership that was particularly noteworthy was his propagation of the propositions of artistic nationalism to Japanese elites. In 1882 he condemned yoga, the modern Japanese practice of "Western painting," in part because it was not indigenous to Japan: "What a sad site it is! The Japanese should return to their nature and its old racial traditions, and then take, if there are any, the good points of western painting."24 This was an early statement of what was to become an ongoing American (and European) irritation with Japanese attempts to modernize their art by incorporating the styles, techniques, and subject matter of European art into native practice. American art often followed precisely this pattern, but the historical and cultural links of the United States with Europe were assumed to legitimize its privilege in this regard, while Japan's greater cultural distance from Europe was often seen as delegitimizing its participation in Eurocentric artistic developments. Fenollosa had identified with Japanese national perspectives to an unusual extent during his work in Tokyo in the 1880s, but he also and increasingly played an influential role in conducting the export of Japanese culture to the United States. Among his most extra-

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ordinary legacies in this regard was the transfer of some 17,000 works of art from Japan to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. 25 Fenollosa also devoted himself to theorizing the proper mode for the American incorporation of Japanese artistic influence. Kevin Nute, who ascertained the considerable impact of Fenollosa's vision of Japanese art on the practice and thought of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, noted that Fenollosa urged American artists not to "merely admiringly imitate the superficial forms" of Japanese art, but rather to seize its "underlying aesthetic principles as a means of developing a new'democratic' art of their own." 26 In effect, Japanese art was to be boiled down through an abstractive process to "principles" shorn of alienating signs of Japanese cultural identity and thereby rendered accessible to incorporation in indigenous American art. Having been tutored by American missionaries during his childhood in Yokohama, Fenollosa's protégé Okakura was intimately familiar with American perspectives of Japanese culture. And the Japanese nationalist position he developed as a writer and bureaucrat was partly the product of his having "studied with foreign eyes his own past life and institutions" to an unusual degree. 27 Following Fenollosa's footsteps, Okakura moved to Boston in 1904 to become curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts. But this move did not signal an abandonment by Okakura of the Japanese perspective of his artistic nationalism. Indeed, in Satô Dôshin's words, one of his purposes was to study American art because, "as a latecomer in the West, it was a model for Japanese modernization." 28 As fellow travelers to European centers of art, Americans may have been less daunting than Europeans. Okakura's polemical assertion of a Japanese national perspective in the United States contrasted sharply with Fenollosa's concern for the lesson American contemporary artists should learn from Japan. Exoticizing taste for Japan among American elites was an important resource for Okakura's project of diplomacy. He took to wearing unusual kimonos with great panache in America at a time when most people in Tokyo dressed more or less like their counterparts in Boston. One American magazine ran a photograph of him posing in a kimono accentuated by a long flowing outer garment and a cowl over his head. These accouterments rendered him "one of the most interesting foreigners now visiting this country," and the same magazine subsequently reported that "Mr. Okakura continues to wear his native costume, his sense of the artistic being too great to allow him to don the clothes of European civilization." 29 Thus, Okakura managed to transmute his non-Europeanness into an artistic quality. He counseled his son, "I suggest that you travel abroad in Kimono too," but he added, "Never wear Japanese costume if you talk broken English." 30 The kimono performance could be controlled only if the Japanese performer had the discursive skills necessary to ensure that it produce a favorable impression. Okakura's well-crafted English prose in The Book of Tea was a brilliant exercise in the art of diplomacy. Originally addressed to an elite American audience, Okakura's words were designed to persuade his readers to abandon their stereotypes of Japan in favor of his vision

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of his nation. The Book of Tea cajoled the sympathies of Americans who wished to think of themselves as culturally sophisticated, inviting them to differentiate themselves from "the average Westerner [who], in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him." 31 As a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Okakura obtained many Japanese art objects for the ownership of his American institution, but he never yielded cultural possession. In The Book of Tea and other writings, the tea ceremony, the architecture, the pottery, the paintings, the customs, the beliefs are always and eternally "ours." The claim of the Japanese nation on the artwork transcends its American ownership. Changing Fortunes

The writings of Okakura and Fenollosa were widely read in the postwar period, and their negotiations of mutual perceptions of Japanese and American art find their echo in the practices of many of the individuals considered in this book. But the war between the United States and Japan and its aftermath had an enormous impact on the artistic relations between the two nations. The successes of the expanding Japanese empire in the 1930s and early 1940s encouraged many in the Japanese art world to believe that the time had finally come for Japanese art to realize a grand destiny in the international art world. To some, the prospects for this cause seemed to advance dramatically with the invasion of Pearl Harbor in 1941, as military ideologues in Tokyo shifted the focus of the war from the ambiguous Sino-Japanese struggle it had been until that point to a righteous conflict between the "Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" and the "American and British devils." Fujita Tsuguji found the transition from his seventeen years as an expatriate Bohemian painter in Paris to that of a Tokyo-based creator of painterly docudramas of contemporary battles uniquely satisfying: "The Greater East Asian War has called forth a great revolution of a kind never before seen in the history of Japanese painting, creating a great style of painting of the Showa epoch that can be equated with that of the Tenpyó, the Asuka, and the Momoyama epochs." 32 His contemporary the painter Yokoyama Taikan was reported to be "burning with combativeness for the annihilation of the Americans and the British" in 1943, when he became the chairman of the Patriotic Society of Japanese Art (Nihon Bijutsu Hókokukai). 33 In one address he declared that the artistic task of the war was that of "shedding European forms and manifesting the true tradition of the Japanese empire." 34 The art historian Yashiro Yukio similarly wished to articulate The Distinctive Characteristics ofJapanese Art, as he titled his monumental national art history published in 1943, but he opposed isolationist approaches to this goal. He declared that the nation's art must excel in terms of "world character" (sekai-sei, the capacity of the nation's art to communicate across national boundaries) as well as "national character" (minzoku-sei, the capacity of the nation's art to express native identity). In 1943, the time seemed ripe to "plan the rapid

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advance" of the nation's art beyond its borders, for in a Social Darwinist spectacle of art history, it was necessary to "take heed of the nation's strengths and weaknesses in the contest with the art of other nations and strive to expand its merits further and rectify its faults." 35 In short, the war was a tonic for certain Japanese positions of artistic nationalism. As the case of Fujita Tsuguji demonstrates, the war withdrew Japanese protagonists from the international artistic competition centered in Europe and permitted them to imagine a new supranational forum for international competition much more favorable to themselves. With the defeat of the Japanese empire in 1945, this empowering ideological framework collapsed, and Japanese artists found themselves back in the world system of modern art centered in Europe. Now, however, their position was much diminished from what it had been before the war, because the conflict had cut them off from subsequent international avant-garde developments. The debacle known as the "Imaizumi storm" of 1952 can be taken as symbolic of the abysmal standing of Japanese art in the international system of modern art in the aftermath of the war. Appointed assistant director of the soon-to-open Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, the art historian Imaizumi Atsuo set out on a fact-finding tour of Europe and America in 1951. Works by nineteen of the most prominent contemporary Japanese yoga painters were included in the Salon de Mai exhibition in Paris, and Imaizumi contributed a short message to the French catalogue expressing his hope that the aesthetic qualities of the Japanese works would not be overlooked. 36 But when Imaizumi arrived at the galleries where the Japanese paintings were being installed alongside the art of other nations, he found himself shocked by what he suddenly perceived to be their inferior quality. He was utterly unprepared for the uniform murky and lifeless appearance of the Japanese paintings in comparison to the adjacent works of artists of other nations. He tried reinstalling the works to better effect, but it made no difference. He asked individual Europeans for their responses to the Japanese paintings but could not argue with their polite silence. Imaizumi described these details of the crushing failure of the first postwar international debut of contemporary Japanese art in two essays published after his return to Japan in 1952, producing the "Imaizumi storm" in the Japanese art world. 37 One of the points of his controversial analysis pivoted on context. The works in question were framed oil paintings, but Imaizumi declared that they had been painted in such a way as to harmonize with the interior of the private Japanese home, its scenery, or the walls of the tokonoma, an alcove for displaying a work of art in interiors of a traditional Japanese style. The paintings might look good in these "conditions of our life," but bringing them to Paris and placing them on the bright white walls of the Salon de Mai exhibition space overpowered their Japanese harmonies and weakened their aesthetic impact. If the Japanese perspectives of art described above are at all indicative of sentiment in the broader circles of Japanese art, one can plot a dramatic rise in the perceived value of the nation's art in the early 1940s only to crash to a new depth at the end of the war. Mean-

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while, the rise in the stock of American art during the 1940s was further boosted by the war's outcome. The steady arrival in New York during the war of leading artists seeking refuge from fascism in Europe seemed to redress the American sense of its provincial distance from Europe. Flush with victory and the new international political dominance it gained for America, many in the postwar art community felt that America was ready to take over the leadership of the avant-garde from war-weary Europe. Clement Greenberg was one of the most influential art critics of this period, and he habitually ranked and rated his favorite American artists against their European peers, as though bullying them to greater accomplishment for the national cause. Greenberg came to the view that contemporary France, though it had been the "undisputed capital" of the art of painting for the last hundred years, was now declining in the hands of the new postwar generation of French painters. "Shocking," he exclaimed in 1946. "Its general level is, if anything, below that of the past four or five Whitney annual exhibitions of American painting." 38 Two years later, in a rapid escalation of his confidence in American art, Greenberg made his famous claim that "the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power." 39 The contrast between the negotiations of the world stage of art by Greenberg and Imaizumi could not be more striking. Whereas the American critic summarily declared in 1948 that the premises of Western art had moved from Paris to New York, four years later the Japanese museum curator reported the debacle of Japanese art in its first postwar debut in Paris. This disparity signals a profound transformation in the relationship between their respective national spheres of art: the United States was making a bid to shed its provincial status and commandeer international leadership of art, while Japan's prospects for even modest international recognition had been severely set back by the war. Moreover, the apparent ascendancy of American art heralded the end of the mediation of the relationship between Japanese and American art by the perceived centrality of Europe. According to Kuwabara Sumio, "Japanese art faced American art directly for the first time" as, in increasing numbers, Japanese artists traveled to the United States not with the intention of passing through to Europe but with the desire to participate in the American art world. 40 This change was caused, however, not only by the rise of American prospects vis-à-vis Europe, but also by the unprecedented degree of social and cultural interaction between Japan and the United States that was set in motion by the American defeat of Japan in 1945. Japan's surrender enabled representatives of the United States government to move in and dictate policy to the Japanese people for seven years, and this relationship was sustained in more subtle forms for years to come. Japanese foreign policy was dictated by the United States; Japan's constitution was (and is) the translation of an English text written by Americans; and the United States provided Japanese industry with its major market. American capital, manufacturing technologies, and managerial techniques flowed into Japan.

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Even the Utopian goal of middle-class consumerism, which was a powerful incentive for the working Japanese people who fueled the "economic miracle," was defined by the luxurious American homes and modern conveniences that were amply illustrated by American sitcoms broadcast on Japanese television. 41 Thus, contending with this ubiquitous American presence was one of the primary nationalist agendas in postwar Japan. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that Japan gradually attained parity or better in certain sectors of the relationship. The chapters that follow focus on the period from the nadir of the Japanese capacity to resist American influence in 1945 through the rise of Japanese economic success as a threat to the United States in the 1970s. This period is of particular interest because the extraordinary power imbalance stimulated tremendous tension along plentiful sites of Japan-U.S. contact. Much of this book focuses on the strategies waged in various contexts of Japanese art to redress the imbalance of power in the early postwar period. While Japan-U.S. interface in the postwar period was massive, American participation was far more limited than that of Japan. There was no Japanese presence in the United States of a scale matching the American occupation of Japan, and the cold war provided national others of more pressing concern to the United States than Japan. Nevertheless, Japanese culture came to the attention of large sectors of the American public. Military service brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to Japan for extended periods. 42 Many of these soldiers contributed to a minor boom in American enthusiasm for Japanese culture on their return to the United States. Japanese literature was translated into English by a generation of American scholars who were introduced to Japan through military service. Japanese artifacts—from extremely rare antiquities to cheap souvenirs—flowed to the United States in unprecedented volume. American audiences demonstrated a remarkable appetite for Japanese art, theater, movies, architecture, and religion. Thus, postwar American responses to the new presence of Japanese art in the United States are as important to this study as perspectives from various art communities of Japan regarding the all but inescapable American presence in postwar Japan.

Chapter 2

The Japanese M a r g i n s of American Abstract Expressionism

A

bstract Expressionism is one of the most celebrated movements in American art history. But here I would like to recover a little-acknowledged dimension of this movement, namely, the subtle role that Japanese otherness played in the assertion and

definition of American artistic identity. Toward this end, I investigate four abstract painters for each of whom the negotiation of cultural differences between Japan and the United States was a crucial dimension of creative work in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism. First I consider two Japanese artists who, spurred by disillusionment with the conditions of art in Japan, immigrated to the United States late in their careers in the 1950s. Okada Kenzo earned a considerable following among European Americans for his "oriental abstraction," and, although he is largely forgotten in the United States today, his abstract paintings can still be found in the permanent collections of many American museums. Hasegawa Saburo was a more critical and theoretical artist whose prolific writings abound in provocative reflections on the relationship between Japanese art and American (or European) art. But European American artists working in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism could also be profoundly preoccupied with the relationship of their art to that of Japan and/or Asia. Mark Tobey's unique style of abstraction was widely perceived to be related to Asian cultures, which were indeed a lifelong interest of the artist. But this relationship to Asia may have recoiled on him, contributing to the failure of his art to attain the level of acceptance he sought in the American art world in the late 1950s. Franz Kline, in contrast, successfully deflected widespread assumptions that his bold black and white abstractions were derived from East Asian calligraphy, and, not coincidentally, he achieved a much higher status in the canon of Abstract Expressionism.

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Thus, I will look at two very different aspects of Abstract Expressionism: first, the historical movement of abstract painting that developed in New York City in the late 1940s and became a pervasive force in the American art world in the 1950s, and second, the canonical formation constructed by the critic Clement Greenberg and many others that focused on a handful of famous artists and their works of art. I would like to bring to light the presence of ideas about Japanese art and abstraction in the historical milieu of Abstract Expressionism and then ascertain and examine the failure of those ideas to obtain appreciable recognition within canonical Abstract Expressionism. But before I turn to the four abstract painters whose careers I shall analyze in these terms, the particular utility of abstract painting as a medium for the representation of national identity requires further consideration. National F l a v o r s of A b s t r a c t i o n For Mondrian, the celebrated painter of the style ("de stijl") to end all styles, "the truly modern artist... is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal."1 Another prewar proponent of abstraction imagined that the visualization of metaphysical truths "would enable the nations of the earth to develop intuitive powers which lead them to harmony."2 Such rhetoric suggests that the withdrawal of art from the depiction of culturally specific landscapes, architectures, costumes, and physiognomies would have the effect of dismissing national identity from artistic enterprise and enabling a penetration to that which was fundamental to all humanity. Indeed, as abstraction became a more prevalent mode of modern art throughout the world, illustrative motifs of national identity disappeared from paintings and sculptures. Gone were the French peasant, the soaring American skyscraper, and the kimono-garbed Japanese woman. In this sense, one may wonder whether abstraction undermined national expression in art. This question arose at the Second Sao Paulo Biennial in 1953. Thirty-nine nations sent four thousand works to this international forum for contemporary art, and New York Times art columnist Aline B. Louchheim reported that abstraction prevailed throughout the national sections of the exhibition. "The overpowering question in all international exhibitions," she noted, "is whether there are discernible and marked national characteristics." But the abstract paintings at Sao Paulo seemed so similar that the artists seemed to Louchheim to be "speaking an Esperanto": "Each may give it his own accent, but it is a language so universal that it must be accepted, even by its antagonists, as a true and valid language of our time."3 One evening in Sao Paulo, Louchheim discussed the exhibition with Rene D'Harnoncourt and James Johnson Sweeney, directors of two of the most important museums in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim, respectively. The New Yorkers wondered, "If something had happened to the packing cases . . . and all the labels had come off everything and we had to reshuffle the art and put it into the different national pavilions, would we be able to?"4 They talked for a long time and finally agreed that "yes, you could find some sort of vague national flavor." French art is "more suave, it's

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more beautiful, it's such nice cookery." Dutch abstraction suggests "a kind of almost carnival gaiety," while American art demonstrates "a more sort of vigorous thing." 5 Japan was represented at Sao Paulo by seven of its leading painters, but Louchheim took no notice of their work, let alone considered how it might relate to Japanese national character.6 Thus, the internationality of abstraction seemed at first to neutralize national difference, but with further deliberation "national flavors" could be ascertained by associating the styles of abstraction produced by various nations with cultural stereotypes of those nations. The certification of the "national flavor" of American abstraction as "a more sort of vigorous thing" than foreign abstraction was a primary aim of supporters of Abstract Expressionism. The desired "national flavor" had to be "strong," because it had a job to do that clearly went beyond American borders. There was deep sentiment in the art world "that something important could happen one day in America; that the country would not always be the most parochial of the big European provinces; that its art could deserve something better than a Museum of American Art." 7 The conviction that Europe was no longer capable of serving as the leader of the advanced art of Western civilization was an empowering sentiment in the circles of Abstract Expressionism; now was America's turn at the helm. Many models of the ideal character of American abstraction were proposed, but one of the more successful themes of what became canonical Abstract Expressionism was the character of the male painter admired for his masculinity, individualism, and ruggedness. Jackson Pollock personified this ideal and was crowned in 1947 as America's "most powerful painter" by Clement Greenberg, who extolled him as "radically American." 8 The Abstract Expressionist epitomized by Pollock was a laconic, intuitive, sometimes violent figure who resembled male movie stars of his era in these respects. Despite the prevalence of nationalistic sentiment, the Abstract Expressionist works of Pollock and others among its beneficiaries can hardly be regarded as the jingoistic imagery of propaganda. Indeed these paintings were admired as abstraction that expunged all figurative imagery; there was no question of painting conventional American symbols. Greenbergian formalism denied the relevance of politics to art altogether, but it was precisely this stance that could insinuate a deeply embedded American cultural identity in the formal character of the paintings, in traits such as vast scale, rugged brushwork, and the distinctive "signature style" of the individual artist. This mode of artistic identity was conducive to what has been called the "politics of apolitical art,"9 a politics that could be effective even if the artist might claim—as Pollock in fact did—that he could imagine an American art of painting no more than an American study of mathematics. 10 As Serge Guilbaut has demonstrated, the universalistic aspirations of Abstract Expressionist nationalism rested partly on aggrandizing the American artist at the expense of European rivals. But Ann Gibson's recent study of the many American artists who were excluded from the privilege of epitomizing Abstract Expressionism demonstrates the range of options and identities that were anathema to this national expression: figurative painting as well as ornamental abstraction, homosexual and female artists as well as African Ameri-

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cans. 11 In short, Guilbaut has illuminated the foreign others against which Abstract Expressionism was differentiated, while Gibson has illuminated the domestic others marginalized from the movement. But little attention has been paid to the relationship between Abstract Expressionism as the preferred vehicle of postwar American art and Asian cultural identity. Students of Abstract Expressionism might regard Asian perspectives of this American movement as a diversion of dubious relevance. To be sure, Asia did not figure on the Abstract Expressionist's horizon with anything near the force of womanhood or the legacy of European modernism. But two factors recommend that Asia be taken into the account of this movement: first, the pervasive interest in what was packaged as "oriental thought" in the Abstract Expressionist milieu and, second, the fact that this movement, which purported to create a universal as well as national idiom, had great consequences for the identities of contemporary Asian and Asian American artists. The first of these points was documented by David J. Clarke, who showed that the writings on oriental thought by authors such as Coomaraswamy, Okakura Kakuzo, D. T. Suzuki, and Alan Watts were popular reading in the early postwar generation of American artists. Artists such as Sam Francis, Paul Jenkins, Ibram Lassaw, Richard Lippold, Robert Motherwell, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Ad Reinhardt, Theodoras Stamos, and Mark Tobey were avid consumers of Asian philosophical concepts such as "the void" and "the continuum." 1 2 Zen Buddhism in particular was very appealing owing to what seemed its compatibility with what Daniel Belgrad has identified as a large range of contemporary intellectual currents valorizing spontaneous expression as the preferred medium of authentic communication. 1 3 The second factor indicating the importance of Asian perspectives of Abstract Expressionism was documented by Jeffrey Wechsler's exhibition and catalogue; scores of Asian American abstract artists worked in the United States at midcentury, and many immigrated from Asia in order to pursue their careers as artists in American contexts. Among the Japanese artists who moved to the United States in the 1950s were Hasegawa Saburo, Inokuma Gen'ichiro, Kawabata Minoru, Masatoyo Kishi, Minoru Niizuma, Toshio Odate, Yutaka Ohashi, Okada Kenzo, James Hiroshi Suzuki, and Teiji Takai. 14 These two factors raise an important disparity of interests identified by Kuwabara Sumio: while numerous Japanese artists wished to participate in the postwar American art world, American artists who demonstrated any concern for Japanese culture were primarily interested in the Japanese religious philosophy of Zen and had little regard for contemporary Japanese art. For Kuwabara, this disparity is related to the fact that in the postwar period "for the first time, the contact between Japanese and American art was part of a broader relationship between a victorious nation and a defeated nation." 1 5 Okada Kenzo: Oriental Abstraction Of all the Japanese and Japanese American painters working in the United States in the early postwar years, Okada Kenzo (1902-1982) was undoubtedly the most successful. To be sure,

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he never achieved anything remotely near the recognition of Jackson Pollock or even such lesser-known artists as, for example, Bradley Walker Tomlin. Nevertheless, in 1953, just three years after arriving in New York, Betty Parsons agreed to represent him at her gallery, an institution that Greenberg heralded in 1956 as one of the "notable scenes of [the] triumph" of the new "status of American art vis-à-vis that of the rest of the world." 16 This gallery played a pivotal role in Abstract Expressionism, and Okada's success with Parsons gained him entrée into inner circles of the movement, where his halting and strongly accented English did not prevent friendships with numerous artists in the movement. Photographs from the late 1950s show Rothko at a party hosted by Okada and his wife Kimi, Okada with Barnett and Annalee Newman at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, and Franz Kline posing with his arms around Okada's shoulders. 17 By the end of the decade, a Japanese art journal reported Okada's success with some astonishment: his shows were being sold out in New York; the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other American museums were competing to buy his works; he received the Astore Meyer prize at the 1958 Venice Biennial; and his painting was so lucrative that he was able to purchase ancient Japanese art objects in Kyoto and hire an architect to design a summer house in Long Island. 18 Additional benchmarks for Okada's American career included the prizes he won at the Art Institute of Chicago (1954 and 1957) and the Pittsburgh International Exhibition (1955), where he also became a juror (1961), as well as his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1957). 19 While Okada did not receive any sustained consideration by the major critics associated with Abstract Expressionism, many American art critics and art journalists recorded their admiration for his work. These writings demonstrate that Okada's manifestation of what was regarded as Japanese tradition was the cornerstone of his American acceptance. One writer assumed that at a young age Okada absorbed "native Japanese qualities that mark all the great periods of their artistic history."20 Quality of 1957 (Figure 1) exemplifies Okada's mode of abstraction, which lent itself to readings of the combination of modern abstraction and Japanese tradition. This work eschews mimetic association with the visual world, but the viewer who ponders Okada's Japanese cultural background might well be reminded of certain motifs from Japanese art history. The subdued tones, near monochromy, sparseness of detail, and sense that forms are hovering in an unfigured ground plane might evoke the tradition of monochromatic ink painting (sumi-e). Indeed the black diagonal brushed motif might seem to have a calligraphic quality, and the horizontal grey forms in the upper third of the composition might suggest the rolling hills of a landscape painting. Okada was the beneficiary of exoticism. That is to say, unfamiliarity was a central feature of what Americans appreciated as Japanese tradition in his abstract painting. One New York art critic wrote: "Westerners can hardly be expected to be familiar with the processes of thought, tradition and instinct that go into paintings of this sort, nor can they hope to be able to analyze their infinite subtlety of color and touch. Too much attention to consid-

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F i g u r e 1 . Okada Kenzô. Quality (So). 1956. Oil on canvas. 177.8 x 193 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of the Women's Board.

erations of good taste make Western painting anemic. But in Okada's case good taste is a positive force." 21 Far from according Okada a place in the American art world, the rhetoric of such admiration positioned him in an entirely different aesthetic system. But it was not just the assumed presence of Japanese tradition that excited American interest in Okada's art. One writer, for example, favored Okada along with Zao Wou-ki (a Chinese abstractionist living in Paris) over two other contemporary Asian artists who were dismissed outright for allegedly repeating the patterns of precedents in Asian tradition without "their spirit." 22 The American admiration of Okada's assumed evocation of Japanese tradition was contingent on the copresence of the modern. Because the Asian tradition was assumed to be "running d r y . . . unable to nourish yet one more generation," the introduction of modern Euro-American art played a crucial role in this reception. 23 The correct balance of (Japanese) tradition and (Euro-American) modern art in

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Okada's painting was the subject of deliberation in commentary on him. Most who appreciated his work apportioned a greater role to the traditional Japanese component in his work than to the modern: "[His works] treat both the tradition of his old world and the advanced art of his new one. And because his own sensitivities seem more tuned to the former world, works in that tradition are outstanding

In contrast, the several canvases

where he tries to endow empty background space with the dynamism of Abstract-Expressionism... seem paradoxically lifeless."24 Okada's comment to a Japanese art critic that the desirable ratio for new Japanese painting was "two parts East and one part West" seems an apt expression of the yardstick against which his work was evaluated by American critics. 25 If "the West" was felt to be expressed in excess, the work was vulnerable to the charge of "imitation," and if the expression of "the East" was felt to exclude evidence of "the West" altogether, the work was vulnerable to readings of "academic formalism." The stance Okada assumed as a Japanese artist in New York was by no means typical of Japanese artists in Japan. His slightly younger contemporary Okamoto Taro poses an interesting contrast. A prominent abstract painter and energetic publicist of modern art in postwar Japan, Okamoto reviled Japanese contemporary artists who he thought produced a traditional sort of Japanese aesthetic that easily and predictably charmed foreigners. Okamoto expressed his disgust with such subservience to foreign taste by likening such artists to living organisms that are unable to ingest alien bodies from without and therefore poison themselves by consuming their own waste products. 26 Sure enough, the flamelike tongues of crimson and other bold primary colors that characterize Okamoto's abstract style resist easy association with common views of Japanese art and failed to develop a following overseas that came anywhere close to his prominence in Japan. Indeed, the same New York critic who admired Okada's subtle Asian sensibility condemned Okamoto's abstraction as the "desert[ion of] his native art for a depressing amalgam of Picasso and surrealism." 27 To borrow Louchheim's metaphor, this critic presumed to have identified a damning mismatch between the "national flavor" of Okamoto's art and his personal national identity. Or, following the Fenollosan dictum, Okamoto was guilty of defying the injunction against Japanese "imitation" of Western art, a familiar jeremiad among Americans after the war. "Japan is sick," thundered one young American designer in Japan in the late 1950s on a Fulbright scholarship to study old Japanese farmhouses: "This nation suffers from a chronic case of indigestion resulting from the over-consumption of under-cooked foreign recipes and half-baked foreign ideas."28 And the Jungian bard of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell declared in 1957, "There is little that a Westerner can learn from the modern works of the Orient, except that the Oriental mind is having a hard time coming to terms with the modern world." Eschewing the "tumultuous and arid aspects of the present situation" in Asia, Campbell, who was admired in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism, advised Americans to "seek in the present scene something of the force and majesty of the

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Oriental past."29 This statement is exemplary of Edward Said's observation that orientalist dogma effects a "fossilization of the Orient" by preferring generalizations about the oriental past to an encounter with its contemporary reality.30 Perhaps the most reassuring emblem of this preferred pastness in Okada's painting was the soft tonalism that was diametrically opposed to Okamoto's brash style. The forms seem almost faded or bleached by the passage of time, for example, in Height of 1956 (Figure 2), a composition of a series of light blue bars and triangles suspended before a light tan form on a white field. The curved contours of this tan form resemble the sinuous profile of the river in the famous folding screen of plum blossoms by the eighteenth-century master Korin, though Okada's work offers but a blurry and bleached trace of its sharp and elegant prototype in Korin's painting. In the 1950s Okada referred to this quiescent sensibility as "yugenism." The aesthetic term "yugeti" refers not to the clear graphic sensibility of Korin, Figure 2 . Okada Kenzo. Height(Taka). 1956. Oil on canvas. 119.3 x

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Akita Senshu Museum of Art, Akita.

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but to quite a contrary strain in Japanese art history, namely, a taste for such qualities as concealment, crepuscularity, tranquillity, mystery, and depth. 31 Okada later disowned this term, but not before it was firmly associated with his style. 32 To be sure, in comparison with the works of Okamoto and indeed those of Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock, Still, Gottlieb, and Newman, Okada's forms seem gentle, diffused, muted, and scattered. In place of the dynamic movement of such painters' works, Okada's forms appear to drift or hover. And if the soft hovering forms of Okada's painting sometimes resemble those of his friend Mark Rothko, the intensity of Rothko's heavily saturated hues makes one reviewer's comment that Okada's paintings resemble "faded silk" all the more persuasive. 33 If Okada's "yugenism" evokes a basis for the gentleness or tranquillity of his style in premodern Japanese art history, there was also an important contemporary currency to such characterizations of Japanese culture. Yoshida Shigeru, prime minister in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Japan was transforming itself from America's bitterest enemy to America's partner in the cold war, claimed that "our people are essentially gentle and dislike brutal strife," thereby dismissing the violent strains of Japanese history.34 But the conversion of the popular American image of Japan as the violent enemy of World War II to a peaceful ally was also satisfying to many in the American establishment who regarded Japanese acquiescence and compliance to an American-led resistance to communism as indispensable to cold war strategy. A cultural dimension to this modification of the American image of Japan in the 1950s can be identified in James Michener's popular writings, which represented Japan as artistic, feminine, gentle, and traditional. 35 The American distaste for Okamoto's flameform abstraction and appreciation of Okada's tranquil "Oriental Abstractions," as Time magazine called his paintings, 36 denote an art world accompaniment to the rewriting of Japan in politics and popular culture. Curiously, the much remarked upon Japanese expressivity of Okada's art was born not in Japan, but in the United States. Okada expressed the central paradox of his career aptly: "When I lived in Japan, I thought only of the West, and now that I am here I dream only of Japan." 37 The painting he did in Japan before 1950 was figurative and bore a close resemblance to styles of the Ecole de Paris. But after the move to New York, his painting became abstract and took on what people perceived to be a Japanese appearance, owing to its stylistic "yugenism" buttressed by an occasional Japanese title or the vestige of some motif such as a fan shape or a vertical division reminiscent of the seam of a folding screen. Until Okada's fateful move to New York, his career followed a trajectory common to many respected yoga painters of his generation. He had studied in Paris in the 1920s, exhibited at a salon in Tokyo, served in the military during the war as a painter of battle scenes for exhibition at venues such as the "Art Exhibition for the Complete National Effort for the Decisive Battle" (Kokumin söryoku kessen bijutsu ten), and returned to his Parisian style after the war. According to one account, Okada's turn to Japanese tradition began at the moment of his trip to the United States, when an acquaintance advised him, "If you are going to pursue

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a career as a Japanese oil painter, why don't you call it 'yugenism' and develop the unique Japanese aesthetic of yügen.'38 For those who were sympathetic to the view of Okamoto Taró, Okada's turn to Japanese tradition must have appeared to be a marketing ploy tailored to European American preconceptions of Japanese culture. Indeed, "there were not a few sharptongued people [in art circles in Tokyo] who felt that Okada's following in the United States was due to the influence of the popular postwar American taste for Japónica." 39 The slang term "Japónica" (Japonika) was derisively defined by one Japanese designer as "Fujiyamageisha style design and fashion which exploits the American exotic taste for Japan." 40 Indeed, some measure of indignation regarding the American exertion of power over Japan was triggered by Okada's success in the United States. One writer identified him along with the artists Isamu Noguchi, Shinoda Tókó, Murata Sushio, and Tsutaka Wa'ichi as producers of"karayuki-san art" for the foreign market for Japónica. 41 "Karayuki-san" was slang for Japanese women who went overseas to work in brothels for non-Japanese clients. Expressions of bitter feelings regarding American domination over Japan commonly took the form of such gendered terms. For example, a stock image in postwar films dealing with the Occupation was "the scene of an American soldier (usually black) raping a Japanese girl (always young, always innocent), usually in a pristine rice field (innocent, pastoral Japan)." 42 In this context, the term "Japónica" connoted the gratification of a superficial American taste for Japanese culture by a crassly marketed debased form of Japanese culture. But Okada's motives cannot be dismissed as shameless opportunism. The artist's own testimony suggests quite a different view of his evolving artistic goals from either the American appreciation or the Japanese skepticism stimulated by his work. In 1948, midway through the U.S. Occupation and two years before his momentous relocation to New York, Okada described his feelings with great excitement to a journalist: The desolation of the end of the war threw off all embellishments at once and exposed the raw skin of things. But this is not a decline, to the contrary, it is a time of the throbbing of a new life force. Despite shortages and the difficulties of daily life, I think this is a good opportunity for the birth of real art

I can feel a strange

vibration of the contemporary within myself. The more I work, the more I gain energy through contact with a new life force. From now on, there is no question that some new feeling will come about, a kind of painting that did not exist in the past, something quite new, not the particularistic regional art of the past. Partly because we have been closed off until this, I feel especially sensitized to and stimulated by the tide from Paris. It is precisely this world character that has the power to give birth to a new art. 43

Thus, after the desolation of war defeat, hopes for the "birth of a new art" seem to hinge on a "world character" (sekai-sei) expected to flow from Paris. I have mentioned the

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wartime use of this same term, "world character," by the Japanese art historian Yashiro Yukio. For Yashiro in 1943, "world character" was a universal aesthetic validity that would enable the nation's art to perform competitively in an international field. But after the war, in 1948, Okada used the term "world character" without the connotation of nationalist ambition. The national community does not figure into his aspiration for the potential for artistic renewal, which he rather located "within myself," on the one hand, and beyond his nation, in Paris, on the other. Okada expressed a remarkable sense of enthusiasm in the passage quoted above, but the wan doll-like images of women in paintings such as By the Window of 1948 suggest that he was having difficulty translating the "strange vibration of the contemporary" that he felt within into paint on canvas (Figure 3). The gradual evaporation of the painterly and volumetric qualities of his figures subsequently in the late 1940s left an enervated Picassoid linearity that remained tied to figurative representation. He later recalled his dissatisfaction with his work at this time: "I had come to a dead end and I ran away from it I had no appetite for being in Japan and I thought if I changed my whereabouts, something would happen."44 But why did he go to New York in 1950 and not Paris, which he had identified two years earlier as the source of "world character"? Apparently, during those years the magnetism of New York overtook that of Paris. Before leaving Japan in 1950, Okada declared, "I intend to find a point of contact between the great movement in modern art now centered in America and the parent body of Oriental art."45 At this point very little information was available in the Japanese art world about recent developments in American art, and most still regarded Paris as the center of modern art. Later Okada himself would volunteer that, when he first came to New York, "he knew nothing about America" except that it was "completely unrefined," and he supposed that such a place might be propitious for his practice of art.46 One observer suggested in 1959 that Okada's ignorance of American art on the eve of his move to New York was offset by that which his experience of American power in Japan during the U.S. Occupation led him to imagine: "He observed American Occupation policy and the actions of the American military forces stationed in Japan and came to understand the real power of America. And its culture? And its art? Surely this too must now be in New York, not France."47 Clearly Okada's move to New York in 1950 was not motivated by the appeal of Abstract Expressionist art. Rather, his perspective in Occupied Japan led him to a line of reasoning that was very similar to that of Clement Greenberg: "Along with

Figure 3 . Okada Kenzö.

By the Window (Madobe). 1948. Oil on canvas. 193.8 x 145.5 cm. Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya.

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the center of gravity of industrial production and political power," surely the "main premises of Western art" would migrate from Europe to the United States. But in the early 1950s very few Japanese could travel abroad, and Okada's move to New York was a risky venture. The value of the dollar was very high, and there were strict limits on the amount of currency that could be taken out of Japan. Okada's wife Kimi accompanied him to New York, where, during their first years, only her work as a seamstress enabled them to make ends meet.48 A fellow Japanese painter wrote: "Going to America at almost age fifty and starting all over with that kind of hardship was really admirable. There is no way I could have done that."49 Arriving in New York in 1950, Okada found "that the stimulation of all kinds of Western things was too great and I could not absorb myself in my work. I could not do anything."50 One of these "Western" stimulations in New York was abstract painting. He looked at the abstract works by Mark Rothko and Bradley Walker Tomlin and found them utterly incomprehensible. He certainly must have known of the many Japanese painters who had been exploring abstraction since the 1910s, but recognizable figuration had never disappeared from his own work. Arriving in New York, he would remember, he found that he did not even know the English word "abstraction."51 Okada's shift to abstraction coincided with an important change in self-perception that was provoked by his experience of expatriation: I gradually woke up to the fact that I was a Japanese person and came to like Japan, and I came to stick my neck out and look at Japan

I settled down out of my over-

anxious feeling. I started to think that, since I am a Japanese person, even if I stand on my head, there is no way I can be a Westerner, and from that point I no longer had much interest in Western things. 52

Okada, the Japanese practitioner of École de Paris-inspired "Western painting" (yoga), came to New York with the ambition of strengthening his art with "world character." But his new American environment apparently gave him cause to believe that this stance was that of an imposter, a Japanese artist trying to "be a Westerner." Nevertheless, Okada did not eschew "the West" altogether. In 1957 he commented, "I am a Japanese person and therefore I have the ambition of expressing something oriental. But if I do so forcibly, the scale becomes small, and therefore I proceed back to something Western."53 Having internalized the historical stereotyping of Japanese culture by diminutive measurements of scale, Okada pins his ambition to expand his expressive scope on inducting "something Western" into his art. These statements of Okada suggest that his achievement of national expression in painting in New York was a deliberate and self-aware pursuit. Yet this testimony is immediately followed, as if oblivious to any sense of contradiction, with the claim that this artistic nationality is involuntary: "I am glad that I discovered my path unconsciously."54 Is one to

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imagine the artist sleepwalking out of his Manhattan studio to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, drawn to New York's Japanese antiquities as if by a metaphysical blood tie to ancestors who created them centuries ago? Okada acknowledged that he developed his knowledge of Japanese tradition by studying the Japanese antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1957, on his first trip back to Japan since 1950, he visited such hallowed sites of Japanese cultural history as Ise Shrine for the first time. Surely, it was Okada's sensitivity to the demand of his European American social environment that a "Japanese artist" produce "Japanese art" that put him on this path. In his critics' words, Okada's New York milieu presented him with a choice between "desert [ing] his native art for a depressing amalgam" of Abstract Expressionism or tapping into his "processes of thought, tradition and instinct." Eventually, the affirmation of national identity provided a status for Okada in an international context of art that would withstand comparison with American artists. Asked how he saw his own work in comparison with that of Americans such as Tobey or Rothko, Okada answered: "I thought that if I only awakened to the realization that I am Japanese, that would suffice. So then, I was no longer surprised when I looked at the works of any artist at all. And at the same time I started to understand people's pictures. At that point, the difference between the West and Japan became very interesting."55 In New York, Okada came to believe that an allusive Japanese quality was the inevitable consequence of the Japanese artist's national identity. That is to say, Okada developed his stance of artistic nationalism after taking up life as an expatriate artist in New York. Indeed, this ideology provided a system for securing himself a place in an international milieu. When the same interviewer commented that Okada's painting, no matter how abstract, always looked like that of a Japanese person, he replied: "That is not just the case with me; you can sense that the paintings of Japanese artists abroad, including young ones, are the paintings of Japanese people

They have something different from Western people. You

feel it through your eyes and with your skin. You are not doing anything especially Japanese, but it is tinctured with Japan." And he added, "On the other hand, even when Western [artists] try all kinds of Japanese themes, their work is still the work of Westerners."56 Although Okada demonstrated his faith in the principles of artistic nationalism in these statements, this disposition did not necessarily dictate his legal affiliation in the system of nation-states. His decision to exhibit in the American section of an international exhibition in Japan in 1955 and his acquisition of American citizenship in i960, on the one hand, suggest that his American context had become the very condition of the Japanese quality of his abstraction. 57 On the other hand, he exhibited at the Twenty-ninth Venice Biennale in 1958 at the Japanese pavilion, not the American, and spent increasing time in Japan in later years. Despite his Japanese critics, important expressions of support for his abstraction also appeared in the Japanese art world. Yashiro Yukio, the nationalist art historian, greatly admired Okada's work in America. Yashiro worked very hard to position ancient Japanese art

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in a favorable light among the masterpieces of Western civilization in American museums. 58 Hence he was delighted to find that "when you look at [Okada's] work among other abstract paintings in American museums, you get the clear impression of a Japanese sensibility from his abstract composition of agreeable colors and space." 59 For similar reasons, the critic Imaizumi Atsuo also found much promise in Okada's abstraction. I have mentioned Imaizumi's dismay on discovering the apparent inferiority of Japanese painting in Paris in 1952. In his 1959 essay "The Energy of Japan: Art," he reported that the ratio of abstract painters to figurative painters was highest in the United States, followed by France, with Japan in last place. But despite this discouraging international measure of Japanese abstraction, Imaizumi held out hope that a specifically Japanese approach to abstract art would soon achieve "something of a high caliber in the world." The enabling mechanism was to be a picturesque quality that he regarded as a "racial talent" of Japanese painters. Imaizumi believed that this talent could be traced back to the Tokugawa period, and although he felt it was presently a weakness of Japanese painting, he envisioned the transmutation of this weakness into a strength that would convey Japanese abstract painting to a "unique world height." And Imaizumi singled out Okada's painting as an exemplary model of this great potential of Japanese abstract art. 60 Hasegawa Saburo: Ambassador of Japanese Art Whereas Okada moved to New York in 1950 on the basis of the shrewd assumption that it was likely to be the next center of the "great movement in modern art," the artist and writer Hasegawa Saburo (1904-1957) followed him later in the decade with a well thought out agenda based on a more learned facility with the history of both European modern art and Japanese modern and premodern art. Okada saw no need to relate his work as a contemporary artist to the legacy of pre-Meiji culture until after his contact with the New York art world. But Hasegawa had been wrestling with this relationship long before his move to the United States. Shortly before his death, Hasegawa wrote that his entire career had been characterized by "anguish between the Orient and the Occident" (Toyd to Seiyd no aida de no

hanmon).61

A brief summary of his autobiographical narrative here shall suffice to illustrate his obsessive juxtaposition of Japanese and European (or American) cultural and art historical antipodes. The pattern began with his adolescence, when he went "sketching with oil paints in Nara Park." In this example, the medium of oil paint, which had been imported to Japan in the mid-nineteenth century with the beginning of the tradition of yoga, or "Western painting," is handled as a synecdoche of "the Occident," while Nara Park, the site of famous medieval Buddhist sculpture and architecture, is framed as an opposing synecdoche of "the Orient." Next, "when I was a cheeky high school kid, my teacher Koide Narushige made fun of my oil paint sketches of Hiroshige's wood-block prints." Koide was a master of what has been called "Japanese Fauvism," the prevailing style of yoga in the interwar years, but appar-

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ently he could see little point to his pupil's use of this modern form of "Western painting" to study the late Edo period master of Ukiyo-e. Hasegawa proceeded to study art history at the University of Tokyo, graduating in 1929 with a thesis on Sesshu's fifteenth-century hanging scroll depicting the Zen patriarch Huik'o presenting his severed arm to Bodhidharma. Later Hasegawa would also copy this near monochrome image in what he called the "extreme colors" of Fauvism. 62 Meanwhile, backed by his wealthy family, Hasegawa traveled to Europe, where he studied Western art history and continued his practice of various Ecole de Paris styles of modern painting in a Montparnasse studio. After two years, Hasegawa returned to Japan married to a French woman and proceeded to play a leading role in shifting the attention of many in progressive Japanese art circles from surrealism to abstraction through his writings, his organizational activities, as well as his painting. 63 But during the war years, Hasegawa's interest veered back again to the Japanese past. Modern Euro-American culture was the object of much critique and suspicion in Japan in the early 1940s, and Hasegawa engrossed himself in the study of Zen Buddhism and the arts of the tea ceremony. His new image as a kimono-clad tea master, however, startled those who remembered him as a stylish young man sporting imported fashions. 64 But with the war's end and Japan's defeat, devotion to Japanese cultural history without confronting the compelling accomplishments of European modern art no longer satisfied Hasegawa. He was at a loss as to how to integrate his esteem for European modernity with his reverence for the Japanese cultural past. Indeed, he confessed his bitter alienation from what seemed to be the only two relevant models of artistic genius: I have dozens of times had the weakness of heart to think that if only I could align myself with one or the other, it would be much easier. Intoxicated with the dizzying development of the past half century of European art, I could feel a great sense of power if I were to brandish the banner of this m o v e m e n t . . . but this of course is not to be. Or I think how nice it would be to . . . believe that compared to [the Edo period painter] Sotatsu, foreign contemporary art is little more than a childish effort. But in this frame of mind, I would live in an oblivion without painting a single picture of the slightest value. 65

Hasegawa was caught in an existential crisis. While he felt sundered from his Japanese artistic heritage by his historical place in the twentieth century, at the same time, his Japanese nationality seemed to alienate him from the great modern art of Europe. In this predicament, the arrival in Japan in 1950 of the Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi was something of a godsend: "In the instant I met Noguchi, this anguish was blown away, and I felt as if a broad path opened before my eyes."66 Hasegawa was not the only one in Japan at this time who was profoundly impressed by Noguchi, and

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the latter's extraordinary role in U.S.-Japan artistic relations will be examined in detail in Chapter 4. Noguchi's impact on Hasegawa can be credited to his considerable accomplishment in the field of modern art together with his great concern for the postwar conditions and premodern heritage of Japanese art. Indeed, Noguchi shared Hasegawa's enthusiasm for exploring the Japanese past from perspectives in modern art. Thus, Hasegawa happily served Noguchi as a knowledgeable and enthusiastic mentor and collaborator in the search for the relevance of the Japanese past to modern culture. In a rapid succession of essays on Noguchi, Hasegawa wrote that he admired his friend's sculpture for a quality he regarded as Japanese (Nihonteki). Looking at reproductions of works that Noguchi had created primarily in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, Hasegawa identified three components to the Japanese quality he discerned: a sensitive handling of materials such that they yield their natural properties, a gentieness of sensibility, and a spatial beauty reminiscent of the use of empty space (yohaku) in the tradition of monochromatic ink painting. In the same writing, Hasegawa then turned to a broader discussion of the relationship between art and nationality: I generally believe that with respect to contemporary art, at least abstract art, the closer one comes to a purity, to a truly international formal vocabulary, the more clearly the artist's nationality (minzoku-sei) or cultural tradition is expressed. For example, when I look at Mondrian, I can sense the climate of Holland and the penetrating intelligence and profound humanism of Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Gogh. . . . Therefore it comes as no surprise when one feels a Japanese quality in Noguchi's work. One can only admire the way that this natural order is realized, thus proving his authenticity as a new sculptor.67

The ease with which Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Gogh are manifested in Mondrian's painting suggests a nearly metaphysical model of artistic nationality transcending history and form. The presumed manifestation of Japanese artistic qualities in the work of Noguchi, who was part American and whose career was largely based in the United States, on the same "natural order" as the Dutchness of Mondrian provided Hasegawa with a propitious model of integration for his own "anguish between the Orient and the Occident." Hasegawa felt that his path to the attainment of an integrated sense of identity lay in realizing the profound common property of "the art of the East and the West" (bijutsu no tozai). But he approached this operation as though it were a project of cosmological enormity: The art of the East and the West are firmly linked. Overcoming whatever vast distance in time and space, they are firmly linked. However, it is in an awesome depth that they are linked to one another. There is no doubt that the upsurge of the spirit

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of art can realize this linkage. But laziness and servility can only serve to worsen the cross purposes that set the art of the East and the West against one another. 68

Said to be one of the most well-read artists of his generation in Japan, Hasegawa brought his extensive knowledge of pre-Meiji Japanese culture and European modern art to the task of forging channels of affinity through which this artistic linkage might be accomplished. Hasegawa had already ventured into this mode in his 1937 book Abstract Art, which surveyed abstract painting, sculpture, and architecture from Cézanne to the 1930s work of Europeans such as Arp, Brancusi, Helion, and Nicholson. Contemporary Japanese art made no appearance in this text, but Hasegawa construed a relationship between modernist abstraction and Japanese pre-Meiji culture in such a way as to prescribe an agenda for the contemporary Japanese artist: "When the development of abstract art brings about the translation of the tea ceremony and ikebana into a completely contemporary language, then the time will come when beauty will have been realized in everyday life and poesy will be written by everybody."69 Hasegawa singled out the tradition of calligraphy in particular as "a planar and abstract art" constituting a "great treasure house for abstract painting... [for] just as calligraphy is the purest art, so abstract art is the embodiment of the purest formal consciousness." 70 A succession of great modern masters—Cézanne, Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian—laid paint onto canvas without implying illusory depth and ultimately without referring to surface appearances of nature at all. What closer prototype for this quest for autonomous creative expression could there be than the art of calligraphy, where pictorial mimesis was not an issue? In fact, even the forms of the characters were splashed, abbreviated, or warped and twisted in ways that exceeded literary content and seemed to register the emotional state of the mind of the calligrapher, for example, in calligraphy by the eighteenth-century Zen monk Hakuin Ekaku, where legibility could be impaired by expressivity. Moreover, the conflation and rhyming of the arts of painting and calligraphy in Sino-Japanese history had the effect, in Hasegawa's words, of "[keeping] the art of painting from falling into photographic naturalism, so that it could become a true expression of spiritual values." 71 Inui Yoshiaki has suggested that an element of calligraphic draftsmanship seems to disengage the brushwork from the forms of the subject matter in Hasegawa's painting as early as a group of still lifes from the early 1930s. 72 This impulse was subsequently pursued beyond its basis in Matisse to produce a cursive field of activity without literal representation in works such as Metropolis (Figure 4). But in the early 1950s, buoyed by Noguchi's enthusiasm for Japanese tradition, Hasegawa abandoned his long career in the medium of oil on canvas. Later he would admonish colleagues still using oils in Tokyo: "To paint in oils in Japan simply because that is how the French paint is to succumb to artistic colonialism (geijutsu-jô no shokuminchi-sei)"7i

Thus, Hasegawa articulated a critical perspective on

historical and political meanings implicit in the materials with which artists identify.

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Eschewing oil paint, he focused his work on black and white, brushing black ink loosely on paper in strokes reminiscent of calligraphy but not recognizable as any characters in particular. During the months he spent investigating tradition with Noguchi in 1950, Hasegawa also turned to the technique of frottage (takuhon), which had long been used as a means of disseminating calligraphy engraved in stone surfaces. In a work of 1952, Hasegawa took ink rubbings from the section of a log into which he had carved the characters "yugen," the same term for a tranquil and subtle aesthetic in the Japanese past that appealed to Okada in this period (Figure 5). Hasegawa also used frottage in works without scriptural elements. With small pieces of wooden palettes used for fish paste and fragments of an old fishing boat, he made repeated ink rubbings to create motifs in abstract compositions on paper mounted on folding screens. Hasegawa sought to test his conviction that calligraphy was an abstract art through parallel investigations of calligraphic form and abstract form. One contemporary American artist who Hasegawa believed had successfully realized the potential relationship between abstract painting and calligraphy was Franz Kline. Hasegawa first learned of Kline's work when Noguchi, on his second postwar visit to Japan in 1951, presented him with a package of reproductions of Cardinal (Figure 6) and other black and Figure 4 . Hasegawa

Saburo. Metropolis (Tokai). 1936. Oil on canvas. 127.7 x 72.7 cm. Private collection.

F i g u r e 5 . Hasegawa Saburö. Yügen. c. 1952. Frottage. 67.3 x 44.5 cm. Private collection.

F i g u r e 6 . Franz Josef Kline. Cardinal. 1950. Oil on canvas. 79V2 x 58I/2 in. Private collection. © 2000 The Franz Kline Estate/Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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white abstractions that Kline had first exhibited the previous year in New York. Hasegawa published the photographs with an article about what he regarded as an important relationship between the work of Kline (as well as that of the French painter Pierre Tal-Coat) and Japanese calligraphy. Pollock and others in New York, Hasegawa wrote, were painting "abstractions of an intuitive character similar to kyoso," the "crazy cursive" tradition of calligraphy. But of all the painters working in black and white, Hasegawa continued, "Kline is the most remarkable new figure who has resolutely and determinedly fathomed the world of calligraphy."74 Hasegawa's conviction about the importance of calligraphy to Kline's abstraction suggests how, in practice, his pursuit of a "firm linkage of the art of East and West" could be a most destabilizing project. Sometimes the construction of a prolepsis for modernist abstraction in the Sino-Japanese past could have the effect of Japanizing abstraction, but it could also effectively exile the aesthetic properties regarded as Japanese from the territory and people of Japan. Contradictions symptomatic of the latter tendency would become increasingly marked in Hasegawa's career in the 1950s. Reporting Noguchi's criticism of the apparent superficiality of the public clamor for Matisse in Japan, Hasegawa wrote: "I was shocked. We who have now substituted technology for art, we who have become devotees of success, are given a highly perceptive criticism of Japan, 'the spiritual country,' by someone from America, 'the materialist country.' " 7 5 Essentializing these nations as spiritualmaterialist opposites, Hasegawa finds an apparent reversal of these roles disturbing. Hasegawa urged his compatriots in the art world to embrace what he regarded as their proper national identity in the international world of contemporary art: "Standing on common ground with foreign contemporaries such as Kline, we too must create a new art of our own, an art bespeaking our character as the inheritors of the great tradition of Far Eastern calligraphy."76 But Hasegawa's passionate plea for nativist Japanese abstraction was not well received in Japan in the 1950s. He complained that his friends were sharply divided between those whose interest lay with "the East" and those whose interest lay with "the West"; his desire to discuss the relationship between the two left him isolated.77 Hasegawa believed that Japanese art had become fixated on the "rendering sickness" (shasei-byd), his term for realistic representation learned from Europe since the Meiji period. 78 Meanwhile abstractionists like Kline who understood the importance of abstraction that had prevailed in Japan before the Meiji period were to be found in New York. Hasegawa concluded that "true orientalists," those who understood "oriental spirit," were more abundant abroad than in Japan. 79 The occasion of his first postwar trip to the United States was an invitation from the American Abstract Artists to organize a selection of Japanese art to include in their eighteenth exhibition at the Riverside Museum in New York in 1954. This organization had been formed to advocate abstract painting in the United States in the 1930s and had a membership of over two hundred painters in the mid-1950s. In a striking example of how the

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placement of art in a foreign context nationalizes it by differentiation, Hasegawa created the "Japan Abstract Artists Club" to provide an appropriate vehicle for showing his own abstract works together with those of eight other Japanese painters in a special section of the American Abstract Artists exhibition. American reviewers, however, were disappointed with the show, because it seemed to them that the "peculiar leveling effect of abstraction" reduced the national distinctiveness of the Japanese art to something that "might have been hung among the Americans without anyone being aware that here was art from another country." But Hasegawa's folding screens stretched with white paper and printed with abstract motifs in black ink were "the most moving of these works from Japan," because they "attempt a sincere fusion of the traditional and the abstract."80 Hasegawa traveled to the United States in 1954 as the official representative of the Japan Abstract Artists Club and remained there for an entire year, during which time he came in direct contact with the great appetite of many Americans at this time for Japanese culture. This was a peak season for Japanophilism in New York with live kabuki, Japanese traditional arts at the Museum of Modern Art, and the premier of Kurosawa's Rashomon. Hasegawa was astonished at the enthusiasm of New Yorkers for Japanese tradition: In about one hundred days I was asked by about one hundred people about Zen and at times they told me about Zen. And about fifty people talked about L a o - t z u . . . . When I go to eat and drink in Greenwich Village, inevitably somebody young or old, painter, musician, or poet, gets a hold of me and starts talking intently. How dearly they desire to learn from the Orient! 81

Artists were conspicuous among those hankering to hear Hasegawa. Ad Reinhardt, a prodigious orientalist himself, dubbed one contingent of the art world "cafe-and-club-primitive and neo-Zen-bohemians," represented by such artists as de Kooning, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Kiesler, Pollock, Rothko, Still, and Tobey.82 Among the New York venues where Hasegawa lectured was "The Club," a semiprivate artists' organization closely associated with Abstract Expressionism. 83 Hasegawa appeared before this group on several occasions in 1954, giving a slide lecture on pre-Meiji Japanese art, making a presentation on Zen and art, and participating in a series of panel discussions with the artists John Ferren and Ibram Lassaw for further consideration of Zen. 84 Hasegawa joked that he had been called on so often to expound on Japanese art and culture in the United States in 1954 that the Japanese government should appoint him as an "art ambassador."85 Indeed, although he had no official Japanese imprimatur and although his relocation to the United States was not without a certain exilic quality, given his feelings of rejection in Japan, Hasegawa's energetic pedagogy in the United States constituted a kind of cultural diplomacy. He promoted his distinctive ideal of Japanese and Asian culture before Ameri-

Japanese Margins of Abstract Expressionism | 41

can audiences. Having had weekly lessons from a native-speaking English tutor in his childhood, Hasegawa was able to communicate with Americans effectively. He was so confident in his theory of the relationship between pre-Meiji Japanese art and Euro-American modern art that, according to Akane Kazuo, he seemed to feel that he alone could give proper guidance to the American thirst for Sino-Japanese culture. 86 Hasegawa pursued this aim through his art as well as through public appearances, tea ceremony demonstrations, writings, teaching, and friendships, and he felt that many of the Americans he encountered were receptive to his advocacy of a proleptic Asian ancestry of modernism. One of Hasegawa's most memorable appearances in the New York art world was at a panel discussion titled "Abstract Art around the World Today" at the Museum of Modern Art. This was the very same occasion where Aline Louchheim discussed the "national flavors" of abstract painting. In a gesture reminiscent of Okakura Kakuzó, a predecessor Hasegawa admired, Hasegawa took his seat at the speakers table wearing a kimono. "Ladies and gentlemen," Hasegawa began his address, "I came here this evening in a costume almost perfectly formal." The transcript indicates that the audience responded to this unexpected use of the modernist rubric "formal" with laughter and applause. Then he explained, "I wear this to show that our costume has much older abstract elements." 87 The idea that the significance of pre-Meiji Japanese art lay in its abstraction was by this time something of a tradition in Europe and America. As noted, Ernest Fenollosa had advanced a way of looking abstractly at Japanese art early in the century. Indeed, the appreciation for the flat color shapes of Ukiyo-e prints in the late-nineteenth-century milieu of Japonisme is commonly regarded as having played a crucial role in the development of European painting toward abstraction. Wilhelm Worringer's influential essay "Abstraction and Empathy" of 1908 had lent weight to the idea of a special cultural linkage between Asia and abstraction. "Civilised peoples of the East, whose more profound world-instinct opposed development in a rationalistic direction and who saw in the world nothing but the shimmering veil of Maya," wrote Worringer, "alone remained conscious of the unfathomable entanglement of all the phenomena of life." 88 Hasegawa had been developing Japanese cultural perspectives of abstraction for nearly twenty years by the mid-1950s, and in New York he managed to embody in his person the notion of "older abstract elements" of Japan. Hasegawa's kimono performance at the Museum of Modern Art was a light if poignant moment in this tradition of associating Japanese art with abstraction, but his larger project of propagating Japanese perspectives of abstract art in the United States also entailed an important critical and ethical stance. He critiqued what he regarded as the excesses of the West, among which he included the cold war. He rejoiced when he discovered that Paul Valéry had turned to Lao-tzu for an authoritative statement of pacifism in search of salvation from the destruction of humankind by the feared outbreak of a World War III. 89 Hasegawa's belief in the contemporary international relevance of Taoism was inscribed in a number of calligraphic abstractions with Taoist themes that he created in the United

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States. In one ink study, for example, he inserted four small characters meaning "supreme goodness is like water" (Jo zen jaku sui) (Figure 7). The locus classicus of this pacifist expression is the Tao te ching, which exclaims the merits of the passive nature of water, which "rests where people dislike to be [and therefore] is close to the Tao, [for] only by noncontention is there nothing extreme." This Asian cultural association of nonassertiveness may be reminiscent of that associated with Okada's style of abstraction. But while Okada's yugenism posed a reassuring exotic sense of mildness and tranquillity, Hasegawa redirected the Asian theme of tranquillity to critical ends. Whether or not this

critical

nuance of Hasegawa's views found a sympathetic audience, the year he spent in the United States confirmed the impression he had already formed in Japan in 1951 that "true orientalism" was more advanced in the Figure 7 . Hasegawa

United States than in Japan. After just eight months back in Japan, he returned to the United

Saburo. Supreme

States in 1955, this time bringing his family with the intention of establishing residency.

Goodness Is Like Water

Thus, his East-West discourse was thrown topsy-turvy out of its presumed geographical ref-

(Jo zenjaku sui). 1954. Ink

erents. This move, however, was made possible by an invitation not from New York City,

on paper. 69.5 x 67.8 cm.

where Abstract Expressionism was centered, but from the West Coast. The great popular-

Collection of Mrs.

izer of Zen Buddhism Alan Watts hired Hasegawa to join the American Academy of Asian

Kiyoko Hasegawa.

Studies in San Francisco. In Watts' words, this academy was established to bring about "the practical transformation of human consciousness, with the actual living out of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist ways of life at the level of high mysticism: a concern repugnant to academics and contemptible to businessmen, threatening to Jews and Christians, and irrational to most scientists."90 Thus, here Hasegawa found a particularly friendly environment for his teachings regarding Asian culture as well as his critique of what he considered Western excesses.

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Hasegawa's promising West Coast career was cut short by an illness that led to his death in San Francisco in 1957. But by this point he had already embarked on an energetic program of teaching, writing, organizing exhibitions, and creating art. The role that Hasegawa began to create for himself was not that of providing direction to the thirst for "oriental spirit" among progressive American art circles of New York; rather, he was becoming something of a Japanese guru in the milieu of the Beat Generation. Watts delighted in the eccentric hybrid of avant-gardist and traditionalist that he saw as Hasegawa's hallmark: Sabro was an ideal mixture of Parisian bohemian and traditional Zen-Taoist Japanese, with a touch of samurai dignity and austerity. On the one hand, he might be lounging on the floor, drinking brandy and discussing outrageous new techniques for creating spontaneous abstractions (such as allowing ink-soaked woolen thread to drool over absorbent paper), while on the other, he might be conducting tea ceremony according to the superb technique of his master. 91

Hasegawa's vigorous promotion of Japanese culture in the Bay Area continued to serve as cultural diplomacy of a kind, but Japanese people did not necessarily regard his eccentricities as a suitable representation of their culture. Some visitors from the Japanese art world thought the sight of him preparing tea in a Hawaiian shirt and Japanese tabi socks to be an "outlandish spectacle." The room that he outfitted for himself in a rickety old woodframe house struck them as a space of "unidentifiable nationality" (kokusekifumei), and his appearance wearing haori and hakama in public seemed "excessively theatrical."92 Thus, if Hasegawa was an "ambassador of art," his diplomatic mission did not seem to be sanctioned by the nation he presumably represented. His attempt to realize the contemporary international relevance of the pre-Meiji cultural past had a dislocative effect on his Japanese identity such that it could only be accommodated outside of Japan. But, as the following discussion of Mark Tobey and especially Hasegawa's friend Franz Kline suggests, the eventual accommodation of the would-be ambassador in California rather than New York may also signal a dislocation from the center of Abstract Expressionism. Mark Tobey: A Janus-Faced America In 1958 the painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976) quoted the following words of the recently deceased Hasegawa: "In general old Japan was newer than the new Occident, while new Japan is apparently more old fashioned than either the new Occident or old Japan itself." Tobey added gravely that this was "a statement that needs rereading and reflection." 93 This paradoxical reading of history held very different consequences for Hasegawa, the Japanese artist and immigrant to the United States, and the European American Mark Tobey. For Hasegawa, the seeming modernity of pre-Meiji Japanese art and the obsolescence of subsequent Japanese art due to its imitation of old European models was a bitter irony that

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alienated him from his nation. But for Tobey, this interpretation of history presented a significant opportunity. In addition to an interest in aspects of "old Japan" that seemed new, Tobey also shared with Hasegawa an interest in the relationship between Asian calligraphy and abstract painting. Universal Field (Figure 8) demonstrates Tobey's distinctive style, which has frequently been referred to as "white writing." A sort of handwriting seems to meander throughout the entire composition in an even density. It is never legible, but one can almost trace bits of text here and there as in a decaying palimpsest. In fact, many Abstract Expressionist paintings have features that even a first-time viewer might associate with writing, and descriptive terms such as "Pollock's cursive draftsmanship" and "Gottlieb's pictographs" were common. Moreover, ideas about written language were used to articulate the expressive mode of abstract painting. For example, in 1947 Barnett Newman termed an exhibition of recent work by himself and others The Ideographic Picture and likened their aims to the graphic communication of the Northwest Coast Indian for whom "a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of awesome feelings." 94 Although many Abstract Expressionist paintings seem to relate to writing, their abstract imagery rarely resembles the forms of written English, though the discourse accompanying the movement was conducted largely in this language. One might wonder whether this disparity could irritate the nationalistic ideology associated with the movement. After all, language ranks along with geopolitics, religion, and race as one of the prime coordinates of national identity. Was there a danger that the forms of writing used by the Abstract Expressionists looked like a foreign language and therefore appeared "unAmerican"? The popularity of the tradition of East Asian calligraphy and painting in circles of abstract painting suggests one foreign association that might illuminate this question. Many abstract painters and sculptors of the postwar generation on both sides of the Atlantic

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F i g u r e 8 . Mark Tobey. Universal Field. 1949. Tempera and pastel on cardboard. 28 x 44 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, Purchase 50.24. Photograph copyright © 1999: Whitney Museum of American Art.

demonstrated an active interest in East Asian forms of writing and brushwork; a short list would include Julius Bissier, André Masson, Henri Michaux, Robert Motherwell, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith, Theodoras Stamos, as well as Mark Tobey.95 But whether or not individual artists can be documented to have investigated affinities between Asian writing traditions and modernist abstraction, viewers often brought this association to their work. The case of Franz Kline demonstrates how this line of interpretation could emerge even though the artist protested to the contrary. The abstract draftsmanship of Jackson Pollock too could seem as "elegant as a Chinese

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character" 96 or comparable to "oriental hieroglyphs." 97 Indeed, although Pollock's painting is not usually assumed to bear any close relationship to calligraphy, he himself alluded to Asian calligraphic practices.98 One study maintains that "oriental philosophy" was a topic of conversation between Pollock and his close friend the sculptor Tony Smith, who "gave Jackson his new medium—literally—by presenting him with a pad of rice paper and a bottle of black ink."99 The possibility of too strong an Asian accent in American abstraction was a vexing thought to Clement Greenberg: Kline's apparent allusions to Chinese or Japanese calligraphy encouraged the cant, already started by Tobey's case, about a general Oriental influence on "abstract expressionism." This country's possession of a Pacific coast offered a handy received idea with which to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that Americans were at last producing a kind of art important enough to be influencing the French, not to mention the Italians, the British and the Germans. Actually, not one of the original "abstract expressionists"—least of all Kline—has felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie entirely in the West. 100

Deflecting the notion of Asian influence on the "radically American" Pollock, Greenberg blames Tobey and defends Kline in his attempt to shelve the whole issue of whether calligraphy held any relevance to Abstract Expressionism. This maneuver in itself recommends careful scrutiny of these two artists' relationships to the Japanese margins of Abstract Expressionism. Tobey's defenders and detractors typically characterized his work in terms of his relationship to Asian culture. William Seitz, for example, claimed in 1962 that "Tobey's fusion of East and West was surely the most specific, influential, and culturally significant America has seen." 101 One circumstance linking Tobey to Asia was his long residence in the Pacific Northwest, a region of the United States often associated with Asia on account of its relatively large Asian population and the greater proximity of the West Coast to Asia than the rest of the continental United States. Tobey had catered to an exoticizing taste for Asian culture among local elites by painting in a Japoniste mode as early as the 1920s. But his personal association with Asia also stood on his early conversion and lifelong adherence to the Bahá'í World Faith, a modern religion with roots in Islam. Here I will focus on the role of East Asian calligraphy in the constitution of Tobey's abstract style, though it must be acknowledged that the Arabic and Islamic associations of his religion (including Arabic script) were also important references in his artistic development. He had had his first introduction to Asian brushwork from a Chinese artist named Teng Kuei, whom Tobey first met when Teng was studying at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1923. During Tobey's first and only trip to East Asia in 1934, Tobey rejoined his friend Teng, who had by then returned home to Shanghai. Tobey practiced brushing

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Chinese characters with Teng for a short while in China before moving on to Japan, where he spent a month at a Zen monastery in Kyoto meditating and studying Zen painting. 102 Later Tobey would write that brushwork of the sort he practiced in Asia was funda-

Figure 9. Mark Tobey. Broadway. 1936. Tempera

mentally different from the Euro-American oil painting to which he had been accustomed:

on fiberboard. 26 x 19W

"In a broad comparison between Eastern and Western art it could be said that in the East

in. The Metropolitan

artists have been more concerned with line and in the West with mass."

103

By crossing this

divide, Tobey achieved a kind of liberation: "In China and Japan I was freed from form by the influence of the calligraphic." Tobey's Broadway

104

of 1936 demon-

strated his new departure from what he regarded as Western form and mass (Figure 9). Here the spatial configurations and volumetric forms of the cityscape seem to be obliterated in an infrared exposure of electric and human energy. This work has been identified as the first manifestation of Tobey's distinctive style of allover light-toned draftsmanship on a dark ground. Tobey would develop this style through cycles of representation and, increasingly, abstraction, which can be seen in works such as Universal Field of 1949 (see Figure 8). The tendency of Tobey's "white writing" to fill up the pictorial field with layers of linear networks instead of leaving open space unpainted separates it from the East Asian tradition of monochrome ink painting. Moreover, the distinctive white on dark draftsmanship represented a reversal of the tradition of East Asian ink painting and calligraphy, which is primarily executed in gradations of black ink on white paper or light silk. 105 Nevertheless, commenting on his Broadway, Tobey noted, "The calligraphic impulse I had received in

Museum of Art, Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 1942.

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China enabled me to convey, without being bound to forms, the motion of people and cars and the whole vitality of the scene." 106 In the sense that form seems dematerialized in Broadway, one might agree that Tobey had internalized from East Asian models a capacity to render views and moods without concern for the solid, volumetric form characteristic of Renaissance and much subsequent European painting. Tobey's development toward the abstraction of paintings like Universal Field may also have been abetted by the paradigm provided by Sino-Japanese calligraphy for superseding F i g u r e 1 0 . Mark Tobey. Space Ritual No. 1.1957. Ink on paper. 29Ì/4 x 37 7/i6 in. The Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection.

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the rendering of illusionistic space with the "writing" of linear configurations on a flat field. The claim has also been made that Tobey's interest in the tradition of Asian theoretical speculation on the void (sunyata) and the continuity of human existence and nature may have led to his tendency to scatter his draftsmanship in an even density throughout the field, a compositional innovation that dispersed figure-ground duality. 107 Thus, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and culture more broadly would seem to be a crucial impetus to Tobey's development of his mature style. So routinely has Tobey's work been identified with the term "white writing" that one writer complained that even works that ^

Tobey executed in black on a white ground were dubbed "white writing." 108 Nevertheless, in the late 1950s Tobey created a group of over fifty abstractions including Space Ritual No. 1 (Figure 10) by distributing black ink forms on a white ground. Though the group demonstrated a diversity of styles and even included a few portraits, the spirited splattering and brushing of ink was the most noteworthy tendency of the series and represented a bold departure from his more delicate traceries of white writing. This black-on-white configuration of dynamic gestures against unpainted ground brought Tobey much closer to Japanese and Chinese prototypes. Indeed, he created these works while reading D. T. Suzuki's writings on Zen Buddhist aesthetics and with the encouragement of the artists George Tsutakawa and Paul Horiuchi and the Zen master Takizaki, Japanese American friends living in Seattle. 109 Defending this experimental series in a letter to Marian Willard, his dealer who subsequently presented these works in her New York gallery in 1957, Tobey claimed, "I think I now have the cumulation of the Eastern influences brought to a focus and quite exciting." 110 Placing his style at a distance from Japanese and New York coordinates, he continued: "No one in Japan has done what I can and have done. I know Kline exists and Pollock, but I have another note." Tobey's apparent strategy for attaining an original artistic identity might be characterized as the cultivation of a unique Pacific Northwest midpoint between New York and Japan in such a way as to counter the appearance of excessive dependence on either pole. He seems to have wanted to obtain something of the admired roughness of the black-andwhite style associated with Pollock and Kline, while averting the appearance of imitating them by linking his spontaneous gestural imagery with Japanese practices.

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In case New York viewers did not notice Tobey's alliance with Japanese ink painting and calligraphy, these works were officially presented as "Sumi Paintings." 111 The Japanese words "sumi" (ink) and "sumi-e" (monochromatic ink painting) were becoming familiar in American art journals at this time. In the very same month that Tobey's Sumi Paintings appeared at the Willard Gallery, D. T. Suzuki, whose lectures at Columbia University were widely attended by New York artists and writers, published an elegant interpretation of the mystical Zen ethos of the spontaneity of pre-Meiji Japanese paintings in Art News magazine. 1 1 2 Japanese contemporary artists also played an important role in the currency of spontaneous sumi imagery that arose in the mid-1950s. Indeed, the Willard Gallery had shown works by Hasegawa Saburo, including monochromatic ink abstractions, just a few months before Tobey's Sumi Paintings. 113 New York was also exposed to contemporary Japanese calligraphy at exhibitions such as Abstract Japanese Calligraphy at the Museum of Modern Art in 1954, featuring works by calligraphers who, as I shall show in the next chapter, investigated positions between painting and calligraphy. 114 With the sumi works of 1957, Tobey identified himself with these Japanese perspectives of monochromatic ink brushwork in the New York art world more closely perhaps than any other European American painter in the Abstract Expressionist milieu. At times, his desire to distance himself from the framework he saw as defining the mainstream of American art could be emphatic; in 1957 he admonished an interviewer who confessed that he did not understand some of the artist's more abstract works: "You are a slave of Western taste." 115 In the foregoing discussion of Tobey, I have attempted to assess his artistic commitment and debt to Japanese culture. However, Tobey did not see his involvement with Asian culture as antithetical but rather as compatible with a strong sense of American identity. The view has been advanced that Tobey was a "cosmopolite" and a "nomad" owing to his frequent travel and his ties to several cultures, 116 but this view obscures the nationalist American impulses that ruled his interactions with some of these cultures at important junctures in his career. Tobey's commitment to American national perspectives are well documented in his writings and interview texts. After the defeat of Japan in World War II, for example, the artist addressed what he felt was the "need for universalizing of the consciousness" in terms of America's relationship to Asia: "America more than any other country is placed geographically to lead in this understanding, and if from past methods of behavior she has constantly looked toward Europe, today she must assume her position, Janus-faced, toward Asia, for in not too long a time the waves of the Orient shall wash heavily upon her shores." 117 Thus, Tobey felt that Americans could not afford to ignore what he regarded as the inevitability of the coming encroachment of Asian culture into the United States. Although there were many other countries that could accurately be described as having significant ties to both Asia and Europe (most pointedly in these cold war years, the Soviet Union), Tobey argued that the geography of the United States singled it out for a destiny that no other country shared. Tobey's warning that "the waves of the Orient shall wash heav-

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ily upon [America's] shores" and his call for his nation's leadership in the universalizing of consciousness strike a note reminiscent of "Yellow Peril" xenophobia earlier in the century. Understandably, the Japanese art critic Takiguchi Shuzo would respond with a shudder. 118 In a lyrical essay of 1951, Tobey, whose painting was by this point predominantly abstract, yearned for a world that would be "abstracted without the feeling of being divorced from one's roots." 119 He proceeded proudly to confirm his own roots in America, "my land with its great East-West parallels." In the same essay, prewar memories of Japan are clouded with alienation of a sort that is surprising for an abstractionist celebrated for his interest in calligraphy: "I found myself suddenly annoyed when in Japan at the Nara Museum—all the titles were in Japanese." The encompassing of "great East-West parallels" by the American homeland was reassuring to Tobey's sense of national identity, while the illegibility of the Japanese script was alienating. In 1957, Tobey addressed a conference in San Francisco that was organized to consider "what Americans can do to promote mutual understanding of cooperation with Asia." 120 He commented that there had been a "hiatus between the art of the East and of the West" at the time of his trip to Japan in 1934 but that World War II brought this phenomenon to an end. Presumably it was the military defeat of Japan by the United States that had accomplished a felicitous bridging of the perceived East-West schism. Meanwhile in the art of the United States, Tobey sensed a diminishing European influence attended by the growth of "an indigenous style" together with an increasing awareness of "the Japanese aesthetic." He noted an interest in Zen Buddhism among contemporary American artists but was skeptical of its significance: "What hold this philosophy will have on our national culture, how indigenous it might become as part of our aesthetic remains to be seen." Tobey was leery of importing Asian culture without a mediating process whereby it might be transformed so as to seem indigenously American. A similar desire to protect an ideal American identity from Japanese incursions was voiced in other fields of American culture in the same years. For example, Tobey's contemporary the prominent industrial designer George Nelson was a strong advocate of broadening the understanding of Japanese design in the United States, but he cautioned, "The lessons that can be learned from the house in Japan have nothing to do with copying its superficial aspects

Any effort to reproduce the Japanese house, or its parts, would merely

result in a freak, because the Japanese way of life is not ours." 121 Concerns about the contact between American and Japanese culture were also addressed in the mass media of Tobey's day. Gina Marchetti's study of romances between Asian characters (primarily women) and European American characters (primarily men) in Hollywood films illustrates popular solutions to Tobey's problem of how to make Asian identity indigenous to America. War brought many young American men in military service to Asia in the 1940s and 1950s, and Hollywood capitalized on the entertainment value of this historical circumstance by dramatizing interracial relationships. The subtle rendering

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of these relationships insinuates larger ramifications for the national politics of AsianAmerican relations. In films like Sayonara (Joshua Logan, 1957), American society is portrayed as a tolerant melting pot by the "happy ending" conferred on an interracial couple that demonstrates promise of assimilation into the American mainstream. Marchetti remarks that the romance between the white American male protagonist played by Marlon Brando and the pacified Japanese woman in Sayonara delivered the message that, "just as it is natural for men to love and dominate passive women, it is natural for America to take a similarly dominant posture toward Japan." 122 In an environment where George Nelson sought to shelter the American home from the freakish influence of the Japanese home and where Marlon Brando subjugated a Japanese woman for the American military, perhaps it is not surprising that Tobey was concerned that his "Janus-faced" American culture ultimately stand closer to Europe than to Asia. Later he would write: "Some critics have accused me of being an Orientalist and of using Oriental models. But this is not so, for I knew when in Japan and China—as I struggled with their sumi ink and brush in an attempt to understand their calligraphy— that I would never be any but the Occidental that I am." 1 2 3 Despite all the Asian ingredients in the creation of his "white writing" and "Sumi Paintings"—the East Asian tradition of calligraphy and painting, D. T. Suzuki's Zen Buddhism, contemporary Japanese abstract calligraphy, the encouragement of Asian American artists in Seattle—and despite his desire for differentiation from New York artists such as Pollock and his proud vision of an America of East-West parallels, Tobey finally battens down his identity to an "occidental" foundation. Thus, the exceptional receptivity of Mark Tobey to Japanese and Asian culture was premised on a fundamental subordination of his involvements with Asia to an a priori sense of belonging to "the Occident." How did this subordination manifest itself in his art? What is one to make of the now irrepressible pun that Mark Tobey's "white writing" inscribed Japanese and other foreign scripts in a racially white idiom? Perhaps, this hidden politics played a role in the developmental process of abstraction. In the 1940s Tobey's interest in urban life was reflected in his numerous figurative studies of anonymous people in the marketplace, laborers, and even skid row denizens, but in the next decade Tobey's vision of the city appears more often in the form of abstract vortices of intersecting beams of light or jumbled fragments of unidentifiable script. One might agree with Kenneth Rexroth that by 1951 he had turned to "the religious affirmation which supersedes the mordant analysis of the mind of benighted cities." 124 The beginnings of this supersession can be discerned already in Tobey's 1940s scenes of crowds of people in Pike Place, a public market in Seattle. One such picture, painted during the war, was titled E Pluribus Unum, the Latin phrase that appears over the eagle's head on American quarters, meaning "out of the many, one" (Figure 11). The application of this national motto to the image of the teeming crowds of the marketplace in Seattle, a city noted

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for its large Asian American population, suggests the oppressive potential of the "melting pot" metaphor, where minority identities are smothered in a dominant culture. Later, Tobey would remember asking an anonymous habitué of the market, "What is your lineage?" to be gratified by the answer "Adam and Eve—just like you, my son." 125 This cultural homogenization achieves a metaphysical condition in Universal Field and many other abstractions of the late 1940s and 1950s, where particular motifs (whether written characters or human figures) seem subordinated to some cosmologica! pattern of energy. Sharing the primitivist romance of many in his generation, Tobey sought a kind of ur-language that all could "read," a script

F i g u r e 1 1 . Mark Tobey.

that would transcend, for example, the illegibility of written Japanese, which was so alien-

E Pluribus Unum. 1942.

ating in Nara in 1934. Already in the 1930s, he wrote of a desire to "release original energies

Tempera on board. 19% x

which I believe would almost automatically form their own language." 126 In Universal Field,

27V4 in. The Seattle Art

the "white writing" is disengaged from its textual grid, deployed with masterful drafts-

Museum, gift of Mrs.

manship and a delicate sense of rhythm like an expansive array of sidereal markings scat-

Thomas D. Stimson.

tered in the firmament. In some works of the 1950s, the calligraphic units seem to have undergone a pulverization and float in space like dust particles through which rays of light are projected. In the hands of some American admirers, Tobey's abstract writing assumed the status of a kind of hallucinatory American script. For example, Merrill Rueppel, the director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, believed that Tobey was "never for one moment anything but an American," reassuring his readers that he had "taken the calligraphy of the orient and made it the foundation of his own art without becoming oriental." 127 In his catalogue essay for the 1962 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, William Seitz claimed that "because [Tobey's] ideas are so powerful, and at base so Western, his brush almost never is imitative, Orientalizing, or over-decorative. Years of maturation preceded his East-West synthesis, and after it happened, in 1935, his knowledge of the Oriental brush was immediately assimilated." Here Seitz reduces the assimilative process to the briefest of encounters with the foreign, as though fearing that any further engagement would threaten native identity. 128

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Seitz imparts dizzying ecumenical sweep to Tobey's universal writing; his list of derivations includes Egyptian pictographs, cuneiform, Coptic and Peruvian textiles, Australian bark painting, Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew script, and Celtic illumination. For Seitz, all of this and much more is unified by the "organically integrated" life, personality, and beliefs of the artist. He writes that "Tobey's likes and dislikes, ethics, religion, amusements, goings and comings, aesthetics—his very faults and weaknesses—make up one entity, whole and clearly defined in its contradictions." 129 And he urges his American compatriots to study Tobey's art, "because his unique development throws valuable light on our culture and its relation to that of Europe and the Orient." 130 Thus, in Seitz' narrative, Tobey's abstraction is elevated to a universal language in a transaction consonant with the contemporary political rhetoric of hegemonic American universalism.131 Tobey's own rhetoric was not inconsistent with Seitz' interpretation; the artist referred to one of his calligraphic paintings as "oriental fragments—characters which twist and turn drifting into Western zones, forever speaking of the unity of man's spirit."132 An important paradigm for Tobey's impulse toward universalism is to be found in the writings of his religion, the Baha'i faith. This religion arose in the late nineteenth century in the Middle East among the followers of Baha' Allah ("Glory of God"), whose career assumes the form of a mythic westward narrative that parallels the trajectory along which Tobey carried his "oriental fragments" of script: "His Holiness Baha' Allah the Sun of Truth has dawned from the horizon of the Orient, flooding all regions with the light and life which will never pass away.... [His teachings are] . . . the one bond which will unite the east and the west."133 The Baha'i literature is filled with a radical antinationalism, prophesying future global unity, a single world state, and, indeed, one world language. But while Baha'i rhetoric demonstrates considerable liberalism, there is also an authoritarian tendency that betrays a hegemonic premise in Baha'i's authorship of unity: "The Promised One of all the peoples of the world hath appeared. All peoples and communities have been expecting a Revelation, and He, Baha' Allah, is the foremost teacher and educator of all mankind." 134 Baha'i universalism can be felt in statements with which Tobey accompanied the presentation of his abstract "white writing": "We are at a time of the break up of the evolution of the parts, with the peak in nationalism. We enter the great universal day when all the pieces have to function as a whole."135 Such comments as these, when placed in the context of Tobey's ambitions for a Janus-faced America, suggest that Baha'i universalism was commuted to an American universalism. Indeed, the thought that the United States might be the land where Baha'i universality could be achieved appealed to Baha'i leaders themselves: "May [America] be the first nation to proclaim the universality of mankind." 136 But Tobey's ambitions for his script encountered resistance. As noted, he was offended by those who seemed to think he was an "orientalist." One critic who might have provoked Tobey's protest was Thomas Hess, who blamed "the Oriental models to which he is so attached" for what he regarded as a defect in Tobey's painting: "Understatement to the point

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of preciosity and restraint to the degree where statement is innocuous—both flaws which so often mar Oriental painting—are evident in this modest tempera." 137 As "the more sort of vigorous thing" became the preferred mode of American abstraction in New York in the 1950s, Tobey seemed to lack the requisite boldness. In Irving Sandler's story of this movement titled The Triumph of American Painting, Tobey is brought up solely to consider whether his allover composition was a source for Jackson Pollock. Both painters rejected the Cubist residue of illusionistic pictorial space and practiced the new compositional system of an even density of brushwork distributed across the picture surface. But Sandler's conclusion is humiliating for Tobey; Pollock might well have known of Tobey's work during the crucial phase of his development, but this was of no importance, because "Tobey's 'white writing' was too minuscule in scale, reticent, and precious to interest Pollock." 138 Judith Kays has demonstrated that, in fact, Pollock did look at Tobey's work very closely over many years starting in about 1944, when he was first developing his overall composition. But she claims that the zealous desire of Greenberg and his follower William Rubin to "build a case" for Pollock led them to dissimulate the influence of Tobey. 139 Despite Tobey's ambition for a new American art, the formal sensibility of his style of writing did not correspond to a nationalistic taste for an aesthetic of great magnitude, such as that espoused by Clement Greenberg. Jackson Pollock, in Greenberg's view, was the paragon of the American avant-garde. Serge Guilbaut has suggested a gendered heuristic for the language of Greenberg's construction of American-French cultural difference. Guilbaut caricaturizes Greenberg's logic: "Only the virility of an art like Pollock's, its brutality, ruggedness, and individualism, could revitalize modern culture, traditionally represented by Paris, and effeminized by too much praise." 140 The quiescent and intimist disposition of Tobey's abstract writing was all too similar to the feminized contrast in this comparison for him to figure heroically in The Triumph of American Painting. Tobey was puzzled that the warm reception his paintings received overseas was not forthcoming at home; in 1956 he wrote, "I am still at 6's and 7's what to do—it seems my best audience is in Paris or Tokyo." 141 The universal script he developed for a proud Janusfaced America was embraced in the contexts he regarded as sources, not destinations. The Sumi Paintings of 1956-1957 were an attempt to respond to the prevailing aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism in New York that made his "white writing" seem too precious and reticent. Many of the 1957 images were indeed bolder and more spontaneous than any of Tobey's previous works. Whereas the artist's suave "penmanship" is felt in his white tracery even when dispersed and agitated, now ink was allowed to flow and splash freely in the interval between the hand and the paper. Tobey engineered the originality of his Sumi Paintings by differentiation from both Pollock in New York and abstract calligraphy in Japan. But this was a perilous balance; while the introduction of the spontaneous ink gesture from Japanese calligraphy could lend a unique energy to his work relative to Pollock, any resulting

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impression of Asianness could only diminish the interest of people like Greenberg and Hess, who seemed to think it a liability. As Harold Rosenberg wrote, the " 'Sumi' thrown-ink paintings [were]... less interesting than Pollock's and Kline's in that they look Chinese." 142 Even a very positive review of Tobey's Sumi Paintings negotiated the relationship to Asia as a liability rather than an asset: "The likeness of some works to grand Chinese calligraphy and pine-sprays does not conceal Tobey's new plastic blossoming." 143 The apparent Asianness of the Sumi Paintings seems to have been unacceptable because it transgressed the principle that the sense of national identity expressed in the work of art should be isomorphic with the artist's presumed national identity. But perhaps this offense was compounded by Tobey's assertion of an Asian aesthetic quality that was antithetical to the preferred view of Asian aesthetics, namely, a mildness and tranquillity such as that appreciated in Okada Kenzo's abstraction. Perhaps the expression of bold and dynamic strength in works such as Space Ritual No. 1 treads too close to the expression of virility in the art of Pollock that was admired as American. Nevertheless, the particular sense of power generated by Tobey's use of sumi was in keeping with the spirit of the thinker who was his Japanese authority. D. T. Suzuki, whose Japanese nationalist ideals may have been offended by connotations of weakness in the prevailing imagery of mildness and tranquillity in representations of Japanese culture, emphasized "something virile and unbending" and a sense of "masculinity" in his account of the sumi-e and calligraphy of Kamakura period Japan. 144 Japanese art history, however, may not have been a preferred association for American artistic expressions of virility. Tobey dropped the bold style, technique, and material of his 1957 Sumi Paintings and would later remember the project in terms suggesting that his earlier vision of a universalizing Janusfaced America encompassing Asian and European perspectives had fallen apart: "The two faces of Janus are seen everywhere. I have a terrible time trying to get my two into focus." 145 While the Sumi Paintings failed to garner a position of leadership for Tobey in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism, Tobey's work continued to generate an enthusiastic following in Europe. In fact, the French painter Georges Mathieu and the British critic Patrick Heron argued that Tobey was more important than Pollock, Heron crowning Tobey as "one of the most influential painters now living." 146 Such European accolades made the American reception of his work seem greatly dissatisfying. According to Katherine Kuh, Tobey's disappointment at the lack of recognition he received in the United States prompted him to move to Switzerland in i960, and he kept his residence there until his death in 1976. 147 Merrill Rueppel and William Seitz may have wished to give Tobey greater recognition in the United States, but the exhibitions that they organized of Tobey's work in America took place after his expatriation. Franz Kline: American Graphology Tobey, it will be recalled, was Clement Greenberg's scapegoat for what he regarded as the unfortunate stories about oriental influence on Abstract Expressionism, while Franz Kline

Japanese

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(1910-1962) was favored by Greenberg's defense against "apparent allusions to Chinese or Japanese calligraphy." For Greenberg, "not one of the original 'abstract expressionists' —least of all Kline—has

felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art

lie entirely in the West."148 This passage from the famous essay in which Greenberg maintained that the term "American-Type Painting" would be preferable to "Abstract Expressionism" is quoted from his 1958 revision of the text. Curiously, the first version of this essay, written in 1955, shows that Greenberg had reversed his verdict on Kline: "Kline's unmistakable allusions to Chinese and Japanese calligraphy encouraged the cant, already started by Tobey's example, about a general Oriental influence on American abstract painting. Yet none of the leading abstract expressionists except Kline has shown more than a cursory interest in Oriental art." 149 Thus, in 1955 Greenberg thought Kline exceptional for his interest in oriental art, but three years later this remark was corrected to read that, of the "original" Abstract Expressionists, Kline was least interested in oriental art. Greenberg was hardly alone in his first impression that there was some connection between Asian calligraphy and Kline's abstraction. The debut of Kline's bold black and white abstractions in 1950 was generally heralded with the assumption that they "were magnified improvisations of the signs and symbols found in Chinese and Japanese writing and painting." 150 And in 1954, Alfred Barr, Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art, mentioned Kline, who was present at the occasion, along with Tobey as American artists whose appreciation of the calligraphic tradition of Japan underscored the importance of a forthcoming exhibition at the museum of contemporary Japanese calligraphy. 151 Art critic Thomas Hess wrote in 1951 that Kline had "mastered a heavy calligraphy which lends [his painting] Cardinal...

a certain Oriental deftness—in fact, sculptor Isamu Noguchi reports that work

along similar lines is being attempted in Japan today" (see Figure 6). 1 5 2 I have already noted that in 1951 Hasegawa had written in the Japanese art press that Kline had "resolutely and determinedly fathomed the world of calligraphy." I shall consider the work of the progressive calligraphers in the Bokujinkai group in Japan who were working "along similar lines" in the next chapter. There was a flurry of correspondence between Kline and this group in Japan in the early 1950s. Kline sent photographs of his paintings, which were reproduced in their art and calligraphy journals along with translations of his letters and the commentary of Japanese critics and artists. Kline wrote in reply to Hasegawa that "the works by Korin, Sesshu, and Hokusai at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts were the strongest influences of my student years. Since then . . . [along with Rembrandt] my love for Korin, Hokusai and the older painters of Japan and China became stronger." 153 And in July 1951 Hasegawa noted in another article that Kline had written to him of his "passionate interest in calligraphy." 154 The following year another letter from Kline arrived in Japan in which he warmly acknowledged receipt of the magazine of Japanese avant-garde calligraphy titled Bokubi (Beauty of Ink): "I cannot tell you how Bokubi is loved and admired here. Everybody is asking to see the issues I have. I'm sure that in the near future, Bokubi is going to be distributed all over New York." 155

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Bokujinkai member Inoue Yuichi responded to Kline's letter with an essay in which he exclaimed that "it is remarkable how the world's avant-garde art is gradually approaching ancient oriental art, calligraphy and ink painting" and supposed that the changes in Kline's work over the previous year had been attributable to the influence of the calligraphy published in the issues of Bokubi, which Kline said he prized so dearly.156 On arriving in New York in 1954, Hasegawa promptly contacted Kline, and the two spent much time together. Hasegawa wrote home to Japan that Kline was painting "abstractions that looked just like calligraphy" and proudly noted that the generous Kline had given him a spare key to his New York studio and invited him to come and go as he pleased.157 The foregoing account of the American and Japanese reception of Kline's work and the contact between Kline and contemporary Japanese artists suggests that the comparison of his abstraction to Japanese calligraphy would be a reasonable exercise. Although works such as Cardinal are realized in oil on canvas rather than ink on paper, they display an architecture of bold black strokes on a white ground reminiscent of effects that can be found in the diverse traditions of East Asian calligraphy. Moreover, Kline's smaller studies in ink on paper from 1949 and 1950 (Figure 12) might be compared to medieval works of calligraphy such as the two characters "Enni" of the name of a Kamakura period Japanese Zen monk brushed as a commemorative piece by his Chinese teacher in the thirteenth century (Figure 13). The two characters, which Kline could not have read, seem to have been set in motion and slammed into one another to create a dynamic collision. Such a comparison serves to demonstrate the rich potential of a dialogue between Kline and contemporary Japanese proponents of calligraphy. But the comparison of Kline's work to calligraphy might seem to be a futile exercise, because Kline himself denied the relevance of calligraphy to his work. Despite his acknowledgment in 1951 to Hasegawa of a "passionate interest in calligraphy," subsequently Kline would repeatedly deny that his work had any relationship to Asian calligraphy. In 1956, for example, he dismissed a reporter's questions about his oriental influences as follows: "When the sculptor Noguchi took some of my drawing to Japan, the artists there decided that my work had its beginnings in Japanese calligraphy. Now I get letters from Japanese painters who would like to discuss the matter in lengthy correspondences, and everybody here seems to think I've been to Japan. The whole subject is getting a little wearying."158 The artist's denial that his abstraction had any relationship to calligraphy was to be repeated piously by almost every writer who dealt with his work at length since the late 1950s: those who hastily dismissed the relevance of the calligraphic tradition from the consideration of Kline's work include not only Clement Greenberg, but also Frank O'Hara, Lawrence Alloway, Elaine de Kooning, Irving Sandler, and more recently Harry Gaugh and David Anfam. 159 They were following the artist's wishes. Kline was said to be "anxious that his paintings not be considered as calligraphy"160 and to have "fought this Oriental interpretation throughout his career," and, it was reported, "One of the few things that angered

F i g u r e 1 2 . Franz Josef Kline. Untitled. 1950. Ink on paper. 27.9 x 21.6 cm. Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis. University purchase, 1967.

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him was having his painting compared to Japanese calligraphy." 161 What was the substance of this vehement denial? Shortly before his death in 1962, Kline argued: "The Oriental idea of space is an infinite space; it is not painted space, and ours is. In the first place, calligraphy is writing, and I'm not writing. People sometimes think I take a white canvas and

I

paint a black sign on it, but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important." 162 This measurement of culture according to a totalizing binary of an

F i g u r e 1 3 . Wujun. Enni.

occidental "us" versus an oriental "them" was typical of Kline's contemporaries. But does

Southern Sung dynasty.

this contrast of his work to calligraphy withstand scrutiny? Certainly, there are conspicuous

Ink on paper. 32.2 x 52.5

differences between Kline's work and calligraphy; Kline's point that the thick strokes of

cm. Tofuku-ji, Kyoto.

white paint on his canvases constitute a significant distinction from Asian calligraphy is well-taken. But it does not follow that, "by using white positively, he neutralized the tendency for the blacks to become volumes and for their surroundings to recede," as David Anfam concludes. 163 Even discounting the reduction of values in black and white reproductions, the effect of most of Kline's black and white paintings, at least those dating from the early and mid-1950s, is that of black forms on a white ground. Moreover, although Kline and his apologists assumed that the positive interpretation of the negative white shapes in his work distanced him from East Asian calligraphy, as Helen Westgeest implies in her discussion of Kline's art and calligraphy, this argument is not effective, because Japanese art had long been interpreted in the United States precisely in terms of an equivalence of figure and ground. 164 Indeed, others in the New York art world at this time, such as the painter Josef Albers, viewed the complex perceptual game of collapsing the dichotomy between figure and ground as a principle of Zen Buddhist thought. 165 Though they look far less like calligraphy than Kline's paintings, Albers' nested squares are more effective than Kline's compositions in frustrating the perception of

figure-ground

difference. Thus, trying to lay down the line between his abstraction and Japanese calligraphy, Kline unintentionally links himself to a principle associated in his environment with Zen Buddhism, which for D. T. Suzuki and others was the philosophical basis of calligraphy. Kline's rejection of calligraphy was not only rhetorical; his stylistic development from the early 1950s onward can be understood as carrying him ever farther away from a formal model susceptible to comparison with East Asian calligraphy. Whether it was an "acciden-

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tal" resemblance as Jules Langsner supposed or not, 166 Kline's ink-on-paper sketches of 1948 to 1950 mark his closest convergence with calligraphy. When he turned in the early 1950s to painting large oil-on-canvas works based on ink-on-paper preparatory studies, his work moved materially away from calligraphy. And in the mid-1950s, Kline's black forms became less like calligraphic brush strokes, thickening into great bulks like the silhouettes of massive forms. Finally at the end of the decade and until his death in 1962, a greater painterly impasto and the addition of color took him beyond the range of comparability to calligraphy. What motivated this steady self-distancing from calligraphy as well as the defensive rejection of any dialogue with calligraphy that is recorded in Kline's statements and those of his supporters? Perhaps the modernist ethic of flattening the illusion of pictorial space was threatened by reading Kline's compositions as black calligraphic forms on a white ground. Or perhaps the focus of calligraphy on the conventional forms of the lexical character was an association that offended the ideal of the act of painting as an unmapped exploratory invention of expressive form. 1 6 7 But artistic nationalism also played a role in Kline's disinclination to pursue the expressive potential of calligraphy. Hasegawa saw no contradiction in what he (perhaps naively) regarded as Kline's deep understanding of Asian calligraphy and an Americanness that he imputed to Kline's "bold spontaneity, simplicity and actionoriented character." 168 But if Kline shared the kind of nationalistic fervor with which Clement Greenberg viewed contemporary art, he would surely have been wary that any apparent relationship of his work with Japanese culture would compromise its effectiveness as a representation of American national identity. On one occasion, Kline suggested that the character of American art could be located in an intuitive approach to creativity, claiming that the regard for painting as an act of giving "life itself," rather than as the "product of knowing," was an "American point of view." 169 And he remarked with satisfaction to one journalist, "It must be quite a shock [to European painters] that something original and significant should come from here." 170 Among Kline's friends and supporters, Greenberg was not the only one to praise his abstraction as a vehicle of national identity. Frank O'Hara envisioned an "American dream of power" in Kline's paintings, 171 and for Elaine de Kooning, they were "all-American in effect." 172 The poet James Schuyler wrote that Kline's "problem as an artist was profoundly American." 173 Kline's abstraction seems to have been valued as an American national script. Perhaps a too conspicuous quotient of Asian or Japanese influence would have injured this yearning for an American graphology. Indeed, the critical language of Abstract Expressionism often resembled a sophisticated practice of graphology where the study of the painting divulges the painter's character and identity. In the Abstract Expressionist milieu, the formal characteristics of a painter's work were expected to be utterly consistent with the character of the painter. This ethic of individualism provided much leeway for the styles of individual artists to differ as markedly, for example, as those of Kline and Pollock. And yet the range of diversity required to suggest

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individualism was bracketed within desired ideals of the nation: virility, boldness, spontaneity, large scale. Persuasive models expressive of each of these characteristics could be located in the large and diverse history of Sino-Japanese calligraphy. But as the American success of the gentle and subtle aesthetic of Okada's "yugenism" suggests, an Asian locus classicus for Kline's "American dream of power" would have contradicted the preferred view of the contrast between Japanese and American culture. Moreover, if Kline's work or biographical narrative suggested a "debt" to Japan, it would have risked tincturing his art with a foreign ambiance antithetical to the goals of the American graphology. Artists Typecast b y Nationality

In movies and stage dramas, it is assumed that playing the role of a murderer is no indication that the actor or actress is a murderer in real life, though a big, brutish-looking actor might be typecast to do the job. But in the climate of Abstract Expressionism, a painting was assumed to be profoundly expressive of its painter's personal identity, nationality included. Yet, in practice, this assumption may have worked in reverse sometimes; the painter may have been ideologically conditioned to create an image compatible with or evocative of profiles of national identity that were held as ideal in his or her social environment. In this sense, many of the paintings and even the painters examined in this chapter can be understood as products of national typecasting. Okada demonstrates this process with unusual clarity, because his New York context typecast his art according to American notions of Japanese national identity, though he rapidly internalized this identity and developed it on his own. Hasegawa developed a vision of Japanese artistic identity much earlier in life and struggled to overcome obstacles to its realization in the practice of painting. Indeed, he exerted considerable effort to persuade Japanese compatriots to espouse his ideal and even believed that his vision of Japanese national identity held relevance to Americans as well. Nevertheless, Asian artistic identities were anathema to the constraints of the American typecasting that unfolded in the careers of Tobey and Kline. What finally were the positions that these artists achieved in canonical Abstract Expressionism through this historical process of national typecasting? Daniel Belgrad suggests that the idiom of gestural abstraction that prevailed in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism constituted a means for "challenging the cultural hegemony of privileged Anglo-American 'insiders'" and attaining greater access for artists of immigrant, working-class, and minority backgrounds. 174 This may well have been the case for the primarily European American artists that are the focus of Belgrad's study of Abstract Expressionism. But the Japanese margins of Abstract Expressionism indicate important limitations to the scope of the greater access that Belgrad identified. In Ann Gibson's account, the canon of the movement was centered on a group of European immigrant and European-descended artists she refers to as the "essential eight."175 None of the four painters discussed in this chapter obtained a position within this exalted circle. In Gibson's description of the hierarchy, Kline ranks in

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the second tier beneath the essential eight, while Tobey figures in the third tier among artists whose names were mentioned less frequently, and Okada and Hasegawa are simply off the map, as were other Asian American contemporaries working in abstract styles in this milieu. Many factors were involved in the determination of these four art historical destinies. Nonetheless, they accord with Arif Dirlik's view that Asian immigration "represented a Pacific component in US national history that was suppressed... by the ideology of a Western moving frontier . . . which would not allow for any alternatives to the idea of'civilization' that propelled it." 176 In other words, the immigration of artists from Asia to the United States was indeed an aspect of the larger history of Abstract Expressionism, but the ideology of artistic nationalism worked to marginalize the two Japanese immigrants and also encumbered the encounters of the two European American artists with Asian culture. Kline's elevated station can be attributed, in part, to his success in distancing himself from associations with East Asian calligraphy. Whatever interest he may have had in Asian calligraphy was "appropriated only in a decontextualized way: to keep the specific debt from being obvious," to borrow Gibson's description of the use Abstract Expressionism made of Native American and African art. 177 Tobey's journey took him from the Pacific Northwest to New York, where he attempted in the late 1950s to demonstrate a bold new American form of abstraction through allusions to Japanese monochromatic ink painting and calligraphy. This supplementary role of Asia in the definition of American identity follows an important pattern that emerged, as mentioned in Chapter 1, as early as 1876 with the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Nevertheless, the failure of Tobey's gambit in the New York-centered world of Abstract Expressionism suggests that realizing this supplementary value of Asian influence could be a risky venture. The very notion of regarding Okada Kenzo and Hasegawa Saburo in terms of their absence from canonical (American) Abstract Expressionism might seem to be a disservice to the Japanese character of the abstraction that was so critical to their aims (Hasegawa consistently and Okada belatedly). Indeed, it might be argued that their efforts have been rewarded more appropriately with the positions they have been allotted by Japanese art historians and curators in the canon of twentieth-century Japanese painting. But this Japanese nationalist art history marginalizes their Asian American positions, though their art and careers were inextricably interwoven with the American context of Abstract Expressionism. They were what Said has called "voyagers-in," artists who moved from subjected territories to metropolitan centers to participate in the avant-garde. Their art documents an "adversarial internationalization in an age of continued imperial structures." 178 In New York they did not find the homogenous American community that canonical Abstract Expressionism might suggest. The art community was very much a society of immigrants of diverse backgrounds drawn by the metropolitan base of the avant-garde. As Hasegawa wrote, painters from all over the world lived together in Greenwich Village in an international assembly that he described as a United Nations of art. 179 The artistic journeys

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of Hasegawa and Okada to the United States were driven in part by the universalizing ideology that accompanied the American geopolitical influence over Japan in the early postwar years. This was a time when, in Guilbaut's words, "American art moved first from nationalism to internationalism and then from internationalism to universalism." 180 How did Japanese protagonists of abstraction fare in this dizzying ascent? Two assessments by individuals in important positions in the American art world provide a means of answering this question. The most important institutional recognition of Japanese and Japanese American abstract painting in the United States in the 1950s was an exhibition titled Contemporary Painters of Japanese Origin in America. Held in 1958 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the exhibition featured works by Okada, Hasegawa, and other Japanese and Japanese American painters. 181 The exhibition was preceded by an article titled "Nipponism" authored by its principal organizer, Thomas Messer, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art. 1 8 2 Establishing the intrinsic foreignness of this art as the criterion of selection, Messer explained that the exhibition was based on the belief that "the work of Japanese artists in this c o u n t r y . . . has distinguishing features enabling one to single it out from the rest of abstract art." The painters who interested Messer had "three things in common: a country of origin: Japan; a country of adoption: America; and a style: Nipponism." Messer's account of the artists' Japanese national identity begins with their childhood. He "imagines these Oriental children drawing and painting within a broad folk tradition and unlocking playfully and leisurely the gates that lead to the mysteries of art." But the progress of these innocents was imperiled by two grave dangers: the degeneration of tradition ("the old tradition, unable to nourish yet one more generation, had turned academic and sterile") and excessive contact with the West ("they were awkwardly handling the subjects of the Western movement that obviously puzzled them"). Those who made the journey to the United States, however, were saved by their contact with the Abstract Expressionists. "It is from such painters that Japanese artists arriving on these shores appear to derive new stimulation which in turn seems to enable them to forge ahead toward unexplored territories." Hasegawa and Okada were "freed from their own academic tradition by the art of the West and have proceeded to create a new artistic language." The addition to the catalogue of a discussion of Japanese tradition and the artists' own comments alleviates the patronizing air of Messer's article to some degree. And the catalogue suggests that some Japanese artists could be accorded a kind of dignity in the American art world, but the parameters of this identity were determined by the orientalist premises that permeate Messer's article. The support of Gordon Washburn, the director of Asia House Gallery in New York, for Okada Kenzo typified the American appreciation of this artist. His art "transports] us into an elusive yet deeply satisfying experience of another culture, another life," but it was the "American mode of Abstract Expressionism [that] was being adapted as a flexible instrument with which he would explore himself, his inheritance and his genius." 183 Thus, Okada

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was deeply indebted to American art, but Washburn could not imagine that Okada's art offered any contribution to American art. Washburn left no doubt about his views on the relationship between Japanese and American art when in 1969 he issued a sweeping denial that Japanese culture had ever exerted any significant influence on modern American or even European art. Washburn's opinion is all the more stunning because it was drafted in response to an ambitious project organized by Japanese, European, and American scholars to investigate "the nature of artistic interchange between Japan and the West over the last hundred years." 184 Washburn quickly dismissed Mark Tobey as an exception and then proceeded to cite Kline's denial that he had been influenced by calligraphy and a whole list of similar denials to support the view that Japanese art was inconsequential to modern art in Europe and America. In contrast to the "detachment from the world" of the Japanese, Washburn declared, "our Western hearts beat a furious protest against total dissolution, which has never been acceptable in our tradition, a tradition stemming from idealist thought of the Greek world." 185 "A genuine dialogue," one might conclude, was forestalled by a failure to "admit that crucial aspects of the non-Western culture may have a great degree of coherence as part of a larger web of ideas, beliefs and practices." 186

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Chapter 3

The Calligraphy and Pottery W o r l d s of Japan

Striking new hybrid genres of calligraphy and pottery emerged in early postwar Japan. By assimilating certain properties from modern painting, a progressive contingent of calligraphers disengaged their practice from written language. Similarly, the repudiation of vessel function produced a new type of pottery that looked very much like sculpture. Great stakes were involved in the acceptance or rejection of abstract brushwork as calligraphy and nonfunctional ceramic objects as pottery, because the practices of pottery and calligraphy were much more than individual artistic activities. Each was the raison d'être of a discrete community, or, in sociologist Howard Becker's term, an "art world," that is, a social network of individuals and institutions operating according to conventions to produce and disseminate objects acknowledged as art. The media-defined art worlds of calligraphy and pottery are each homological to the nation-state in aspects of their institutional structures. Moreover, each of these worlds presumes to protect and foster a vital aesthetic organ of the nation as a whole through its stewardship of a particular art form. In this chapter, I investigate the service of art worlds to their nations and then turn to the roles played by two individuals in the admission of the new hybrid genres into their respective art worlds, the calligrapher Morita Shiryù and the potter Yagi Kazuo. Since Yagi never actually traveled to the United States and Morita did so only briefly later in his career, they might seem out of place in a book that purports to be about individuals who negotiated the U.S.-Japan cultural border. But the borders of their art worlds were inflected with the tensions of national borders, and their crossings of these art world borders carried them beyond spaces within regarded as native and Japanese or Asian to spaces without regarded as alien and American or Western. 66

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A r t W o r l d s within Nations

In the previous chapter, I considered the American national identity sustained by Abstract Expressionism with respect to the constraints it exerted on the Japanese artists and even certain American artists who traveled in its milieu. Abstract Expressionism can be identified as a period of American art history, a canon, a set of beliefs about abstract painting, and a mode of critical language. But it was also situated firmly in a specific sector of American society: "The whole substructure of the New York artists' social world was based on interconnected friendships and hierarchies. . . . It was like a beehive, full of humming and bumbling, ceremonial dances, ritual games of follow-the-leader—and death to strangers."1 The sarcasm of this critic stands on the ideal that the great artist is one whose originality should be unfettered by social context. But as Pierre Bourdieu writes, "The producer of the value of the work of art is not the artist but the field of production as a universe of belief which produces the value of the work of art as a fetish by producing the belief in the creative power of the artist."2 The conventional focus of art history on the artist has often obscured the role of what Bourdieu called the "field" of art, a term related to Howard Becker's "art world." For Becker, artworks "are not the products of individual makers, 'artists' who possess a rare and special gift. They are, rather, joint products of all the people who cooperate via an art world's characteristic conventions to bring works like that into existence."3 Throughout this book I am more interested in the activities of individual artists than Bourdieu or Becker would recommend, but I do think their insistence on a focus on the community of producers as a whole is very helpful in the analysis of the relationship between the individual artist and the nation. The art world mediates the artist's relationship to the nation in important ways. The population of any given art world, whether that of Abstract Expressionism or calligraphy or pottery, is so much smaller than that of the nation with which it is associated that one would have to conclude that the art world is of minimal significance to the larger nation of which it is a subset. Nevertheless, art world rhetoric frequently assumes the prerogative to define the larger national identity by assertions focused on art objects. Such definitions are constructed with the presumption that art world propositions regarding the actual or ideal character of the nation's art are more authoritative than contradictory definitions of art that might develop in other social sectors of the nation. Although the parameters of the art world are much smaller than those of the nation, the projection of the former to the latter merits careful attention. The relocation of artists such as Hasegawa Saburo and Okada Kenzo from Japan to the United States took them from a highly developed art world in Tokyo to another one in New York. Their Japanese art world was primarily that of yoga, or "Western painting," established in the late nineteenth century through the acquisition of the materials, methods, and values of European oil painting for use in Japan. Since New York painting was also grounded in modern European tradition, a good bit of overlap of canons, techniques, and history related

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the American world of painting closely to the Japanese world of yoga. Thus the intimate familiarity with Cézanne and Picasso that Okada brought to New York in 1950 corresponded closely to that of Kline, Newman, or Rothko. Moreover, by that point in his career, Okada had been working with oil on canvas as long as his American contemporaries. In effect, the account of Okada offered in the previous chapter suggests that he disguised the great similarity of his yoga heritage to the tradition of the New York School by introducing new references to Japanese tradition that were actually quite alien to his yoga upbringing. Unlike the art world of yoga, the Japanese calligraphy and pottery worlds had no clear counterparts in the United States. The relative autonomy of calligraphy vis-à-vis Europe and America is simply a reflection of the fact that there is no American practice that corresponds to the art of writing in Japan. There is a history and community of ceramic arts in the United States, sustained by institutions such as the Ceramic National held at the Everson Museum in Syracuse New York twenty-six times between 1932 and 1972 and continued sporadically since then. But the high esteem of many American ceramists for Japanese pottery is one indication that twentieth-century American ceramic art has not generally been a match for the powerful institutions, strong market, high technical proficiency, and long complex history of ceramics in Japan.4 Moreover, in sharp contrast to Okada's world of oil painting in Japan, the Japanese pottery world stands on a vast and diverse tradition of East Asian pottery techniques and styles that many American ceramists have attempted to access by becoming "foreign students" in the workshops and classrooms of Japanese potters.5 Calligraphy and pottery were not the only Japanese art practices that enjoyed relative autonomy from modern Euro-American art worlds. Their assumed continuity with ancient models in Asian history and lack of obvious counterparts in Euro-American art also characterize nihonga, or "Japanese painting." This neotradition was established in the climate of the nationalistic ideology articulated by Fenollosa, Okakura, and others in the Meiji period, and its continuation as an art world extended through the postwar period in parallel with yoga. But the practices of calligraphy and pottery are serviceable to the definition of national identity on a dimension to which nihonga has a much less persuasive claim, namely, that of the everyday life of the vast majority of the subjects of the nation who are not members of the art world. Nihonga might aspire to create ideal representations of the everyday life of the people, but calligraphy and pottery suggest a use value that is shared throughout society. Farmers and factory workers no less than politicians and movie stars eat their rice out of ceramic bowls and brush their letters in ink. Calligraphy inscribes the very language of Japanese people, and pottery provides the utensils of their daily meals. Portions of both the pottery and calligraphy worlds address their medium to society on the demotic vernacular level of the everyday. The calligrapher may brush titles for reproduction in print or manufacture as signage, while the potter may produce utilitarian tableware. Moreover, calligraphers and potters teach their crafts to classes of hobbyists in ways that distribute the creative experience of these practices to members of society far beyond the specialist.6

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Calligraphy has been a particularly popular art form in Japan in recent years; the estimated 1987 "calligraphy population" was 16 to 20 million.7 In a recent novel about contemporary elite Japanese society, the prime minister takes lessons from a master of calligraphy who sees his art as a means of instructing "the leader of this country in the spirit, the soul, of Oriental thought."8 Perhaps those calligraphers and potters whose works seem to stand at peaks of aesthetic refinement and sophistication towering above the plebeian life of Japanese society can be understood as epitomizing the best of that which prevails throughout the horizontal comradeship of the nation. One calligrapher claimed that "the desire to practice calligraphy is possessed by every Japanese person. It is in the blood of the race."9 Thus, the calligrapher is a kind of mandarin arbiter of an intrinsic racial property of the nation. This ideological authority, however, is sustained by an elaborate institutional apparatus. The pottery and calligraphy worlds intersect significantly with the broader society and also with other art worlds such as those of nihonga, yoga, and sculpture. But their infrastructures are characterized by a striking degree of sovereignty. In addition to its medium, each is defined by distinctive canons, ancient histories, factional divisions, commodities, and institutions. The pottery world and the calligraphy world are each home to a broad and diverse population that includes famous masters and students, collectors and dealers, journalists and critics. In many cases, affiliation with such a community constitutes an allconsuming financial, social, as well as artistic identity, and the membership of such individuals in their art worlds is cemented by powerful affective ties. Indeed, many positions in these communities are inherited; the contemporary potter Sakaida Kakiemon, for example, occupies the position of fourteenth-generation master in a lineage of craftsmen working in a particular style of porcelain. Other potters assume names referencing their pottery world identities by including, for example, the characters for "ceramics" ( |tj) or "flame" ( Exhibition societies are the most powerful institutions in the calligraphy and pottery worlds. A sense of these organizations can be obtained, for example, in the 650-page catalogue of the forty-ninth annual Mainichi Calligraphy Exhibition of 1996, a finely tuned instrument of social stratification.10 This volume illustrates a single work of calligraphy by each of the 2,523 members of the Mainichi Calligraphy Association Foundation. The layout and organization of reproductions in the catalogue is calculated to reflect the relative status of each member of the organization. The first section, fronted by a shiny gold title page, contains works by senior office holders in the association; they are reproduced one per page, and each caption indicates the position (or positions) held by the calligrapher. There are thirteen positions in this upper tier, including Supreme Adviser, Superintendent, Manager, Counselor, and Trustee.11 As the reader of the catalogue proceeds through the book and down the ranks of the calligraphy bureaucracy, the reproductions diminish in size and are crowded to fit more on each page, and the color of the title pages of consecutive sections changes from gold to silver

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and then pink to green. Calligraphy by jurors of the association is grouped five to a page, while the works that were selected from the pool of 30,009 submitted for exhibition are grouped six to a page, except for the twenty-six that won prizes and were therefore honored by being printed each singly on a page. There is even a section in the catalogue for works by deceased calligraphers; and, here too, the former holders of high ranks in the Mainichi Calligraphy Association are honored by the allocation of an entire page for their work, while calligraphy by deceased colleagues of lower rank appears two works to a page. The meticulous attention to nuanced differences of position in this calligraphic hierarchy closely corresponds to modern corporate and state bureaucracies. Moreover, in Japan and elsewhere, the nationalist rhetoric of art world institutions closely resembles that of the government. Frequently, the very titles of art world institutions define their national parameters. For example, the American Abstract Artists (which brought Hasegawa Saburo to the United States in 1954) was an organization of artists who "adhere" to the "vital heritage" of "distinctly original schools of American painting and sculpture," according to their "president" in 1966. 12 And the professed opening of membership eligibility to all artists in the nation typifies nationalist rhetoric of a horizontal linkage of all citizens as equals: "We invite into our membership the best known 'abstract' artists in America, as well as those who are totally unknown." 13 With their governance by presidents and constitutions, such organizations in the United States as well as Japan confirm the power of the state by mimicking its structure in microcosm. Just as any Japanese citizen can theoretically run for elective office to the National Diet, so any potter in Japan can aspire to rise through the elaborate ranks of the Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition. Or at least any Japanese potter could submit a work to the jury for selection to be included in the exhibition, although of 909 submitted in the thirteenth biennial exhibition in 1995, only 149 were accepted and only five were premiated. Founded in 1971, the biennial Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition is the third largest exhibition salon for pottery in Japan and constitutes a fairly complex organization with significant state and corporate involvement. It is sponsored by the Mainichi Newspaper Corporation with the cooperation of the Cultural Agency of the Ministry of Education and is held at the Daimaru Department Store in Tokyo and then travels to several locations elsewhere in Japan. Its prizes are conferred by the minister of education, Imperial Prince Chichibu, and the Mainichi Newspaper Corporation. The first of this exhibition's five sections is limited to venerable elderly potters who are distinguished holders of such titles as "Living National Treasure," and the second is limited to works selected by the steering committee of leading potters in the pottery world. The three remaining categories "open their portals widely" to submissions from any potter in Japan, and works submitted are screened by a committee of jurors, who are critics and curators. 14 The resemblance of the internal hierarchy of the pottery exhibition bureaucracy to institutions of the larger national society without is symptomatic of an inflation of critical

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rhetoric from artistic excellence to national excellence. This relationship is well illustrated in the following passage from the foreword to the catalogue for the Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition by the chairman of the steering committee: Since very ancient times, the pottery of Japan has created something uniquely its own through the eager absorption of styles and techniques from the Korean peninsula and the Chinese continent. Moreover, it has succeeded in adding an international depth by learning from Euro-America since the Meiji period. So much has been accomplished that, since the end of World War II, Japan has been dubbed the "Kingdom of Pottery" by many nations around the world. The Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition shows works of ceramic artists, each with different expressive statements, under one roof and thereby makes explicit the entire visage of the world of Japanese contemporary ceramics.15 This single passage demonstrates characteristics of nationalist rhetoric found in many national contexts, not excepting the United States: primordial origins, a universal domain of sources, exceptionalism, competitive international comparison, and phantasmic unification of intranational difference. But the conferral of the title "Kingdom of Pottery" (Yakimono no Okoku) on the Japanese nation is a particularly arresting expression of the grandeur obtainable by linking the art world to the nation. The nation itself is triumphalized and essentialized through the excellence of its pottery world. The concentricity of the relationship between the art world and the nation is such that, ironically, the art world is sometimes imagined as the larger encompassing circle protecting the nation within. In addition to vertical stratification, genre categories constitute an important horizontal system of organization in the pottery and calligraphy worlds. Pottery and calligraphy exhibitions are subdivided according to genres that remain fairly constant from year to year. For example, the potter who wishes to exhibit in the Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition must choose one of three categories to enter submissions. The first of these is "Tradition" (Dento), and the objects accepted under this rubric in 1995 were large showy vessels designed in a wide variety of styles, traditional or otherwise. The third category is "Functional Ceramic Receptacles" (Jitsuyd tdki), reserved for tableware that one can easily imagine using in the kitchen or dining room. The nonvessel ceramic objects were grouped in the second category, which is titled "Avant-Garde" (Zen'ei). Having eschewed the vessel, they take forms such as a large broken egg titled Birth of Venus, a rough sphere of fired clay with ruptures in its surface titled Heaven and Earth, a group of walking legs, and two glazed ceramic slabs suspended by cables from a metal armature. 16 While social hierarchy is clearly the privileged mode of organization in the previously described Mainichi Calligraphy Exhibition, in calligraphy too, a horizontal system of genre categories operates within ranks. The 1996 catalogue of the Mainichi Calligraphy

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has seven genre subdivisions. "Avant-Garde Calligraphy" (Zen'ei sho) is listed last after categories such as "Chinese Characters" and "Modern Poetry and Prose Calligraphy."17 Most of the works of Avant-Garde Calligraphy are abstract compositions of ink on paper that appear to bear little relation to calligraphic orthography. But when the photograph of the brushwork is pondered in conjunction with a titular character printed as a caption, one imagines ways in which the brushwork may have been derived as a distortion of the lexicographical form. Some compositions, however, thwart this route of lexicographical identification by generic titles such as Work—96. Or the brushwork disperses into a painterly field where little vestige of calligraphic structure is to be discerned. In one work, the brush appears to have been substituted or supplemented by a squeegee or some other means of application. Other works feature large remnants of calligraphic strokes cropped by the edge of the composition. And occasionally, a theme named by the title, such as Birth or Circle, is manifested in the brushwork more through pictorial means than through resemblance to the title character.18 Thus, the Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition and the Mainichi Calligraphy Exhibition demonstrate that the nonvessel ceramic object and the abstract ink composition occupy well-established niches in their art worlds today. The official designation of subdivisions in academic institutions as "avant-garde" alongside categories such as "tradition" is an amusing irony, yet recuperation by the establishment is not an unusual fate for an avant-garde. This use of the term "avant-garde" calls attention to the recentness of the admission of abstract calligraphy and nonfunctional pottery into their worlds relative to other genres. Further, it may also suggest an ambivalent condition of that inclusion; perhaps the new genre is valued as the badge of ongoing vitality and innovation but regarded as less intrinsic or definitive of the arts of calligraphy and pottery. In this sense, while the hybrid genres are securely incorporated in their worlds, their status in those worlds does not necessarily reach parity with that of older genres. It was in the early postwar years that abstract calligraphy and nonfunctional objects were first thrust into their respective worlds by truly avant-gardist initiatives that were hotly resisted by conservatives. Before proceeding to the postwar contexts of calligraphy and pottery reform, however, I would like to point out some sources of discontent in these worlds that date from an earlier period. The first of these was the relegation of both calligraphy and pottery to positions of inferiority beneath the "fine art" status reserved for painting and sculpture. While the Japanese art worlds of calligraphy, pottery, nihonga, yoga, and sculpture have developed along separate trajectories, they have also frequently been positioned as subdivisions of an overall national configuration of art. Typically, this collective assembly has privileged painting and sculpture at the expense of calligraphy and crafts such as pottery. This hierarchy of the arts was a European system imported into Japan in the late nineteenth century. At this time, the Japanese government was making extraordinary efforts to present massive displays at the international expositions in Europe and the United States.

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Part of the objective was earning foreign currency, and pottery and other craft commodities were acknowledged as particularly successful in the export market. But Japanese ideologues also sought to assert an impressive image of their nation in the competitive international context of the exhibitions. It was only after four decades of participation in such exhibitions that Japan was able to present its wares under the coveted rubric of "fine arts" in addition to less prestigious categories such as "manufactures and liberal arts." This status was first attained in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Japanese officials were enormously gratified to see their nation become the only Asian nation represented in the Fine Arts Palace. 19 In the reigning hierarchy of the arts, the heights of civilization were thought to be reflected most gloriously in the "fine arts" of painting, sculpture, and architecture, while the "applied arts" such as pottery were assumed to be more prosaic in conception owing to their greater concern with technique and utility. Nor did calligraphy fair well in such reckonings. After one Tokyo exhibition presented calligraphy among other arts in 1882, the yoga painter Koyama Shotaro bluntly declared his opinion in a respected journal that calligraphy should not be regarded as art. In his view, calligraphy was strictly a utilitarian medium of language inscription and had no formal properties like painting or sculpture. Moreover, he contended, its illegibility to Euro-Americans rendered it unable to serve even as an export like crafts. Although Okakura Kakuzo offered a persuasive rebuttal to Koyama's offensive, the exhibition of calligraphy as the equivalent of painting and sculpture at prominent art exhibitions in Japan was discontinued. 20 As this European hierarchy of the arts was adopted domestically, the aesthetic difference between "fine arts" and "applied arts" came to be seen as a social difference where the former was created by "artists" and the latter by "craftsmen." Such inequalities were institutionalized when calligraphy and the crafts (including pottery) were excluded from the first centralized national art exhibition, which was founded in 1907. Patterned after the French Salon, the Ministry of Culture Art Exhibition, abbreviated as "Bunten," was literally an agency of the state.21 For the next twenty years, Japanese craftspeople had to content themselves with an annual crafts exhibition segregated from art, an exhibition under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture rather than the division of the state bureaucracy that took the nation's culture as its purview. Meanwhile, the calligraphy world struggled for acceptance in national venues. Calligraphy was included in the Taishd Exhibition of 1914, excluded from the 1922 Peace Exhibition, and admitted to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum in the 1920s after encountering serious resistance.22 It was only in 1927 that a fourth department called "Art Crafts" (Bijutsu kdgei) was instituted at the national art salon, which had been renamed the Imperial Art Exhibition, abbreviated as "Teiten." This department subsequently became the most important avenue for craftspeople's careers, yet its ordinal position after Nihonga, Yoga, and Sculpture was commensurate with lingering assumptions about its relative importance. It took two more decades before the national salon would open its doors to calligraphy. Finally, in 1947 a fifth

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department was established for calligraphy at what was now called simply the Japan Art Exhibition, abbreviated as

"Nitten."23

Among the reasons why potters and calligraphers pressed forward in the long struggle to gain acceptance of their work as art was the fact that industrialization progressively diminished other outlets for their practice. With the introduction of the pencil, the pen, and machine-made paper in the late nineteenth century, calligraphy lost its importance as a practical skill required for the smooth functioning of society. 24 And the increased number of mechanically mass-produced ceramic vessels severely curtailed the ability of potters to satisfy the low end of their market with cheap handmade pottery. Thus, technological and economic factors generated increasing pressure on calligraphers and potters to test the borders between their practices and "fine art." Many strategies were pursued already in the prewar years for making calligraphy and pottery more effective for display and contemplation in the setting of the public museum exhibition. Hidai Tenrai was one of the first calligraphers to shift the emphasis of his practice from "functional calligraphy" (jitsuyd sho) to "art calligraphy" (geijutsu sho). By the end of his life in the 1930s, he arrived at a form of calligraphy that was "neither character nor picture but a complete fusion of expression and object." This form was something akin to the abstract calligraphy that his students would explore vigorously in the postwar period, though Hidai never actually exhibited such works, and none by him are known to be extant. 25 Meanwhile, certain potters occasionally tried their hand at rendering a scene in glaze on a tile or creating animal or human figurines. But for the most part, prewar artistic aspirations in these worlds were exercised by exploring the expressive potential of pottery vessels and calligraphic script. This situation did not change substantially until after the end of the Pacific War in 1945. The surrender and the ensuing U.S. Occupation of Japan provoked a sense of dire crisis regarding the future of the Japanese worlds of calligraphy and pottery. The very autonomy of Japanese pottery and calligraphy, signified by their basis in East Asian tradition, appeared to contribute to the threat of their marginalization from the modern art that now seemed to dominate the larger international horizon of art. One calligrapher remembered that "to construct a contemporary calligraphy, we had to go through a bitter trial

Buffeted about amidst modern art, there was danger as to whether or not [callig-

raphy] would survive." 26 Abstract painting and sculpture of the United States and Europe became signs of a coveted modernity in the eyes of progressive young potters and calligraphers. Massive borrowing from these distant art worlds disrupted the authority of lexical calligraphy and vessel pottery. Morita Shiryu: The Lexical Basis of Calligraphy Morita Shiryu (1912-1998) was one of the most interesting players in the tumultuous postwar calligraphy world. A student of Hidai Tenrai, Morita wore several hats in the calligraphy community. He was known not only as a calligrapher, but also as the leader of

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the Bokujinkai (Group of People of Ink), whose members' admiration for and correspondence with Franz Kline was mentioned in the previous chapter. But Morita was also a prolific writer and a trenchant polemicist, an organizer of calligraphy exhibitions, an editor and publisher of books on calligraphy, and editor of the monthly journal of calligraphy art Bokubi (Beauty of Ink) for thirty years starting in 1951. This was the magazine that Kline had responded to with such warmth. Morita, however, was neither the most precocious nor the most radical proponent of the disengagement of calligraphy from lexical form. Hidai Tenrai's son and student Hidai Nankoku is said to be the first to abandon word forms from calligraphy in a 1945 work called Work 1: Variation on "Den" (Figure 14). The ink forms here do not purport to be a deformation of the character for "electricity" (den) or any other character, though Nankoku would claim that its loose strokes of ink were brushed with the thought that ancient calligraphy had "abstract and interesting form." 2 7 Ueda Sokyu, another student of Tenrai, stirred controversy when he exhibited the single character "shina" ( fin , "thing, article") under the title "ai" ( f | , "love") in the new calligraphy section of the Nitten exhibition in 1951. Two years later, Nitten authorities made a controversial decision to turn down a work featuring an iconoclastic splattered pattern of ink by yet another student of Hidai Tenrai, Osawa Gakyu. These and other events sparked much divisive debate in the calligraphy world over the issue of moji-sei. The moji is the character or other component of the written word that was

Figure 1 4 .

regarded as the irreducible unit of calligraphy. But the suffix "-sei," or "quality of," suggests

Hidai Nankoku. Work 1:

the margin of ambiguity where the debate rolled about. Some, such as Hidai Nankoku,

Variation on "Den." 1945.

argued that it was possible for a work to be calligraphy without the literal presence of the

Ink on paper. 42 x 67 cm.

moji so long as the nonlexical formal qualities of calligraphic brushwork remained in

Chiba City Museum

evidence. The disconnect of Ueda's titular character "shina" and his brushed characver "ai"

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challenged the authority of the calligraphic moji to serve as the seat of calligraphic meaning. Heated arguments over these nuances of the presence and absence of the moji and moji-sei shook the foundations of the calligraphy world. Was the writing of Japanese or Chinese lexical forms the sine qua non of calligraphy, or had the time come to jettison this practice as an obsolete form of communication in order to thrust the art of calligraphy into the modern era? In 1948 during the U.S. Occupation, Morita wrote an essay titled

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"Like a Rainbow." 28 He described an unnamed American in Japan who was neither a scholar nor able to read Japanese or Chinese but who nonetheless demonstrated a keen ability to differentiate types of script and appreciate brushwork. Indeed, in this ability he surpassed most literate Japanese people. For Morita, the American was "untroubled by meaning; his sensitivity [was] freely and purely put in play.... He [could] see the beauty of the line itself." Morita's American could not read Japanese, but his perceptive appreciation of calligraphy seemed to transcend words. Morita deduced that calligraphers should focus on the formal qualities of calligraphy to render their art meaningful to the world at large. Morita argued for the potential of calligraphy to manifest "world character" (sekai-sei), the term Okada Kenzó had used in the same year (1948) to name the exciting new energy of art that he assumed was located in Paris. For Morita too, "world character" was inseparable from Euro-American perspectives: "Calligraphy can exist as an art for people who are not of character-reading nations (kanji kokumin igai no hitobito)" To convey this potential to his calligraphy-world readers, he described the transcending of culturally specific representational content by Mondrian's abstract painting. Then, in the same 1948 essay, he described his recent encounter of a reproduction of a drawing by Matisse. Morita was greatly moved by Matisse's extreme reduction of all form to pure and simplified line. Calligraphy also being an art of line, Morita imagined that one day these two art forms would come together at some lofty height "like a rainbow standing with one leg in the West and the other in the East." But Morita ended his essay with the ominous warning that unless the calligraphers of Japan press forward rapidly, one leg of the rainbow (that is, "the East") would disappear from the process of creating that Utopian new art. For Morita, it seems, though modern art was universalistic, thus far it had been authored most persuasively by Europeans such as Mondrian and Matisse. The calligraphy world of Japan held the potential to join this great project but was threatened with extinction unless it could live up to that potential. Another perspective on Morita's concern about the possible demise of calligraphy is posed by a radical movement to reform general usage standards for Japanese script in this period. Script simplification and rationalization was advocated to increase efficiency of communication for economic growth, to permit the development of a broad political discourse to achieve democratization, and to facilitate international communication. Some argued for the abolition of characters, while others demanded that even kana should be rejected in favor of the romanization of Japanese script. Measures that actually became law include a finite list of standard characters for current use and a standardization of kana usage, though these reforms were later weakened by conservatives. According to Nanette Gottlieb, such reforms constituted a major change in opinions about the cultural function of writing in Japanese society. "No longer was the prevailing view that of characters and kanazukai representing some sort of sacred manifestation of the essence of Japanese spirit, sanctified by time and custom to inviolable status, although certainly there was still a substantial, if temporarily subdued, conservative element who held

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to this view." 29 The new approach, according to Gottlieb, privileged spoken language and reduced script to a mere instrument for its recording. Many in the calligraphy world felt threatened by these reforms, which promised to disencumber their artistic medium of what Gottlieb refers to as its "metaphysical baggage." Some worried that the art of calligraphy would come to an end if the calligrapher was to be constrained to characters specified on the official list of characters sanctioned for current use. 30 Morita's approach to the reform of calligraphy in the late 1940s and early 1950s shared the objective of increased accessibility with contemporary initiatives in script reform. Many in the movement to simplify Japanese script wished to render the language easier for larger numbers of people to learn how to read, while Morita wished to intensify the formal power of calligraphy as a visual art capable of being appreciated independent of legibility. In both cases, this broadened access included an interest in greater ease of communication with Europeans and Americans. Regarding this objective, Morita observed that the inability of Europeans and Americans to read characters need not hinder their aesthetic appreciation of calligraphy. Thus, in these Occupation years Morita imagined "illiterate" foreigners appreciating the work of calligraphy as if it were an abstract painting. In the previous chapter, Isamu Noguchi was introduced as a pivotal figure who helped Hasegawa come to terms with his convictions regarding the relationship between Japanese and Euro-American culture in difficult postwar conditions. Hasegawa, who had developed a theory about the relationship between Sino-Japanese calligraphy and European modern art in the prewar years, was an important participant in Morita's Bokujinkai group. And through Hasegawa the Bokujinkai came into contact with Noguchi during the critical period of its formation. In 1950, Morita visited Noguchi's solo exhibition in Tokyo with Hasegawa and responded with much the same enthusiasm as Hasegawa: "Here was the native place of my heart, the heart of the Orient and especially of Japan." Moreover, Morita felt that Noguchi's primarily sculptural and three-dimensional design work was "at root one with the secret of form that lay within our own art of calligraphy." 31 But while Morita esteemed what he regarded as the Japanese sensibility of Noguchi's work, Noguchi also personified the ideal appreciation of the foreigner for calligraphy that Morita had written about in 1948. Hasegawa reported in Morita's magazine on Noguchi's response to a work of calligraphy by the Edo period Zen monk Hakuin that consisted of the single character for "death": "He was tremendously impressed. He who could not read the calligraphy just stood there appreciating without asking what it said. When finally I told him that the character meant 'death,' he was even more impressed and said, 'That is a great death.' " 3 2 Noguchi's articulation of an appreciative foreign perspective for calligraphy seemed to confirm Morita's thesis of the potential of calligraphy to manifest "world character." A long discussion among Hasegawa, Noguchi, and Morita's circle of young calligraphers in 1952 was acknowledged as an important catalyst in the formation of the Bokujinkai group in the text of their manifesto:

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Today, a great future is opening up in front of contemporary calligraphy art. European and American avant-garde artists and progressive critics and artists in Japan are knocking on the door of calligraphy. Recently we went to Hasegawa's house and talked with him and Isamu Noguchi and his wife until the end of the day and were firmly convinced of this. Impoverished by its long hibernation in the shell of feudalism, this motion from without has started to shake calligraphy. We fully realize that we now stand at a pivotal moment: can the art of calligraphy, which has been guarding its long tradition in one corner of the Orient, revitalize itself as a true contemporary art, or will the very category [of calligraphy] become extinguished by being completely absorbed by progressive artists?33 Morita had already taken an important practical step in 1950 toward this revitalization of calligraphy by establishing a monthly column called the "Alpha Section" in his magazine. Calligraphers were encouraged to submit ink compositions, that is, designs with little mojisei or none whatsoever. 3 4 Submissions judged the best were reproduced each m o n t h in the column alongside a critical review. Morita invited Hasegawa to select the works and write the review for the Alpha Section. While the fruits o f this exercise suggest that it engaged these students of calligraphy in a practice of painting, Morita's motivation was ultimately focused on calligraphy: I don't want to reject flatly artworks that cannot be called calligraphy. The core of formal [expression] is the universal language that speaks to all people. It is by this means that the internationality of calligraphy and its relevance to the masses are to be obtained. To revitalize the true formal potential of calligraphy, it is necessary to take a step away from calligraphy and investigate pure form. 35 Thus, Morita felt calligraphy required the shoring up of an infusion from without; calligraphers should improve their calligraphy through exercises in abstract painting. The links between formal innovation in calligraphy and European American abstract painting intensified in the next years. The Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline was among the most important models for the Bokujinkai circle in the early 1950s, and Morita shared his colleagues' admiration for Kline. Looking at photographs of Kline's black and white oil on canvas abstractions, Morita was deeply moved, even shaken, by what he saw: "I got the impression of great clarity; he has grasped from within something the same as the beauty of calligraphy, and what is more, [his sense] o f f o r m shows concision of a degree that none a m o n g us has attained. W h e n I saw this, and h o w unerring the means by which it was achieved, I was quite surprised, and even felt menaced (kyoi sae kanjita)."56

W h a t is one to

make of the menace that accompanied Morita's appreciation o f Kline? D i d Kline's work seem to Morita to signal that the art he had envisioned at the crest of a great East-West

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rainbow had been accomplished already, accomplished before the calligraphy community could realize his ambition for participation in what was to have been a partnership? If so, the centrality of the moji-sei that emerges in Morita's subsequent practice of calligraphy could be understood as the cultivation of a different dimension, a dimension to which the "illiterate" Franz Kline could make no claim. The calligraphy that Morita practiced and propagated for the rest of his career involved a selection of just one or two characters, such as Koru, which means "freeze," of 1957 (Figure 15). Morita detached the individual character from any textual or syntactical matrix and subjected the lexical form of the character to such deformation that, without reference to the printed title, it was illegible. But often the viewer was supplied with the type version of the character in the form of an exhibition label or a caption to a published reproduction. Like a legend on a map, this key enables the spectator to relate seemingly random blotches of ink to the conventional strokes of a character. Indeed, Morita's Koru features two vertically stacked islands of ink on the left and one larger mass on the right amid a sea of scattered sparks of ink—forms that roughly approximate the shape of the dictionary character "koru" ^ . I was unable to relate an additional ink mark in the center of Morita's composition to the character, so I asked a longtime close colleague of the calligrapher in the Bokujinkai if he could explain it. I noted my query on a photocopy of Morita's calligraphy, and my obliging correspondent consulted the elderly Morita in 1996 and returned my photocopy with the explanation that the small central dot in question was in fact the beginning point of an ink stroke that was animated by a leap of the brush off and then back down to the paper surface. Thus, what might seem like an image as abstract as Mark Tobey's flung ink studies of the same year (see Figure 10) was indeed formed entirely according to a clear notion of correct brush orthography. Nevertheless, a group of calligraphers conversing with Morita at a roundtable discussion in 1954 challenged him on the issue of whether his calligraphy, which they found illegible, could be said to manifest moji-sei. Morita replied, "Moji-sei is a question of possessing the forms that are assembled according to fixed rules. The ancient texts or cursive that contemporary people can't read are not forms that were made by accident or made on a whim, they are forms made according to the rules of their time have moji-sei.With

They

some exceptions, most ancient texts of calligraphy were intended to

be legible in their time, but Morita's calligraphy was illegible to contemporary colleagues in the calligraphy world. Morita may have countered the "menace" of Kline's abstraction with a moji-sei that would be impossible for the European or American artist to produce but was not necessarily legible to the Japanese reader or viewer either. In the 1950s and early 1960s Morita and his colleagues in the calligraphy community were greatly admired abroad, and they accepted invitations to exhibit in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Sao Paolo Biennale and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. As the close resemblance of Morita's calligraphy of 1957 to Mark Tobey's work may suggest, Americans and Europeans found new Japanese calligraphy to be under-

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standable from the perspective of modern abstract painting, yet intriguing because of its

Shiryu. Freeze (Koru).

inflection with the Asian alterity supplied by varying degrees of continuity with calligraphic

1957. Ink on paper. 69 x

tradition. Thus, for the first time in the history of the calligraphy world, numerous callig-

137 cm. The National

raphers regularly created works expressly for viewers in Europe and America w h o did not

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pretend to be able to "read" them.

Art, Kyoto.

The reduction of the work of calligraphy to just a single character, as in the case of Morita's Koru, or to just a few characters was fostered by this new international spectatorship. The calligrapher Tejima Yukei is closely associated with the consolidation of this type of calligraphy into the established genre of shojisusho (calligraphy of few characters). Tejima's international career began with a flurry of overseas exhibitions in the late 1950s:

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the Sao Paolo Biennale in 1957, the Brussels World's Fair in 1958, and Documenta at Kassel in 1959. "When I started doing singlecharacter calligraphy after the war," he would recall, "it was because there was much exchange with foreign countries. Since *

.ggr

they don't understand kanji abroad, if you did text calligraphy, they would not be able to read it. So it comes down to shape." 38 Extracting a single character from its matrix in text gave the calligrapher an opportunity to form and deform its particular combination of strokes into a composition of striking graphic appeal. Tejima felt that "flowing masses of characters in a text seem to be hard for them to appreciate." He regarded the illiteracy of his non-Asian audience as a racial limitation and focused on an aspect of calligraphy that he assumed could be conveyed to them: "Since they are of a different race, it may be difficult for them to understand the real beauty of calligraphy, but they ought to be able to understand the intensity that comes from the figure of the line." 39 Pursuing this logic, Tejima created calligraphy that expressed meaning through formal means. For example, he brushed the characters for the word "hókai" (collapse) so that the brush strokes seem to be falling apart. Tejima's frank admission that he attempted to create calligraphy that Euro-Americans could appreciate opens him to charges of "Japónica" of the sort that were leveled at Okada Kenzó. Morita, who exhibited calligraphy reduced to one or two characters in Europe and America even more frequently in the 1950s than Tejima, may well have been similarly influenced by the need to render calligraphy that would be appreciated by foreigners unable to read characters. But Morita took a more considered approach to the challenges

presented to the calligraphy world by the enthusiasm for its products overseas. While the primary medium and focus of Morita's activism was the calligraphy world in Japan, many of his tools and forms as well as the pressure driving his reformist zeal had their sources far afield from the customary terrain of the calligraphy community. But this outer field was by no means synonymous with modern Euro-American art. The new range of discourse that Morita and his colleagues introduced to the calligraphy world included the investigation of areas of Sino-Japanese calligraphy history that had not hitherto been part of the standard canon of venerable models, such as the Zen monks' rough eccentric style and spirituality. Morita also facilitated substantial input from Hisamatsu Shin'ichi and Ijima Tsutomu, two scholars working in the nativist vein of the contemporary

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Kyoto School of philosophy. And in addition to fostering exchange with Kline and other abstractionists in the United States and Europe, Morita engineered an ongoing dialogue with Japanese abstract painters. He attempted to integrate elements of these other discursive arenas into the calligraphy world. As moderator, participant, editor, and publisher, Morita orchestrated countless group discussions among calligraphers, painters, and scholars as well as critics and curators. Though his attacks on what he regarded as corruption in the calligraphy world could be blistering, he periodically invited representatives of different factions to come together for lengthy roundtable discussions. His magazine regularly featured the unbowdlerized transcripts of such discussions. In one such discussion of 1953, which included calligraphers as well as painters and artists working in other media, Morita initiated discussion with a lecture in which he theorized calligraphy as an art having three properties: time (the duration of reading and of creating a work with the brush), space (the formal qualities of composition, line quality, and so on), and literary value (the moji). In Morita's view, the moji was a conventional form arising from tradition through lexical function but was only realized as calligraphy when "the forms of that which wants to come out from within and the forms of the characters that we use overlap one another without any resistance."40 In a theory of expression influenced by the Zen Buddhist principles taught by the Kyoto School of philosophy, Morita understood the given conventional forms (the moji) as attaining utter sameness with something profoundly internal to the calligrapher. In the discussion following Morita's talk, after many conflicting assertions regarding the relationship between calligraphy and painting, Morita maintained that the two arts share the property of form, but since calligraphy is distinguished from painting by moji-sei, it would be pointless to talk about moji-sei as if it were a dispensable component of calligraphic form. Thus, although he had previously urged calligraphers to investigate pure form, form without moji-sei, in 1953 Morita asserted that moji-sei was indeed the sine qua non of calligraphy. But his own calligraphy was avowedly illegible and removed from language context to an ambiguous condition of autonomy. In this sense, Morita's moji-sei calligraphy might be understood as "abstract calligraphy." For Morita and his followers, the tension between observing selected aspects of calligraphic convention and yielding to such distortions as to be linguistically nonfunctional was of great importance. In their writings, the act of selecting a character from the shared lexicon is characterized as an intuitive identification with its form, sound, and meaning. The character is revered as the timeless product of centuries of language use, but at the same time it is intuited at a level so deeply interior to the calligrapher as to undergo a massive upheaval when brought forth as an expression in brush, ink, and paper. But Morita's moji-sei calligraphy met many skeptics. Yoshihara Jiro was a major figure in twentieth-century Japanese painting though probably best known in Anglophonic art history as the leader of Gutai, an adventuresome group of younger artists in the 1950s. His

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encrusted abstractions with cursive draftsmanship of the late 1950s suggest an interest in calligraphy, but at Morita's discussion table, he was blunt in his skepticism regarding calligraphy: No matter who the calligrapher, the works are somehow unsatisfying compared to painting; calligraphy is enormously restricted. I really think this comes from mojisei. [In abstract painting] it suffices for one mark to be a line and another a dot. I feel a great inexhaustible freedom in this. But when it comes to the syllable " tfi," there must be three dots and there are many prerequisites like this in calligraphy. . . . Shouldn't one transcend this limitation and devote oneself instead to form? . . . If the calligrapher raises standards to find that his calligraphy has become painting, what is wrong with that?41 Morita had cultivated dialogue with abstract painters in order to foster a formal power in calligraphy. Now he was told by one of the painters he had solicited that the way to attain true form would be to leave calligraphy behind in favor of painting. Yoshihara's skepticism may have been a bitter pill for Morita, but the acceptance of a painter was probably not as important to him as the direction of the calligraphy world itself. And here all was not to his liking, for works without moji-sei were becoming increasingly common fixtures. Morita maintained that such works were not to be mistaken for calligraphy, but their proliferation was partly attributable to his own sponsorship of abstract design as a formal exercise for the training of calligraphers. Morita's own colleague in the Bokujinkai, Inoue Yuich, abandoned moji-sei of Morita's definition with a vengeance, though it was only to be a temporary departure. In 1955 Inoue produced a group of compositions of energetic brushwork using black enamel rather than the ink of calligraphy tradition. His gestural abstractions may seem to have more to do with Franz Kline's later work than with calligraphy (Figure 16). When pressed to clarify his position in a group discussion, Inoue said that he was a calligrapher who reserved the right to do paintings too. But he became defensive when asked what shortcomings of calligraphy caused him to turn repeatedly to painting. Indeed, in 1956 Inoue reaffirmed his commitment to moji-sei with bold new works based on specific characters identified in titles. Thus the brevity of Inoue's expulsion of lexical elements from his brushwork confirmed Morita's view that in order to be calligraphy a work must manifest moji-sei. But there were many progressives in the calligraphy community who disagreed with this view. One of the leading proponents of calligraphy without moji-sei was Hidai Nankoku, the creator of the 1945 Variation of "Den" and the son of Morita's teacher Hidai Tenrai. After some lapse, Nankoku returned in the mid-1950s to a sustained practice of calligraphic abstractions such as Work 22 (Figure 17). In addition to experimentation with materials new to the calligrapher's repertoire such as ink on lacquer-coated fiberboard or the oil on linen

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used in this work, Nankoku explored aesthetic qualities of calligraphic line divorced from the moji. Although there is no titular or intentional presence of kanji or kana here, Nankoku insisted that such works were nonetheless calligraphy. Nankoku and Morita squared off on this issue in a 1959 debate. 42 Morita took the view that Nankoku's abstraction was very admirable, but since it was not based on the brushing of moji, it simply could not be regarded as calligraphy; it had to be abstract painting. In his defense, Nankoku mentioned "fragments of ancient characters," the "line quality of calligraphic brushwork," "a calligraphic sense of spatial organization," and the literati principle of the "parity of painting and calligraphy," but he was not very sure of himself and proved no match for the tenacious Morita. The brow-beaten Nankoku insisted: "The identity of my work as calligraphy is fundamental to my practice. It is greatly disappointing and debilitating to be told to remove it." 43 The muddiness of Nankoku's distinction between calligraphy and painting in this discussion arose from the slippage in his thinking from a genre distinction to a cultural distinction. He suggested that painting, on the one hand, was defined by "a compositional principle coming from the history of the painting of the West." On the other hand, he associated calligraphy with "line quality" even when divorced from language. But, in his view, Figure 1 6 . Inoue Yuichi. Work A. 1955. Enamel on Kent paper, finished with medium gel. 87.5 x 115.2 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. © UNAC Tokyo.

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that did not qualify the linear abstraction of the French Informel painter Georges Mathieu

Figure 1 7 . Hidai

as calligraphy. However, Nankoku was willing to classify the brush strokes in the landscape

Nankoku. Work 22.1955.

paintings of the Edo period nanga painter Ike no Taiga as "calligraphy," because if one were

Oil on linen. 99 x 131 cm.

to examine them in magnified detail, they would appear very much like calligraphy.

Chiba City Museum

From this 1959 discussion text, one gets the sense that Nankoku's strong desire for affiliation with the calligraphy world was in some measure motivated by the assumption that this membership assured membership of another kind, membership in Japanese national culture or perhaps recognition as an artist of "the East," a "calligrapher" alongside Ike no Taiga rather than a "painter" alongside Mathieu. To be sure, there were plenty of Japanese painters, like Yoshihara Jirô, who did not feel that their identity as painters threatened their national identity. Yet, if one keeps in mind that the conservative calligrapher Nishikawa Yasushi derided all progressive calligraphers, whether of Morita's stripe or of Nankoku's, as

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mere imitators of Western painting, it is possible to sense what might have been at stake here.44 Indeed, there was more behind Morita's attempt to evict Nankoku from the calligraphy world than a demand for theoretical rigor. Morita's tireless rhetoric directed at defining and redefining the border between painting and calligraphy was motivated by an ideological assertion of cultural difference not unlike that which may underlie Nankoku's emotional plea for inclusion in the calligraphy community. Morita and Nankoku were paired in the 1959 discussion because they were honored as the Japanese representatives that year to the Biennale in Sao Paolo. The Japanese commissioner to the Biennale also took part in their discussion, which Morita ran in his magazine. Speaking in petto and somewhat apologetically to the Japanese art community before leaving for Sao Paolo, the commissioner noted that Japanese calligraphy had an "easy advantage" in its appeal to Westerners compared to oil painting, which was a "handicap" for the Japanese artist.45 Perhaps he was right; in Aline B. Louchheim's inventory of the "national flavors" of abstract painting at the 1953 Sao Paolo Biennale, considered in the previous chapter, the Japanese abstract paintings exhibited in Sao Paolo that year received no mention whatsoever. The Japanese commissioner had a point; short of creating an elaborate Japanese thematics like Okada's "yugenism," it was apparently difficult for foreigners to recognize a "Japanese flavor" in abstract paintings by Japanese artists. But change the medium from oil on canvas to ink on paper (as Hasegawa Saburo did), and the recognition of an "authentic" Japanese identity was assured. But Morita took umbrage at the commissioner's words about calligraphy's "advantage" before foreign audiences. He countered that calligraphy was actually at a disadvantage because, although foreigners may have a superficial interest in calligraphic technique, it is difficult for them to understand calligraphy on a fundamental level.46 This argument represented an important shift in Morita's thinking. He had worked hard on behalf of the international dialogue between calligraphy and abstract painting. He had introduced numerous European and American abstractionists to the Japanese readers of his magazine and helped organize exhibitions of Japanese calligraphy abroad. Morita had been deeply moved in 1952 by what he regarded as Franz Kline's ability to produce an effect close to what he was aiming at in his own work as a calligrapher. As late as 1954 he had argued eloquently that foreigners who could not read Japanese or Chinese calligraphy and were not initiated to the customs of calligraphy's long artistic tradition might well be able to judge works of calligraphy on a purer intuitive level than knowledgeable and skillful Japanese calligraphers. 47 But apparently Morita's enthusiasm for an international dialogue on calligraphic abstraction began to sour in the mid-1950s. In 1956 the art critic Takiguchi Shuzo wrote of Morita and his colleagues in the Bokujinkai group: "While they seem to have departed greatly from the calligraphic tradition, they haven't really done so. Rather they are faithfully trying to protect the border of calligraphy

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. . . from the world of painting." 48 By this point, Morita and his colleagues had formally put an end to their painterly experiments and declared the primacy of the moji in the art of calligraphy.49 Morita's calligraphy can be understood as occupying a middle position between the radical rejection of moji-sei by Nankoku and the conservative literal moji-sei of calligraphers like Nishikawa Yasushi. While defending calligraphy from painting, Morita grew increasingly absorbed with arbitrating East-West difference: "The West and Japan take completely different attitudes toward the sign, whether motif or word. The former deals with it as object, we by becoming the sign itself as subject."50 In Morita's opposition, following his Kyoto School mentors Ijima Tsutomu and Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, "the West" was tied to dualistic thinking and approaches to art, while "the East" pursued a path of nondualism based on Buddhist theology. He felt that abstract painting was symptomatic of this larger West, while true calligraphy must manifest the disposition of the East. In the 1960s, Morita devoted his magazine increasingly to the study of premodern Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and withdrew from the introduction of abstract painters from abroad. On a trip to the United States in 1963, he was convinced that the numerous appreciative responses to his exhibition and his discussion of calligraphy by individuals in the New York art world were "most certainly not directed at me personally. Rather they were directed at calligraphy and the Orient itself which is at the heart of calligraphy." 51 The dragon became an important symbol of Morita's increasing concern for what he regarded as calligraphy's fundamental basis in "the East." His artist name, Shiryu, which he had chosen in his youth at the time when he first resolved to become a calligrapher, literally means "child dragon." 52 In a 1964 essay he reflected on different cultural connotations of the dragon; in "the West" it was "a figure of terror, to be conquered by a St. George... [but] in the East, it has quite positive implications

We tend rather to feel nature breathing in

us or with us and that all creatures are in man and with man, not opposed or apart." 53 Thus regarding the dragon as an emblem of oriental nondualism, Morita frequently selected the character "dragon" (ryii) as the theme of explosive acts of brushwork, including one version in which a viscous gold dragon seems to prance across the shiny black lacquer surface of a large folding screen (Figure 18). In 1964, Morita concluded that "something corresponding to 'calligraphy' is not coming about in the West after all."54 Nakatsuka Hiroshi comments that Morita "despaired over the deep gap between calligraphy and abstract painting and saw his dream of a rainbow bridging the East and West ruptured." 55 Perhaps Morita's progression from one who worked vigorously to expand calligraphy to an art form of international relevance to one who was more concerned with arbitrating the difference between calligraphy and abstract painting was symptomatic of a recurring pattern among twentieth-century Japanese intellectuals "in which the admirers of European culture turned into its detesters overnight." 56

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F i g u r e 1 8 . Morita

If so, the disinclination of Franz Kline to reciprocate the overtures of Morita and the Boku-

Shiryu. Dragon (Ryu).

jinkai to explore artistic common ground as a formula for universality must surely be

1965. Four-panel screen,

relevant to the increasingly nationalistic tone of Morita's thinking in the 1950s.

pigment and lacquer

Morita and Hasegawa and many others in Japan really seemed to believe in the early

on paper. 166 x 312 cm.

1950s that contemporary American and European painters were deeply interested in Asian

Kiyoshikojin Seicho-ji,

art. 57 However, Kline's denial was not exceptional but typical of American and European

Takarazuka City, Hyogo.

artists who had seemed at first to be sincerely interested in calligraphy. A great wariness about the vulnerability of their work to criticism for being excessively influenced by Asian sources, as in the cases of Kline and Tobey, was characteristic of many of their colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. The French Informel painter Georges Mathieu came to Japan in 1957 and performed calligraphic painting exercises for public audiences, triggering an "Informel Boom" that swept Japanese painting in the late 1950s. But Mathieu arrogantly declared, "My coming to Japan is the confrontation of my calligraphy and Japan's calligraphy."58 And later he inflated this claim further: "Without knowing it, I gave these people, who have been seeking for nearly a century to combine the privileges of their traditional art with the seductions of Western painting, an answer to their question." 59 Mathieu felt that Morita's calligraphy was closer to what he was trying to do in his own abstract painting than the other "Japanese calligraphic painters." Nonetheless, for Mathieu, Morita's work "demonstrates very clearly how the freest will of the boldest calligraphic painters is cast in the mold and convention of a thousand years and a day."60 Segi Shin'ichi

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responds justifiably, "We must not forget that a painter, while seeming so Asian and cosmopolitan, can actually be filled with Western self-importance." 61 Morita's realization that, contrary to his earlier optimistic assumption, the Klines and the Mathieus would grant no place for Asian calligraphy in the modern practice of abstraction must have been a bitter disappointment. In 1948, during the U.S. Occupation, Morita had hoped for some ideal future synthesis of the calligraphy of the East and the abstract painting of the West but feared that Europeans and Americans might accomplish this synthesis without the participation of Japanese calligraphers. To avert this crisis, he attempted to extract a "universal language" from calligraphy by infusing it with the formal means of abstract painting. Menaced by the astonishing power he sensed in the abstract painting of Kline and perhaps disturbed by Yoshihara's recommendation that calligraphers throw away their moji-sei and become painters, Morita may have begun to regret that he had helped open what may have come to seem like the floodgates to an enswampment of calligraphy by painting, of Japan by Euro-America. Indeed, he increasingly concerned himself with guarding against the eclipse of the Asian character of calligraphy. Morita the modernist reformer of the calligraphy community was also and increasingly a hard-line defender of the calligraphy community from the threats posed by Kline and Mathieu as well as Yoshihara and Nankoku. Yagi Kazuo: The Attachment to Clay While Morita played an ambivalent if influential role in the introduction of abstract calligraphy into the calligraphy world, Yagi Kazuo (1918-1979) was the leading proponent of the admission of the nonfunctional object into the pottery world. 62 Yagi's breakthrough to the kiln-fired object was accomplished in 1954 and preceded by a few years a similar rebellion against the functional vessel in the United States by the potter Peter Voulkos and his circle at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. 63 Yagi was a charismatic professor of ceramics at the Kyoto City Art University, known not only for his nonfunctional pottery but also for his work with other media such as film and photography, not to mention his drunken singing. Moreover he was also admired for his writing, which typically took the form of brief informal essays featuring narratives of personal reminiscence. These writings, which are discussed and quoted in the following pages, usually deal with issues related to pottery, whether they appeared in the popular press or in pottery world publications. 64 Yagi and his followers would transform the premises of pottery with such values learned from modern art as abstraction, individualistic self-expression, primitivism, and the cult of originality. One view of some of the ideals of pottery that were quickly becoming obsolete during Yagi's upbringing in the pottery world in prewar Kyoto can be glimpsed in the text Musashi, a popular historical fiction by Yoshikawa Eiji. In an essay written late in life, Yagi recalled his youthful impressions of this novel, which first appeared in the 1930s in serialized installments in a major daily newspaper. 65 The story revolves around the adventures of

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Musashi, a heroic warrior loosely based on his seventeenth-century namesake. In the episode Yagi mentioned, Musashi makes an appearance in the Gojózaka district of Kyoto.66 Gojózaka was also the area where Yagi lived and worked for almost his entire life. In fact, he was born there in the workshop home of his father, Yagi Issó, who was also a potter. In Yagi's day and for many previous generations, Gojózaka was a famous center of potters' shops and kilns. Yoshikawa's Musashi chances upon a Gojózaka potter at work fashioning a tea bowl on the potter's wheel. He sits at his wheel in a humble shack that serves as his workshop as well as the store where he sells his wares for a pittance. Musashi is transfixed by the artisan's concentration, which seems so complete that it is as though "his soul has entered into the clay" (tsuchi no naka ni tamashi ga haite iru).67 Musashi is so humbled by the singular power of concentration of the skilled artisan that he falls to doubting whether he could ever achieve a comparable level of perfection in his own métier of swordsmanship. Yagi wrote that he could guess which one of his neighbors in Gojózaka was the model for Yoshikawa's fictional potter. Surely, he was the old balding man stooped like a crane whose amazing skill Yagi had idolized as a young boy.68 Later in Yoshikawa's long narrative, Musashi encounters a second Kyoto potter.69 This one, however, is not a poor nameless artisan, but Hon'ami Kóetsu (1558-1637), the wealthy and learned master of the tea ceremony and highly reputed amateur in the art of calligraphy as well as pottery. Musashi, however, simply stumbles into him unaware of his reputation and accomplishments. Kóetsu offers Musashi a cup of tea in an unpretentious earthenware tea bowl without telling Musashi that he has made it himself. Musashi is struck by a "latent force" when he picks up the tea bowl, drinks out of it, and handles it. In an erotic rendition of the connoisseurship of pottery, Musashi "rubbed the bowl, unwilling to lose physical contact with it." He fathoms all sorts of things about the character of "the potter himself." Moved by "something superhuman about [the] sharp cut in the clay," Musashi senses that the maker of the tea bowl is "as sharp as a sword from Sagami" and that "there's something big and daring" about him. The tea bowl looks very simple, but "there's a certain haughtiness about it, something regal and arrogant, as though [its maker] didn't regard other people as being quite human." Thus, while the first potter Musashi meets provides a model of selfless pottery-making skill, the second dramatizes the haptic basis of the aesthetic appreciation of the clay vessel. The profound beauty of the teacup is sensed more through the flesh of the one who would drink from it than through the eyes. Perhaps the sense of touch in pottery of the past was sensationalized in Musashi precisely because it was threatened by the changing conditions of pottery in the present. The privileged site of the encounter with pottery was increasingly the public exhibition. The exhibition stages an encounter with an art object that maximizes viewing and forbids touching, let alone use. This format effectively precludes the premises of pottery as they are dramatized in Musashi. And the exhibition system also brewed considerable anxiety in the

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pottery world in the prewar years because it placed crafts such as pottery in an inferior station to the "fine arts." These consequences of the exhibition system had considerable impact on Yagi's early career in pottery. Yagi's father, Yagi Issô (1895-1974), came of age as a potter in this period when the pottery world was developing under the strain of its inferior status in the reigning hierarchy of the arts. Dissatisfaction with this status motivated many in the pottery world to dedicate themselves to reform. Art Nouveau and other European styles were mastered; the medieval Japanese methods and styles of tea ceremony ceramics were reconstructed; bold new glaze patterns and colors as well as forms were invented; and the simple pottery of the Japanese countryside was elevated and reconstituted by the folk art movement.70 Issô was one of these reformers. In 1920 he and five other young potters formed the group "Akatsuchi" (Red Earth) as an alternative to the rigid salon system. In defiance of the general assumption at this time that potters were not artists, they wrote that the goal of their group was to "express the eternal beauty of nature through the art of pottery."71 To advance the artistic dimension of their pottery, they broke with convention by charging admission to their exhibition and giving their glazed vessels romantic titles such as Pond in Twilight. Nevertheless, their approach to ceramic innovation, like that of most of their contemporaries in the pottery world, was overwhelmingly focused on the design of ceramic vessels. Whether plates, vases, bottles, or cups, their forms were designed to serve as holders or containers of one sort or another. However, in order to enhance the career he assumed his son would pursue as a vessel potter, Issô sent Kazuo to sculpture classes so that he could learn the fundamentals of form. 72 Later, even after advancing to a technical school for potters, the younger Yagi continued his study from 1935 to 1938 at the Japan Ceramic Sculpture Association, a small workshop headed by Numata Ichiga (1873-1954).73 Numata, known for his skillfully molded animal figurines, had been trained at the famous French porcelain manufactory of Sèvres. Yagi, however, would remember Numata's tales not of Sèvres, but of the great modern French sculptor Rodin. Numata had spent some time as a student in Rodin's studio and described to Yagi and his other students the French master's practice of making rapid sketches of nude models. To be sure, Numata's decorative figurines bear no resemblance to Rodin's figure sculpture. Nevertheless, they were nonvessel works of fired clay, objects that potentially held an ambiguous and unstable position in the salon, straddling the border between sculpture in the third division and crafts in the fourth. Moreover, in Yagi's memory, the figurine maker held an alluring if tenuous link to Rodin, the master of modern European sculpture. Since the hierarchical structure of the salon system subordinated pottery to sculpture, Yagi felt a "strange thrill" when Professor Numata recommended that he submit his work to the division of sculpture rather than crafts. But Yagi's hopes were dashed by his father, who adhered more closely to the vessel in his own work and never achieved much success

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in the salon system himself. In Yagi's words, his father, "threw cold water" on the idea of submitting his work to the sculpture division of the salon. Yagi reminisced about these difficult early experiences of the border between pottery and sculpture in an essay written much later as an affectionate memoir of Professor Numata. At a banquet party where everyone had been drinking, the professor asked the young Yagi his opinion about a recent work, a ceramic incense burner by Numata himself that had just been accepted at the salon. The pupil had the temerity to reproach his master, replying, "Its form is splendid, but unfortunately there is only one hole so the smoke would build up and choke the fire out." 74 Yagi represents this episode as a regretted effrontery of his youth, but it also alludes to one of the central contradictions of the modern system of crafts. So belabored were the virtuoso handicraft techniques in an age of mass production and so precious the commodity, that its raison d'être of utility began to atrophy behind the glass of the showcase at an exhibition or the lens of a camera. In other words, Yagi was discovering that the difference between Professor Numata's incense burner and his decorative figurines was increasingly a trivial difference. The pottery world that Yagi was born into still honored utility, and practitioners of the tea ceremony still provided an important clientele for costly pottery that would actually be handled. Nevertheless, much of the focus of this world had become reoriented toward the site of the exhibition. The design of the beautiful pottery object was primarily addressed to the spectator or juror in a salon, while the person who would actually place incense in the burner and light it up became a secondary concern. And when actual use was precluded, so was the erotic and imaginative sort of physical handling of pottery that was so critical to Musashi's appreciation of the tea master's tea bowl. While the privileged hand-clay contact of the user of a ceramic vessel was threatened by the modern exhibition culture, a compensatory increase of attention was devoted to the hand-clay contact of the potter in the act of making the clay object. Yagi's autobiographical account of an incident at the outset of his career reads like a fable of this transfer. Though he was the son of a potter and he grew up in the pottery world, it took war to shake him to an awareness of his affective ties to the culture of pottery. In 1939 Yagi was drafted and dispatched to South China. In military service, he took his meals on army-issue aluminum utensils. This was the first time in his life that he lost contact with ceramic tableware, and he found the metal utensils to be "things that really had no feeling." 75 Discharged from the military owing to illness, Yagi was convalescing at a military hospital in the countryside in Japan when he came across some clay in the woods nearby and "tore into it like a starving person discovering food." Though he had been working with clay all his life, this passionate encounter with clay was the epiphany that would establish his artistic identity. In the rhetoric of the pottery world, the word "tsuchi" (which means "clay," "earth," or "dirt") has come to hold great poetic resonance. Remarking on the great outpouring of popular interest in pottery in Japanese society in the 1970s, Yagi reflected in a phenomenological

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vein on the feeling of a small ceramic tea bowl in one's hands. He suggested that the pottery object stimulated a sense of physical connection with the whole of the earth under one's feet and an awareness of its integral relationship to the very tissue of one's body. 76 Something of this spirit pervaded Yagi's memories of his own experiences decades earlier. In the privation of war, a war in which Yagi not only suffered from illness but lost his younger brother, the unexpected encounter with clay kindled a powerful desire to live and create as a ceramic artist. In 1948 Yagi and four friends, who were each sons of Kyoto vessel potters as he was, organized themselves into a new pottery group much as his father had done nearly three decades earlier. They named their new group "Sodeisha," or the "Group of Mud-Crawling." The word "sodei" derived from a Sung dynasty term for a glaze pattern resembling the trail of an earthworm "crawling on mud." This name for the organization that was to launch the nonvessel poses another expression of the romantic elementalism that Yagi associated with the earthy material basis of pottery. 77 Yagi wrote a manifesto: "The bird of dawn has flown from the imaginary forest and can only discover the face of its self in the well of truth. Our union is not to provide a warm bed of dreams, but to come to terms with our lives in broad daylight."78 The search for "self in the well of truth" brought Yagi into opposition with one of the dominant modes of the Japanese ceramic tradition, the cultivated taste in the milieu of the tea ceremony for rustic wares such as Shino and Bizen. On ethical grounds, Yagi attacked the contradiction of this aesthetic of rusticity; though savored by its connoisseurs in language that blurred the distinction between art and nature, it was clearly a product of artifice. Two years after the formation of Sodeisha, Yagi and his cohorts made two resolutions: first, to stop working after models from pottery history and, second, to discontinue submitting their works to the salon system.79 With this severance from the canons and institutions of the pottery world, they freed themselves to explore that which lay beyond. The following year they inaugurated independent annual group exhibitions that did not have to heed the salon's hierarchical separation of sculpture and pottery. Though he still lived and worked with his father in the Gojozaka neighborhood of Kyoto in close contact with a whole community of traditional vessel potters, Yagi started bending and warping his wheel-thrown forms and glazing them with designs that resembled paintings by Picasso, Klee, and Miro. The work of these European modernists had already become well known among Japanese artists before the war. After the war new Japanese publications started to reacquaint artists with their work, and the first postwar exhibitions of their works in Japan began to appear in the early 1950s. An exhibition of Picasso's ceramic works was mounted in 1951, but already in the late 1940s, Yagi was deeply moved by what he saw in photographs of pottery by Picasso. Picasso appropriated the vessel surface as both ground and medium for representation. He inscribed and painted images on his ceramics that triggered punning and rhyming reverber-

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ations between what was drawn and what was potted. Yagi wrote, "All material and technical aspects [in Picasso's ceramics] are direcdy embodied by Picasso himself, resulting in a willful form corresponding to the movement of the artist's spirit."80 In a 1949 tribute to Picasso's use of pottery as a medium of self-expression, Yagi carved the image of a face (not dissimilar to his own appearance at the time) using a Picassoid style of draftsmanship on the surface of one of his vessels and inflected the pottery wall with a dent under the face (Figure 19). At this critical juncture in his career, Yagi's experimental work in the bosom of Japanese ceramic tradition received an unexpected and much remarked endorsement from far beyond the pottery world. Some New York art world dignitaries sightseeing in Kyoto in 1950 were so taken with his work that they decided on the spot to purchase four vases and have them exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 81 Thus, as the Asahi shinbun reported, the work of the "young avant-garde potter... who had flung off the ancient tradition of Kyoto ceramics" was to become "the first postwar Japanese pottery to be introduced to the world." 82 There was also interest in his work from Europe. One Kyoto pottery world regular who was a protégé of Yagi's at this time would later explain Yagi's greater appeal overseas than to Japanese viewers with the comment "Westerners who understood new art and humor responded quickly."83 At the time of the showing of his work in New York in 1950, Yagi announced that he was searching for a balance of the various models on his horizon: "The marriage of the new and the classical, this is my aim. My task is finding harmony in my creative work between the modern painting of Picasso and Klee and the shibui flavor of the Japanese potter's wheel."84 But in the goal of obtaining a creative harmony between Japanese ceramic tradition and Western modern art, the Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi was a model of much more immediate relevance than Europeans such as Picasso and Klee. The products of Noguchi's short periods of intense engagement with the materials, conventions, and some of the leaders of the Japanese pottery world in 1931,1950, and 1952 provided a powerful catalyst to Yagi's work and the development of the nonvessel genre in Japan. At the outset of his career before the war, Noguchi had spent several months in the studio of Brancusi, and just as Brancusi's identity in Paris was related to "his origins in the 'mysterious East,' if only Eastern Europe," 85 so Noguchi wished to connect with his Japanese origins through contact with the Japanese earth. Thus, in 1931, Noguchi spent five months in Kyoto using the facilities of the distinguished potter Uno Ninmatsu, known for some of the finest celadon in Kyoto and also for his workshop, which employed some fifty persons in the production of ceramic lamps and other decorative objects for export to the United States and Europe. 86 But Noguchi shunned both Uno's sophisticated classic pottery and his industrialized ceramic production; he put himself in what he would remember as "the cottage of a ditchdigger" and entered a "close embrace of the earth, as a seeking after identity with some primal matter beyond personalities and possessions." 87 This return to the earth was facili-

F i g u r e 1 9 . Yagi Kazuo. Jar with Inlaid Figure. 1949. Ceramic with white slip. Height: 29.8 cm. Private collection.

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tated by a return in time to the prehistoric pottery that Noguchi encountered at the Imperial Museum in Kyoto. Long before the vessel-dominated pottery world of Japan, a nonvessel practice of pottery had flourished in the Japanese archipelago. Haniwa are cylindrical earthenware figurines and models that were probably intended as grave furnishings for the great tombs of the Kofun period (250-600 C.E.). While creating ceramic sculpture in 1931, Noguchi found these objects, which at that time had no place in the canons of the pottery world, to be "in a sense modern" and close to his "feeling for earth." 88 Thus, Noguchi's prewar experience at the edge of the pottery world in Kyoto suggests a similarity of spirit to the romantic interest in primordial origins indicated by Yagi's early postwar search for "self in the well of truth" by "crawling in mud." Noguchi's career as a modern sculptor and designer in the United States and World War II would keep him from Japan for the next nineteen years. He returned for the first time in 1950, and it was his activities there during the final years of the U.S. Occupation that had such an impact on Hasegawa, Morita, and the Bokujinkai (and even Franz Kline). I shall return to this dramatic period in Noguchi's career in the next chapter, but it must be noted here that he resumed his prewar immersion into the earth of Japan with such intensity that it was felt throughout the Japanese pottery world. For Noguchi, clay came to be a powerful marker of the difference between his two nations; it was, he would claim, "a natural medium to work with in Japan, but not so in America." 89 In 1950 and 1952, he worked with clay at the kilns of well-known vessel potters such as Kato Hajime at Seto, Kanashige Toyo at Bizen, and Kitaoji Rosanjin in Kamakura to create clay works in many styles using many techniques, ranging from functional vessels to small rough clay sketches and figurines to large abstract forms. In one work of this period (Figure 20), Noguchi took a thin slab of clay over two meters long and simply folded it into an upside-down loop while it was still semisoft. He left its graceful Figure 2 0 . Isamu Noguchi. Mrs. White. 1952. Shigaraki ceramic on wood stand. 42% x 9V2 x 8% in. The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Long Island City, New York.

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contours and roughly cut edges in a fairly unworked state but carefully fused the two sides of the narrow arc with subtle cross-pieces. To one of these supports he attached a vertical rectangle that seems to hover in space and that suggests the face of a hooded or long-haired figure, perhaps the "Mrs. White" of the title. The most daring aspect of the piece, however, is its mounting by means of pegs inserted through holes in the ceramic structure onto a vertical wooden dowel. Many a vase in the history of ceramics is endowed with an elegant profile that seems to lift the ceramic weight into space, but this ceramic form is draped in space like a strip of linen and dispenses with all contact with the ground whatsoever. Noguchi fashioned the work out of clay from the ancient kiln site of Shigaraki with which Yagi was very familiar. But Yagi could never have seen Shigaraki clay deployed in bold sculptural handling of the sort Noguchi demonstrated: "It was probably with Isamu Noguchi that I first started to feel close to sculpture and think about the actual process of making [sculpture] and its structure. When I looked at Noguchi's ceramics, I had the feeling, 'Whammo, he's really done me in!' (Pokkato kore wa yarareta na)"90 The potter Suzuki Osamu, Yagi's colleague in the Sodeisha group, confirmed the impact of Noguchi's clay work in the early 1950s, particularly in changing the group's understanding of their position in both pottery and natural history: We felt his work to demonstrate the nature of clay itself; it was like throwing a rock into the seemingly unstoppable system of pottery developing through the ages as if without beginning or end. With this understanding of the earth as the source, suddenly, like a chain reaction, the earthenware images lined up in the museums, such as haniwa and Chinese tomb figurines, assumed a new immediacy.91 The modern primitivist appeal of the prehistoric wares of Japan's Jomon and Yayoi periods is an important value in the pottery world today, but according to Inui Yoshiaki, this was not the case until Isamu Noguchi's work was fathomed by Yagi and others in the Sodeisha group in the early 1950s. 92 Not only did Noguchi's work help initiate an appreciation for prehistoric Japanese pottery in the pottery world that would later become commonplace, but it also stimulated the consideration of new perspectives of Japanese identity. Yagi thought that Noguchi had discovered a "brightness" (akarusa) in the ancient haniwa and Yayoi pottery that had long since become dormant beneath a contrary "cloudy moistness" (kumotta shimepposa) in the Japanese national character. Turning to blood metaphors of race to express his fascination for Noguchi's Japanese and American identity, Yagi concluded that Noguchi's "life as an American has washed away the moist Japanese character that also flows in his blood and has nourished only the bright, open side of his Japanese disposition." 93 Noguchi's presence in the pottery world seemed to inspire potters to imagine the image of their work as it would look from contemporary international and American perspectives.

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F i g u r e 2 1 . Yagi Kazuo. The Walk of Samsa (Zamsa no sanpo). 1954. Glazed pottery. 26 x 26.5 x 14.5 cm. Private collection.

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The potter Kanashige Toyo, w h o was well known for his discovery and reconstruction of the ancient style of Bizen ware and w h o gave Noguchi free reign of his workshop in 1952, wrote: "Through the work of the international sculptor Noguchi, Bizen ware has made its debut on the world stage. We can only wait to see how it will be received in the United States."94 By putting his hand to Japanese clay, Noguchi inspired an imagined extension of the pottery world beyond what had hitherto been its domain. However, Noguchi's interaction with the pottery world did not earn him membership in this world, and the products of his sojourn there were not regarded as products of the pottery world. According to Suzuki Osamu, "Noguchi was primarily a sculptor w h o did some work in Japanese clay and simply had it fired by Japanese potters." 95 Yagi's synthesis of Japanese pottery and European and American modern art required a different balance. Noguchi's clay work was fascinating and suggestive, but it remained foreign to the pottery world. Yagi's stated desire "to create something new at the very limit of ceramics on the basis of classical cultivation," 96 in contrast, rings with the excitement of the ambition to press pottery to new frontiers, but it does not suggest a desire to depart from the pottery world altogether. How far could Yagi carry his avant-gardist impulse to press ceramics to its "very limit" without severing his affective ties to the pottery world? This threshold shifted dramatically in 1954 with Yagi's Walk of Samsa (Figure 21). Coming from the hand of a son of the pottery world, this work threatened the boundaries of the pottery world itself. Having just fired Samsa in the communal kiln at Gojozaka, Yagi was carrying his new object home when he was confronted by one of the senior potters in the community. The fourth-generation Kiyomizu Rokubei saw Samsa and said, "You've got something pretty weird there. What is it?"97 Such work clearly broke with the vessel premise of pottery, and the response Yagi encountered in the pottery world was reported to have been "hysteria." 98 Samsa is widely heralded as the first major monument of the new pottery world genre of the kiln-fired objet. The central torus form to which the numerous pipe legs have been joined was thrown on a potter's wheel and rotated ninety degrees to stand vertically. Perhaps it is difficult now to appreciate why this was such a shocking break with the conventions of the pottery world of Kyoto in the mid-1950s.99 Inui Yoshiaki explains the impact of Yagi's reorientation of the wheel-thrown form: [It was] a concept that would never have occurred to potters before this. The potter's wheel was not just a tool, it was one with the potter's physical disposition, or rather, it was something firmly linked with the spirit and feeling, it was part of the flesh of the potter

Y a g i . . . dared to thrust the potter's wheel a w a y . . . make

a clean break, and think of it as simply a physical machine. 1 0 0

The title Samsa's Walk refers to Kafka's Gregor Samsa, the traveling salesman who was metamorphosed into a large insect. If Yagi's object is read as a sequence of "legs" walking

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360 degrees around a circle, the following passage is probably the closest match in Kafka's story: Soon it became his habit to distract himself by walking—around the room, back and forth along the walls, and across the ceiling, on which he would hang; it was quite a different matter from walking across the floor. His breathing became freer, a light, swinging motion went through his body, and he felt so elated that now and then, to his own surprise, he would let go and fall to the floor.101

This is one of the only moments in Kafka's story where Samsa really seems to like being a bug. Perhaps Samsa's gleeful metamorphosis resonated with a joy Yagi felt in his new mastery of the self-expressive voice of the artist disengaged from the tyranny of the vessel. If so, the new voice discovered was once again closely associated with a foreign model, the fiction of a European writer. Two of Yagi's most important artistic models, Picasso and Noguchi, some of his most significant early patronage, and now the text through which he expressed his breakthrough from the potter's wheel and the vessel were imports from Europe and America. The departure from "tradition" is persistently tagged with European or American identities. And yet, in one important respect Yagi's Samsa was not the product of his absorption with foreign culture. His new self-expressive voice was not so completely changed from his old potter's voice as Samsa's bizarre transmutation into a bug. For although this work is most certainly a strange metamorphosis of traditional pottery, nonetheless it is surfaced with a sensibility that restores the affective affiliation to the pottery tradition, namely, the organic earthy ash glaze that is one of the hallmarks of Japanese ceramic taste. Thus, while Yagi dispensed with the vessel that had hitherto been the sine qua non of the pottery world, his nonfunctional ceramic object retained a significant residue of the vessel: its physical material, the fired clay, and the aesthetic qualities associated with this material. But these properties were not the only vestige of the vessel that remained in Yagi's thinking. The pottery vessel was a frequent topic in his writings: he mused over the poetic quality of the prehistoric vessel, analyzed the aesthetic effect of adding pattern to the surface of the vessel, discussed various historical styles of vessels, and considered historical potters such as the Edo period Ninsei as well as numerous individual vessel potters among his contemporaries, including his father, whose views and habits he quoted and described frequently. Even in Yagi's own ceramic practice, the vessel remained a pervasive presence far beyond the use of the material of pottery. Indeed, Yagi continued to create tea bowls and other vessels throughout his career, and these objects were occasionally illustrated in his publications alongside his nonfunctional objects. Yet perhaps it is more significant that his nonvessels themselves often make reference to vessels. This thematization of the vessel can

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take a literal form, such as the large globular bottle in the shoulder of which a fractured aperture seems to have been deliberately excavated. Yagi posed for a photograph peering around the profile of this vessel as though identifying with the vessel rendered unusable by its gaping wound (Figure 22). In another perspective on vessel craft, Yagi delighted in the small lumpy efforts at vessel making by his students at a school for mentally retarded children where he volunteered as a teacher of ceramics. 102 But perhaps what might be regarded as Yagi's deconstruction of the vessel form was most dramatically expressed in one of his films, which documented the smashing of a dropped clay vessel. In Yagi's systematic investigation of "vesselhood," the utilitarian function of containing

Figure 22. Yagi Kazuo

also became a metaphor for the containing of knowledge in his many fired clay books and

with his large Shigaraki

his series of works in the "wrinkled manner" (shiwayosede), in which masses of extruded

jar of 1966. Photograph

noodlelike forms resemble the gray matter of the brain (Figure 23). To a certain extent, the

of 1969.

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exhibition culture that had become such a prominent feature of the pottery world invited Yagi's transition from ceramic vessels to ceramic art about vessels. For, as Yagi pointed out with relish, the ceramic vessel made to be experienced in a museum, where touching let alone using the vessel is prohibited, was already an "objet" whether or not its design was functional, because the museum space effectively cut it off from the space of everyday life. 103 Nevertheless, in Yagi's view the creatively conceived "objet" was not divorced from the everyday altogether. He wrote that creativity itself was impossible without unceasing contact with the everyday; art is made through a process that requires "refracting the everyday through the prism of the heart." 104 By the end of Yagi's career in the late 1970s, the genre of nonfunctional ceramics that he had pioneered had become a familiar and established niche in the pottery world. Yagi contributed considerably to this process not only through the continued production of nonfunctional pottery in his later years, but also through professional activities that gave him a high profile in and beyond the pottery world. His teaching career at the Kyoto Municipal Art University and elsewhere gained him many protégés among younger potters. In addition to publishing numerous essays, he also participated in television and radio discussions Figure 23. Yagi Kazuo.

about pottery. His ceramic work could be seen yearly in solo and group exhibitions in Japan

Portrait (Shôzô). 1964.

and abroad and won prizes, for example, at the Second International Ceramics Exhibition

Kokutô pottery. 15 x 19

in Ostend, Belgium, in 1959 and three years later at the Third International Ceramic Exhi-

cm. Private collection.

bition in Prague. Moreover, since its founding in 1948, the Sôdeisha group grew into an important annual exhibition salon not unlike the larger salons that Yagi had rebelled against in his youth. Sôdeisha held its forty-first annual exhibition in 1978, the year before Yagi's death, and at this time the organization numbered forty members. The first monograph on Yagi's work appeared in 1969, but the definitive texts of the canonization of Yagi Kazuo were those authored by Inui Yoshiaki and published soon after his death in 1979. 105 A professor at Kyoto University and curator at the National Museum

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of Modern Art in Kyoto, Inui was an influential figure in the Japanese pottery world. Inui's writings on Yagi appeared in catalogues and magazines, but they were also published in the authoritative format of handsomely produced monographs in multivolume series of library references with such titles as Complete Corpus of Contemporary Japanese Ceramics,1061 have made much use of Inui's work in the preceding discussion, but now I would like to look more critically at some of the premises of Inui's interpretation of Yagi. Inui's discourse of Japanese pottery can be located in a much larger theme of discussion in Japanese society at this period. The Nihonjinron, or "discourse of Japanese people," was a vast popular industry of speculative thinking about the distinctive features of Japanese national character.107 Inui's writings on Yagi bear a period resemblance to the historical phase of Nihonjinron discourse that was stimulated by Japanese economic successes of the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural and racial features unique to Japanese society were identified and investigated to explain and justify the nation's financial competitiveness. In effect, Inui marshaled Yagi's pottery innovation to the prevailing agenda in the cultural climate of the Nihonjinron. Inui granted Yagi's development of the "kiln-fired objet" an exalted place in twentiethcentury ceramic history. In Inui's account, the earthy surface of ceramic objects such as Samsa assumed great significance: "While [Samsa] possesses sculptural form, it is ultimately pottery because it is made in earth and

fire

The muted and sophisticated coloration is

a direct reflection of Japanese traditional ceramic aesthetics. Thus, though Samsa has a sculptural form, it has the nature and the aesthetic that are native to ceramics." 108 For Inui as for Yagi, the term "sculpture" was linked to "the West," while the term "ceramics" was linked to Japan. The new pottery genre of the "kiln-fired objet" held aesthetic fascination for Inui because of its suspension in a creative tension in what Inui regarded as an everpresent contradiction between sculpture and ceramics, art and craft, modernity and tradition. Yagi pushed the perimeter of the pottery world beyond its previous limits to the extent of internalizing something of the duality of the border itself and something of that imagined to lie beyond. This internalization of a figment of "the West" was typical of Nihonjinron thinking. According to Yoshino Kosaku's analysis of the Nihonjinron, the arguments of its proponents typically hinged on the enunciation of "our" Japanese difference as the active agent. American or Chinese nationalisms, by contrast, often placed "us" in the center and "them" on the periphery. 109 In the Nihonjinron, the Japanese mode was often assumed to be the exception and the Euro-American the norm. This assumption made it all the more urgent to describe both sides and identify the difference between them. This discursive pattern was the operative mode of Inui's identification of Yagi's form with sculpture and the West, and his concomitant assertion of the Japaneseness of the shrinking, burning, blistering of clay that occurs in the kiln, where the object is too hot for the artist to touch. There are indeed many ways in which pottery traditions are not jettisoned but thematized in Yagi's practice of the "kiln-fired objet." Nevertheless, Inui is perhaps too quick to

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read Yagi's work as nativist expression by commuting Yagi's associations with myths and traditions of the pottery world to emblems of national identity. Yagi opposed the Japanese pottery tradition with a force, conviction, and frequency that Inui maneuvers too swiftly into just one pole of a contradiction. Yagi's opposition can be seen in his early gravitation to Korean (not Japanese) ceramics and in his shift in 1963 to kokuto, a black, relatively unvariegated, glazeless, low-fire earthenware (see Figure 23). Much of Yagi's late work was realized in this medium, and Yagi stressed that he was attracted to kokuto because it reduced the chance effects of the kiln (yohen), the spontaneous blisters and blushes so loved by Japanese tea masters, to a minimum and thereby transferred agency from accident and tradition to the artist's imagination. Moreover, Yagi made occasional forays into materials of sculpture such as bronze, lead, and wood. Indeed his ceramic work was strongly informed by long, close friendships with two Japanese sculptors, Horiuchi Masakazu and Tsuji Shindo, who were his colleagues on the faculty at the Kyoto Municipal Art University. 110 But while these departures from Japanese pottery are impressive, Yagi did provide justification for Inui's emphasis on his ties to the pottery world. A formal analysis of Yagi's work might suggest that he was really a ceramic sculptor, not a potter, but he continued to make tea bowls and other vessels. Moreover, he was reportedly in the habit of saying, "I'm a tea-bowl maker," as if inviting his viewers to savor the radical strides of his work, which became more conspicuous when his work was juxtaposed with that of tea-bowl makers such as those described in the tale of Musashi. But Yagi's invocation of the humble tea-bowl maker was not just an affectation. During a 1969 discussion for radio broadcast, Yagi declared the strength of his attachment to clay as though it were an involuntary fixture of his identity: In painting and sculpture, the ideational and the poetic come first, and these bring in materials and technique. But it is not like that for me; for me the materials and technique come first. You could say that my attachment to clay (tsuchi to no tsunagari) is my destiny. It is both my own strength and my weakness. In any case, I have attempted to continue to dwell purely on clay. 1 1 1

For Inui, such statements justify a leap from the discourse of pottery to the discourse of nation: "The Japanese aesthetic awareness based on the sense of the material of clay can be fathomed in [Yagi's] work. That is not because it remains like a coccyx that he was unable to throw away completely, rather it emerges through a refinement in the positive expressive process of his work." 1 1 2 In Inui's nationalist narrative, Yagi's national identity unfolds through an expressive artistic process. Inui attaches great significance to "the clever concealment of the tea-bowl maker within him." 1 1 3 Wrapping vessel function in profundity renders it more powerful as an ambiguous and potent statement of Japanese identity. Some of Yagi's followers in the genre of the nonfunctional ceramic object affirmed its

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capacity to serve as a statement of Japanese national difference much more readily than did Yagi. Miwa Ryosaku, a member of Yagi's Sodeisha from 1967 to 1975, developed a more sensational and kitsch sort of imagery. His works of the 1970s include representations of fragments of Greco-Roman architecture and women held under some sort of restraint, such as the bust of a blindfolded woman titled Black Sonatina. (Figure 24). But if such motifs might imply that the artist has removed himself from the Japanese sensibility of the pottery world to a less bounded international frame of reference, Miwa testified to the contrary: I resist being told that I am a sculptor on account of my objet work. It gives me the feeling that someone is covering me up with an overcoat. Being a ceramic artist is fine by me. If you are a sculptor, you might as well carve whole forms, only forms. But in my case, to take the perspective of sculpture alone would be to throw away the flavor of the clay, the good flavor of the glaze, or the subtle smile of the flame. So in that respect, I am pulling the old umbilical cord of the taste of Japanese people; I can't simply leave off with form alone as do people in the West. Because I was born a descendant of this long Japanese tradition, I am naturally different from people who started from an absolutely

F i g u r e 2 4 . Miwa

new beginning like the Americans. And yet I really hate the work of those who are

Ryosaku. Black Sonatina

buried in the world of taste. 114

(Kuro no sonachine). 1977. Glazed stoneware.

The nonfunctional ceramic object allowed Miwa to stage something of a rebellion against the national aesthetic orthodoxy, even while perpetuating and revitalizing it. Miwa's father was the eleventh-generation holder of a famous title in Hagi ware pottery and was designated a "Living National Treasure" in 1982 for his use on vessels of the same milky white glaze that his son used on motifs such as Ionic columns and blindfolded women. The dramatic departures of the younger Miwa and the younger Yagi from their family traditions do not constitute renunciations of those traditions. Indeed, both continued their fathers' practices of vessel pottery along with their nonvessel production. The vessel and the nonvessel resonate with one another in the spaces of the pottery world, lending some of the character of the vessel to the object and the object to the vessel. The admission of the nonfunctional object into the pottery world of Japan enabled a diversification and modernization of the vessel tradition. It permitted an abundance of contradictory international cross-currents to enter the pottery world and expand the range and capacity of Japanese identity naturalized as an essential attachment to clay.

45 x 39 x 38 cm. Private collection.

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Proprietorship of Clay a n d Ink

The placement of Morita Shiryu and Yagi Kazuo back to back in this chapter brings to light a striking congruence in the predicaments that they faced in their respective art worlds. Both were initiated at young ages before the war into lifelong membership in their media-defined art worlds. The sense of security provided by each of these worlds reached a nadir in the early postwar years, when Japan's sovereignty was in the hands of the United States military. Each experienced a severe shock upon encountering works by American artists in this period: Morita "even felt menaced" by Kline's black and white abstract painting, and Noguchi's ceramic sculpture hit Yagi like a blow: "Whammo, he's really done me in!" Surely the works of Kline and Noguchi were impressive, but the intensity of these reactions goes beyond aesthetic appreciation. Perhaps Morita and Yagi each felt he was being dispossessed of his aesthetic entitlement as modern calligrapher and potter by rivals who were doubly foreign—by nationality and by medium. Kline was neither Japanese nor a calligrapher, yet he generated the powerful abstract brush strokes in black and white that Morita felt should be the special calling of the modern Japanese calligrapher. Similarly, Yagi saw his own ambition to infuse something of the dynamic power and freedom of modern art into the materials of the pottery world realized by a (Japanese) American sculptor. As John Clark points out, artistic modernization in Japan has often proceeded with knowledge about Euro-American art serving "as the reference or . . . interprétant to allow the transition away from tradition." 115 This mode of modernization, however, was greatly complicated in the early postwar period, because the paths imagined for the transition away from Japanese tradition seemed already to have been trod by the likes of Kline and Noguchi. Hence there was a tremendous need to reaffirm the Sino-Japanese counterweight in the process of hybridization with Euro-America that constituted the system of artistic modernization. The tension of this cultural difference was transferred to media difference: how were the calligraphy and pottery worlds to accommodate borrowings from sculpture and painting without ceasing to exist as calligraphy and pottery worlds? Clearly the projects of pottery and calligraphy modernization are hybrids; the genre of the kiln-fired object is "sculptural pottery," and the genre of abstract calligraphy is "painterly calligraphy." To a great extent, the alien components of these hybrid formations were Euro-American painting and sculpture. What was the right balance, the right composition of modern calligraphy and pottery? What degree of foreign admixture would invigorate the practices of calligraphy and pottery, and where was the threshold that, if crossed, would signal the dissolution of these practices into the worlds of painting and sculpture? Yagi and Morita differed sharply in their positions on these questions: Yagi sustained a longer and more adventurous experimentation with media and ideas far afield from his world of pottery. On occasion, he could affirm the hybrid character of his art most forth rightly, as when he volunteered that his work was neither pottery nor sculpture but "like a nue," a grotesque mythical bird. 116 And he described his return to the fold as though it were

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almost involuntary, though it was well consolidated in the rhetoric of his followers and supporters. Morita, in contrast, felt the need to confirm the Japanese and Asian character of his calligraphic identity more quickly on the heels of his border crossing. He attempted to articulate a water-tight theoretical distinction between calligraphy and noncalligraphy, even though what he decreed to be the latter could be from the hand of one whose membership in the calligraphy world was arguably more deeply rooted than his own, none other than his own teacher's son, Hidai Nankoku. Morita diverted attention from the categorically interstitial quality of his abstract calligraphy by pouring great significance into the presence of moji, even if illegible, and by anchoring his work in ancient calligraphic history. Nevertheless, the type of calligraphy that Morita and others promoted bears unmistakable traces of the intercourse with abstract painting that Morita had facilitated in the early postwar years. Many aspects of Morita's calligraphy can be related to lessons learned from or reaffirmed by abstract painting—the decreasing importance of literary content, the dynamic quality derived from spontaneous execution, the increase in size and boldness of scale, and the concern for the graphic compositional effect of the brushwork in a rectangular field. Morita would have been loath to admit it, but in important ways his work, too, was "like a nue," neither painting nor calligraphy. But it is not sufficient to label the sources of painterly and sculptural additions to calligraphy and pottery as "Western." Among their ports of entry into the calligraphy world were a group of Japanese abstract painters who were interested in the calligraphic potential of calligraphy such as Hasegawa Saburo and Yoshihara Jiro. 117 And to an even greater extent, Yagi Kazuo's pottery bore the traces of an ongoing exchange of ideas with the sculptors who were his colleagues on the faculty of the Kyoto Municipal Art University. Some will argue that these Japanese painters and sculptors on the peripheries of the calligraphy and pottery worlds were simply conduits for cultural influences that ultimately originated in EuroAmerica, that any contributions they have made to calligraphy and pottery were basically aspects of "Western influence." Indeed, from some perspectives, the difference between one medium and another was fraught with a rhetoric of national difference of an intensity that seems to override the nationality of the artist. Such contradictions expose the relative and contingent quality of the rhetoric of East-West difference. Yoshihara Jiro's art, for example, could be regarded as Western painting (yoga) from a calligraphy world perspective, but one could just as easily dwell on its Asian character relative to an appropriately contrasting comparison from the field of painting.118 For that matter, Morita, though he seemed to negotiate a persuasive position for himself well within the bounds of "Japanese calligraphy," was regarded as an imitator of the West by the conservative calligrapher Nishikawa Yasushi. Nishikawa, who was known for his study of classical Chinese calligraphy, was in turn criticized on account of an alleged mismatch between his adherence to Chinese models of calligraphy and his identity as a Japanese calligrapher: "The ambiance of the Chinese classics does not suit the flesh of a Japanese person." This criticism was authored by the calligra-

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pher Otani Senji, a whistle-blower at what he regarded as corruption in the calligraphy world in the mid-1980s. In addition to the Sinophilism of Nishikawa, the reactionary and racist Otani also opposed Tejima's attempts to create a calligraphy for Euro-American viewers. Otani censured Tejima for crossing the line from calligraphy to art: "If you exhibit calligraphy as art, it will be perceived through preconceived ideas of art." This transgression was unpardonable to Otani's way of thinking, because it destroyed what he regarded as the racial basis of the appreciation of calligraphy: "In the broadest sense of [artistic] appreciation, even an African could appreciate calligraphy." Otani advised his calligraphy world readers that "it is extremely difficult for the foreigner to understand kanji. It is the meaning and sense of the word that is so difficult. And if they do understand it, theirs is an understanding that is fundamentally different from ours." 119 One way to appreciate the capacity of art world borders to produce such clashing opinions is to consider "the question of propriety and property," as Rey Chow recommends, regarding social borders in general. With great vehemence and righteousness, art world individuals can forward new or revised mappings of the property of the art world and point their fingers at that which is to be expelled as improper. As Chow suggests, such border operations pivot on the anticipation of "new proprietorship by destroying, replacing, and expanding existing [borders]." The incorporation of margins as new properties brings them into the "field" delineated by borders, a field that she sees as analogous to Gramscian hegemony.120 In the early postwar years, Morita pressed the boundaries of the calligraphy world outward so as to fortify its "property" with a greater international relevance. Tejima Yukei offered a rather crass account of his own pursuit of the same goal. While he never went to the extreme of Otani, Morita grew increasingly wary that the press outward might call into question the calligraphic proprietorship of the new work on account of the alien quotient of its hybridity. Regardless of the particular border plan advocated, most of the individuals I have considered here sought to defend or replenish their art world as though it were a reservoir of culture of fundamental significance to the nation as a whole. The harvests of investigations of alien culture beyond art world borders were absorbed within this reservoir. The hybrid genres of kiln-fired objects and abstract calligraphy became the property of their Japanese art worlds. These expansions of the pottery and calligraphy worlds compensated for the contraction they had suffered from aspects of modernity—their society's declining need for hand-brushed documents and hand-potted containers. The consolidation of abstract calligraphy and the kiln-fired object as properties in their respective worlds indicated that, in themselves, vessel utility and script readability were no longer valuable contributions to society. The myth that the products of the calligraphy and pottery worlds were designed for utility in everyday life was exposed. Dispensing with this ethos cleared the way for a vigorous pursuit of such ideals of modern art as abstraction, individualistic self-expression, primitivist valorization of natural elements, and the historicist cult of originality.

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These modernizations of calligraphy and pottery facilitated a shift in the core values of these practices from a focus on the written word and the vessel to a thematization of abstracted qualities of the written word and the vessel. Unfettered from the now banal functions of legibility and tableware use, moji-sei and vesselhood were opened up as epic themes for the poetic commemoration of fantasies of a lost organically integrated society where utility was imagined to have facilitated a seamless continuity between the worlds of calligraphy and pottery and the surrounding society at large. Very concrete though untouchable forms of ink and clay became fetishes for the loss of this fantasmic ancestral society. The scriptor became a "person of ink" (bokujin), and the vessel potter was one who "crawled on mud" ( sodei). Indeed, the artist-fetishist could facilitate the imagining of the Japanese people at large as "people of ink" and "people of clay." The alienating threat posed by the hybridity of the fetishes themselves, the abstract calligraphy and the kiln-fired object, was mollified by prioritizing the physical embodiment in ink and clay of the abstract properties of moji-sei and vesselhood.

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Chapter 4

Isamu Noguchi: Places of Affiliation a n d Disaffiliation

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he Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was an enormously important figure in interactions between the visual arts of Japan and the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Hence he has made several

important appearances in the previous two chapters. His interlocutory role in the interface

between the art of the United States and that of Japan was pivotal in the experience of native-alien difference for Hasegawa Saburo, Morita Shiryu, Yagi Kazuo, and to a lesser extent Franz Kline. But Noguchi merits attention not simply for his value as a conduit between national contexts of art. The previous two chapters have dealt with individuals for whom the propositions of artistic nationalism described in Chapter 1 had a more or less stable reference. The encounter of the border between these two nations was a profound and, in most cases, formative experience for each of these artists. But their crossings into what they approached as foreign culture were followed by return journeys to what they regarded as home culture. These artists and their critics wrestled with such questions as how their nation should be represented in their art, but discussions surrounding the work of Noguchi were often troubled by ambiguities regarding which national identity was more fundamental. His unique capacity to imagine both nations as home challenges the notion of artistic nationalism and articulates its particular flexibility and strength. My strategy for investigating Noguchi's fluctuating sense of home will be to examine specific local places where he encountered and proposed various models of national culture. Noguchi was a prolific designer of places; his repertoire included gardens, interiors, public plazas, stage sets, playgrounds, outdoor monuments, and fountains. This chapter focuses on a group of his place designs from the early postwar years—an unrealized plan for a cenotaph to the nuclear dead in Hiroshima (1952), a residence for himself in Kita Kamakura (1952), a garden for UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1958), and a water garden IIO

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for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York (1964). Each of these places was a focus of images of homeland, and therefore each became the object of debates of inclusion and exclusion involving various individuals and groups. Noguchi's itinerary from Hiroshima and Kita Kamakura in the early 1950s to Paris in the late 1950s and New York in the early 1960s traces a transformation of his position from an aspiring but frustrated designer of places in Japan to an accomplished designer of places outside of Japan that incorporated components from or associated with Japan. Thus various manifestations of "the Japanese earth," a theme examined in connection with Yagi Kazuo's pottery, become exportable ingredients for place making in Paris and New York in Noguchi's hands. But I would like to precede the analysis of Noguchi's place designs with a framework for conceptualizing Noguchi's relationship to the Japanese and American nations. Changing Places, Changing Skin

"I'm changing my skin all the time," declared the sixty-four-year-old Noguchi in 1968 while preparing a major retrospective exhibition of his work. "In fact, by the time I have my show, I'll have disappeared, so to speak—involved in some other thing entirely."1 In this affirmation of chameleon-like changeability the operative ideal is protean versatility of an artistic kind. But the artist's metaphors of "changing skin" and "disappearance" evoke questions of identity. An oscillation between American and Japanese cultural identities is woven throughout the narrative of Noguchi's career and art as he rendered it in numerous statements and as it was reinforced by many observers. With repetition, the story of Noguchi's parents' relationship and his youth becomes a fable of biculturalism. 2 Leonie Gilmour, Noguchi's mother, was an American of Scotch and Native American background educated at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. His father, Noguchi Yonejiro, was a Japanese poet who began his career at a young age writing and publishing in the English language in the United States and England. Leonie served as a copyeditor for Yonejiro's English writings. 3 Stirred by patriotic sentiments on hearing news of the Russo-Japanese War, Yonejiro returned to Japan before the second birthday of his son Isamu in 1905. The following year Leonie brought Isamu to Japan, but Yonejiro soon married a Japanese woman, began a new family, and embarked on a career as a scholar and writer notable for his extreme Japanese nationalism. Nevertheless, Leonie remained in Japan and raised Isamu there as a single parent until he was thirteen years old, when she decided that he should continue his education in the United States and sent him off by himself to a boarding school in the Midwest. After her son had spent five years on his own in the United States, Noguchi's mother returned from Japan and rejoined Isamu in New York City. At this point, in 1923, the youthful Noguchi resolved to be an artist: I was at this time still known as Isamu Gilmour, and I had become completely acclimatized as an American. There was no hint of Japan about me. Yet when I

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finally became conscious that I was to be a sculptor, I decided almost involuntarily to change my name [to Isamu Noguchi], adopting one that perhaps I had no right to. I could see my mother's consternation, but she did not object, helping me rather in my travail, away from her, toward Japan, and the way that I had chosen. 4

Thus, Noguchi entered into his artistic identity at the outset of his career through a disturbing reorientation of his national identity. Perhaps it is not surprising that Noguchi was frequently motivated by a desire to obtain a creative resolution of this polarity: "I'm the fusion of two worlds, the East and the West, and yet I hope to reflect more than both." 5 As seen in the preceding chapters, the will to combine aspects of Japanese and American culture, or homologously imagined supranational cultures of East and West, was typically accompanied by a promotion of one party at the expense of the other. The uneven deployment of such terms as "East-West fusion" would be a leitmotif in the reception of Noguchi's work. The conjunction of cultures in Noguchi's work resonated with an ongoing preoccupation in Japanese society with the resolution of East and West, regarded as antipodal terms for cultures and races. Among the many Japanese intellectuals who addressed this issue was the poet Oka Makoto, writing in the early 1970s about modern Japanese culture. Westernization since the Meiji period, he claimed, had produced a "rupture" (danzetsu) that could be traced throughout modern Japanese culture. For example, the practice of painting since the Meiji period had been split into nihonga and yoga, and similar contrastive pairings of nominally indigenous and Western artistic practices characterized modern Japanese theater, music, and literature. Furthermore, he maintained, this two-tier indigenous-foreign structure was operative in the everyday lifestyle of Japanese people. For Oka this situation constituted an "experiment of crossbreeding species" (ishu kohaijikken) across a "painful schism" (kutsu ni michita bunretsu). Carrying this biological metaphor further, he declared: "If you crossbreed a horse and a donkey, a mule is born. But this child of crossbreeding cannot procreate. The history of modern Japanese thought, culture, and art shows the foreboding of the misery of the mule. But at the same time it has continuously struggled to demonstrate that it can overcome the mule's fate and give birth to a healthy child."6 Oka's notion of the "healthy child" (kenko na kodomo) of crossbreeding aptly characterizes the terms of the admiration of Noguchi by individuals he encountered in Japan in the early 1950s such as Hasegawa Saburo. They saw his art as American and modern, but he also seemed to them to demonstrate a persuasive expression of aspects of Japanese identity. For Hasegawa, the fact that one of Noguchi's parents was a Japanese poet and the other was a European American seemed to authenticate his accomplishment of a harmonious blending of cultures. Similarly, in the passage cited in the previous chapter, Yagi Kazuo declared that Noguchi's "life as an American has washed away the moist Japanese character that also flows in his blood and has nourished only the bright, open side of his Japanese disposition."7

Isamu Noguchi |

The enthusiasm of Yagi for Noguchi's apparent accomplishment of a laudable expression of both the Japanese and the American poles of his identity was typical of the views of numerous other artists, architects, and designers who befriended him in Japan in the early 1950s. Surely, this manner of appreciation for Noguchi in the Japanese art community was related to the historical context of a time when Japanese sovereignty rested in the hands of Douglas MacArthur. As one of Noguchi's friends would later recall, "It was bleak after the war. Then came Isamu, half-Japanese, half-foreign—everything changed."8 An abiding interest in racial identity was an important component of Noguchi's reception in the United States as well as in Japan. In a 1946 article that was one of the earliest texts to consider Noguchi's work comprehensively, Thomas Hess admired him as one who "fashioned a conscience for a greater race than either of his own, humanity... fused in his art the East and the West as they were fused in his body." 9 And in the late 1970s, when Noguchi's efforts were being crowned with an eminent status in the American art world, in the first monograph on Noguchi (other than exhibition catalogues), Sam Hunter pronounced the sculptor "a citizen of the world, on a plane beyond nationality [ w h o ] . . . managed to combine in triumphant synthesis important features of both Eastern and Western tradition." 10 But for Hunter, Noguchi's synthesis favored the nation indicated by the latter term: "The sculptural resolution of his conflicts," he continued, "became the trademark of a unique sensibility in American art." Malign racial characterizations of Noguchi's biracial identity were also commonplace. In his generation, miscegenation was often derided as "a disharmony that occurs when incompatible traits from different races are combined in hybrid individuals." 11 For most of Noguchi's lifetime, almost every state in the United States had an antimiscegenation statute prohibiting marriage between individuals of the "white" race and persons of any other origin. In California, where Noguchi was born in 1904, the first such law was enacted in 1850, and a bill was approved as late as 1946 prohibiting the marriage of "a white person with a Negro, Mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race." Such laws were intended to protect "white racial purity." 12 Antimiscegenation might seem irrelevant to art criticism, but in 1935 the art critic Henry McBride, one of the foremost American champions of early modernism, expressed his displeasure with Noguchi's art by deriding him as a "wily . . . semioriental sculptor." 13 And Noguchi experienced similar racism in Japan as well. Pondering the difficulties of his youth in his autobiography, Noguchi supposed that his mother's decision to send him away from Japan at age thirteen to a boarding school in the United States was motivated by her concern for "the unfortunate situation of children of mixed blood growing up in the Japan of those days—half in and half out." 14 In 1996 a longtime associate of Noguchi in Japan reflected, "Now the word 'half (haafu) is used, but in the past the word crossbreed' (ainoko) was used and he was tormented horribly. I think that he could never forgive Japanese people for that. He really was tormented." 15

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The creative process has long been likened to procreation and artists' biographers have often described works of art as though they were somehow the artist's "child." 16 Such metaphors naturalize the transfer of qualities assumed to inhere in the artist's race to the work of art. In Noguchi's case, the legacy of nineteenth-century race theory played a subtle but critical role in this transfer; "East" and "West" were racial and civilizational terms arrayed as extreme opposites in the spectrum of humanity. So vast was the distance regarded as separating them that individuals whose lives spanned these poles, such as Asian immigrants in the United States, were represented with images of schizophrenia. 17 Perhaps this history explains why Noguchi's admirers have sometimes been tempted to resolve his biculturalism in favor of one nation or the other. But one cannot generalize his entire career spanning over five decades with statements such as "Japan never left his mind." 18 And by the same token, as I will discuss, there is reason to doubt that Noguchi's views of the war between his two nations were necessarily commensurate with "an American point of view." 19 Noguchi's personal sense of affiliation was conflicted and shifted with some frequency during his career; at times it was closer to Japan, at times America, and sometimes elsewhere. Moreover, his oeuvre was in many ways a volley of contrasts rather than stylistically or thematically consistent. Not only did his ambit include the United States and Japan (and other nations), but it also included sculpture (in a diversity of media such as magnesite, zinc, stainless steel, clay, bronze, wood, and stone) and sustained forays into fields of design such as stage sets, mass-produced lighting fixtures, not to mention fountains, interiors, plazas, parks, and playgrounds. Hence, the strain, for example, in the rhetoric of a supportive journalist trying to sustain the narrative of triumphant synthesis in 1978: "The man and his art are . . . almost impossible to classify or to pin down. They project opposing qualities: solitude and charm, order and explosiveness, harmony and dissonance, affirmation and despair." This apparent classificatory impossibility is glossed as an obstacle to the proper understanding of Noguchi's work, which, the journalist predicts, shall be overcome by a forthcoming retrospective exhibition. This exhibition promises to be a felicitous display of Noguchi's "crossbreeding" of diverse media, revealing the "profound intellectual and stylistic consistency" and "overriding sensibility that unites the apparently disparate parts."20 In his own comments, Noguchi was often but not always skeptical of attempts to define his work in terms of some "overriding sensibility." He was speaking of an earlier retrospective when he made the remark quoted earlier, about "changing skin." 21 Abstract Expressionism was arguably the most important art movement to Noguchi's later artistic development, and although he was aloof from many of its values, his career brought him into repeated contact with its members and their work. 22 Among the highest virtues in this milieu was that of the pronounced individuality of the artist. Indeed, the pervasiveness of abstraction removed conventional "subject matter" from the culture of painting, and, in Michael Leja's words, "The 'subjects of the artist' were the artists as subjects." 23

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Sometimes the esteem for an artist's "strong" individualistic statement encouraged a univocality of expression. Many artists developed easily recognized "signature styles," lending a high degree of homogeneity to their oeuvres. For example, almost every painting by Mark Rothko after 1949 was a variation on the theme of two to four vertically stacked rectangular

Figure 2 5 . Isamu

fields of color with indistinct edges. Any painting within this family can instantly be recog-

Noguchi. Deepening

nized as "a Rothko" or an imitation thereof.

Knowledge. 1969.

Thus, when Rothko walked through an exhibition of Isamu Noguchi's work, he reportedly vented his disapproval with the comment, "Too many images, too many images."

24

Basalt. 91 % x 28 x 27 in. Background: Break-

Noguchi, in contrast, explaining his own refusal to limit himself to any single material, style,

through Capestrano. 1982.

or technique, suggested that "if Mark Rothko hadn't been tied to his brush, or whatever he

Basalt. 73 x 29 x 25 in.

happened to use, he could have had a new life and started all over again." 25 At one point

Photograph by Shigeo

Noguchi distanced himself from the concept of style itself as "a form of inhibition,"

Anzai. The Isamu

declaring, "The more I change, the more I'm me, the new me of that new time." 26 Indeed,

Noguchi Foundation,

in contrast with the consistent sensibility of Rothko's oeuvre, that of Noguchi is character-

Long Island City.

ized by a plurality of images, which was not simply a matter of style and medium. Although Noguchi's autobiography published in 1968 was titled A Sculptor's World, it turns out that "A Sculptor's World" is but one chapter alongside "Theater" and "Into Living," while the artist's narrative leads the reader through an ever-changing sequence of sharply contrasting cultural contexts. The singular "world" of the title notwithstanding, the reader may well receive the impression that Noguchi's life was a plurality of worlds. In this respect, Noguchi poses a striking contrast not only to the ideals of Abstract Expressionism, but also to those of the Japanese artists considered in the previous chapter who were firmly ensconced in their media-defined art worlds, which were concentrically positioned within their nations. Late in his career, Noguchi did indeed develop a more consistent sculptural style in the medium of granite and basalt boulders scored or fractured by powerful tools without preplanned design. But this style began to emerge only in the late 1960s, when the artist was in his sixties, with works such as Deepening Knowledge (Figure 25). To read such a work as "Eastern" for its "attitude towards un-

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formed nature" and "Western" for its "scale and as a freestanding work of art" and to suggest that it illustrates Noguchi's "vision of stone as symbolic and ceremonial [which was] a consistent theme throughout his work" is to edit a complex career according to a superficial East-West binary on the strength of an imagery accomplished late in life. 27 The charismatic futurologist and inventor Buckminster Fuller, who was Noguchi's close friend for decades, took a different view of the artist. Fuller's outlook was the very antithesis of the romantic view of timeless nature, tradition, and national character sometimes associated with Noguchi's late monumental stone sculpture. In Noguchi's words, Fuller "thought all our ills stemmed from an accumulation of bad habits and weighty possessions."28 Fuller advocated space-age technologies, the rationalization of life, and global and even antinational problem solving. In his enthusiastic foreword to Noguchi's 1968 autobiography, Fuller ignored Noguchi's heavy stone sculpture and wrote instead about Noguchi's pioneering use of shiny reflective metals and his lifestyle of incessant traveling: "He has to-and-froed in his great back and front yards whose eastward and westward extensions finally merged to encircle the earth." 29 Fuller was by no means above racially deterministic thinking and indeed supposed that "the remote and complex cross-breeding of Noguchi's European-Asiatic-American genes defied his conscious urge to settle down." But Fuller believed that national borders were an anachronistic hindrance to grasping the fundamental relationship between human beings, or "Earthians," as he called them, and their "spaceship earth"—an understanding that he felt was crucial to human survival. And he imagined that Noguchi held a significant place in the evolution toward a global society, for despite Noguchi's "deep yearning for the security of'belonging,'" Fuller wrote, it was "biologically and intellectually impossible for him to escape his fate of being a founding member of an omni-crossbred world society."30 Thus, Fuller envisioned his friend in terms of a destiny determined by his mixed-race heritage. The view that Noguchi's late stone sculptures were "his crowning sculptural achievement" in which he "completed the modernist project of his early years in a unique synthesis of the art of Asia and the West" has been argued most capably by Bruce Altshuler. 31 This assessment is by no means a falsification of Noguchi's career, but it relies on the teleology of biographic narrative that proceeds toward a foreordained culmination. It thus tends to marginalize earlier experiences as mere stages in the process of artistic maturation. As Noguchi himself argued at one point, "It's not necessarily true that you're becoming more and more yourself.... To break away is very important." 32 In less subtle hands, the biographical narrative allows readers to forget, for example, that Noguchi was "Bucky's friend." In fact, at one point in his life, Noguchi was so interested in metal and so disinterested in generating the appearance of an "earthy" sort of nature that he proposed covering a twomile segment of land between two highways entirely in anodized aluminum. 33 Views that pose Noguchi's art as an ideal East-West synthesis risk determining the character of his art through presumptions that are ultimately grounded on race. The com-

Isamu

plexity of Noguchi's career can better be appreciated if approached as an itinerary through a scattered range of places rather than a teleological synthesis. As Fuller noted, Noguchi was an inveterate traveler. When questioned about his forthcoming schedule, he could outline an itinerary between widely scattered sites of sculptural production and installation. One journalist found him in the spring of 1968 working in Kagawa Prefecture on the remote island of Shikoku on a project destined for Seattle and quoted Noguchi's travel plans: "Next I go to Gifu Prefecture to work on some lantern designs. Then in mid-June I return to New York to visit my exhibition there. After that, I go to Italy to work on some sculpture. In the fall, I'm scheduled to work on a large fountain for MIT." 34 Thus, Martin Friedman, the curator of Noguchi's 1978 retrospective, wrote, "With Noguchi, you get the feeling of being in many places at once." 35 But this mobility need not be equated with "operating] in a cultural limbo" if this is to be taken as a condition that was constant throughout his career. Nor is it necessary to string all of Noguchi's place designs together on generalizations such as "all of his forms, in their various manifestations and combinations, are, fundamentally, expressive of life processes." 36 Shifting attention from Noguchi's presumed character to the places that defined the itinerary of his career entails a focus on the different ways in which he invested himself in particular cultural locales, each sedimented with various national and other symbolic associations through historical processes in which Noguchi was a participant. In each of these encounters, he engaged himself with what Rob Shields calls the "place-images" that shape specific spaces through stereotyping, labeling, and oversimplification and are disseminated through various media to produce "place-myths." 37 Considering Noguchi as a maker of places puts his work in a different light than does regarding him as a "sculptor of space." In this contrast, "space," on the one hand, is the formal and generic entity suggested by such terms as "modern space," "Japanese space," or "urban space." "Place," on the other hand, evokes the specific localized matrix of rituals of social identification evoked by images such as the White House lawn, grandfather's attic, and the luggage pickup area at Narita Airport. Rather than attempting to ascertain the formal qualities of "Noguchi space," I shall investigate the different identities that emerged as a consequence of his variable creative investments in a range of specific places. Rather than presuming Noguchi to be some "East-West fusion of art and body," I shall trace his itinerary of changing places and "changing skin." Hiroshima: To Build a Nation In 1952 Isamu Noguchi boldly declared: "I do not just want to make s c u l p t u r e . . . . I want to build a nation." 38 Never previously and never again in the six decades of his career did he assume so central a role in contemporary Japanese circles of art and design as he did during the final years of the U.S. Occupation. Noguchi would continue returning to Japan throughout the rest of his career, but never again would he be showered so profusely with entreaties for exhibitions, commissions, collaborations, interviews, publications, and friend-

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ship as he was in the early 1950s. No one could be unaffected by such an outpouring of warmth, and Noguchi grandly imagined himself as an artistic nation builder, as the quotation above suggests. The site of human destruction of unprecedented scale, Hiroshima was one of the most significant symbolic places of the war. Noguchi's bid to design a permanent cenotaph here for the victims of the atomic bomb was perhaps his most ambitious placedesign initiative in Japan at this time. Noguchi's cenotaph design represented an attempt to forge an emblem of modern Japanese culture through contemplation of the Japanese past. And yet, no matter how highly one may evaluate his design for its aesthetic power, spatial subtlety, craftsmanship, or ingenious melding of tradition and modernity, such considerations do not change the fact that the majority of the Japanese people who recorded views about this place design in the 1950s failed to see in it any reflection of their own real or desired sense of Japanese identity. Moreover, the rejection of Noguchi's design proposal spelled the defeat of his personal desire to create a place of affiliation on this symbolic site of the conflict between his parents' nations. Many of Noguchi's views regarding both the making of places in general and the significance of Hiroshima in particular took form long before his first visit to Hiroshima, so I must digress here to earlier experiences that conditioned his work at Hiroshima. Noguchi's visit to Japan in 1950 was his first since 1931, when he had spent several months visiting his father and creating his first group of ceramic sculptures. The work Noguchi did in New York over the next two decades bears traces of nostalgic memories of Japan from his childhood years in Japan from ages two to thirteen and the 1931 trip. Nevertheless, with some exceptions, the traces of "Japan" in his sculpture and design during these years were hermetic. That is to say, they were not overtly expressed, for example, by the use of Japanese titles or conspicuously Japanese motifs. Some writers have discerned the memory of Zen temple gardens in the spareness of stage set designs such as Frontier of 1935 and proposals for large earthworks such as Play Mountain and Monument to a Plow of 1933, but Noguchi maintained that these works were intended to evoke his "wish to belong to America." 39 It was more difficult, however, for Isamu Noguchi to "belong to America" than for his European American colleagues in the New York art world. These visionary place designs in which Noguchi expressed his desire for national belonging had earned him the slurs "wily" and "semioriental" from a prominent art critic. Noguchi's expressionistic bronze image of a contorted corpse hanging by its neck, which was his contribution to an exhibition sponsored by the NAACP to oppose the wave of lynchings that was sweeping the South, was dismissed by the same critic as "just a little Japanese mistake."40 After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when Japanese American citizens were incarcerated on account of their race, Noguchi voluntarily entered one of the official internment camps. Since one of his parents was a European American and since he resided on the East Coast, Noguchi was under no obligation to enter a camp. He did so out of a sense of solidarity with Japanese Americans on the West Coast, which led him to hope that among them he would find "some

Isamu Noguchi |

place where I might fit into the fight for freedom." 41 But the nisei he lived with in the camp in Poston, Arizona, tended to be conservative and provincial, and Noguchi the New York artist found himself "despondent for lack of companionship." His request for release from the camp was finally granted by the War Relocation Authority not because his entry had been voluntary in the first place, but because of his mixed parentage. After seven months in the camp, Noguchi resumed his place in the New York art world, and by the late 1940s he was a well-respected figure in this milieu. He had studied in his youth with Brancusi, arguably one of the most important sculptors of the century; he was represented by an important gallery; and he had close friendships with prominent individuals such as Arshile Gorky and Martha Graham. Nevertheless, he was out of step with Abstract Expressionism as it was developing at this time. Noguchi's divergence from this New York avant-garde would propel him on the particular career of place making investigated in this chapter. Greenberg was by no means the only proponent of Abstract Expressionism, but he was among the most influential voices in this context, and the contrast between his thinking and that of Noguchi gives a clearer sense of the uniqueness of Noguchi's position vis-à-vis his New York art world. In 1949 Greenberg had listed Noguchi in eleventh place among American sculptors he regarded as having a chance "to contribute something ambitious, serious and original." But he sniped at the biomorphic stone sculptures Noguchi exhibited at this time for their "miniature grace on a large scale."42 Greenberg laid down the gauntlet with the withering questions: "Where is strength? Where are profundity and originality?" The art critic staked his hopes for American sculpture on the welded steel abstractions of David Smith, whom he dubbed "one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century

anywhere"43

In several short essays of 1949, Noguchi outlined a direction for modern sculpture that differed dramatically from the values for which Greenberg championed David Smith.44 The gap between Noguchi's views and those of Greenberg pivoted on two issues: the relationship between art and society, and the relationship among the different media of art. On the first point, Greenberg argued that the advance of culture in the modern period rested on an unavoidable divorce of the avant-garde from the lamentable kitsch of mass culture. Noguchi, however, believed that art must address the larger society in a more positive way by serving the purpose of "public enjoyment." Indeed, he felt that the public should be a primary consideration in "the creation and existence of a piece of sculpture." Noguchi stressed, "Without this purpose the very meaning of sculpture is in question."45 At quite the other extreme, David Smith scorned the public: " [The artist] sees that the great public is beyond his hope. Like Pavlov's dog, they are trained to look only when the bell rings. He needs the public on his terms. They have no need of him." 46 Noguchi's belief that contemporary art suffered from a breakdown of the relationship between "artists and society" led him to advocate a broadening of the field of sculpture itself. This position was anathema to Greenberg, who demanded that the various arts—painting,

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sculpture, literature, music—must be reduced to "the literal essence of their medium" in order to "communicate that sense of concretely felt, irreducible experience in which our sensibility finds its fundamental certainty."47 Noguchi was diametrically opposed to this view. He called for "a reintegration of the arts toward some purposeful social e n d . . . in order to enlarge the present outlet permitted by our limiting categories of architects, painters, sculptors and landscapists."48 In his expansion of the artist's proper purview from the solitary act of creation sequestered in the private studio to an unlimited array of social contexts, Noguchi maintained that "any change in the emotional climate of our environment becomes a matter of artistic consideration." 49 "Our reaction to physical environment may be represented as a series of hazy but continuous aesthetic judgments. Such judgments affect even the control of our emotions, bringing order out of chaos, a myth out of the world, a sense of belonging out of our loneliness."50 In other words, to use the terms introduced earlier, Noguchi regarded the sculptor's mission as one of carving meaningful "places" out of abstract "space." But Noguchi's sentiments in the early postwar years also differed sharply from those of Greenberg in another respect. While Greenberg progressively escalated his appraisal of American art relative to that of Europe, Noguchi found himself deeply demoralized in the very community where Greenberg saw such exciting promise and finally exiled himself from it for an extended period of time. In part, Noguchi's disenchantment was a reaction to the nuclear bombing of his father's nation by his mother's nation. A photograph remains of a face molded in an ephemeral sand relief in which Noguchi expressed these sentiments in 1947, a time when many Americans were reading John Hersey's account of the human suffering at Hiroshima (Figure 26). 51 The eyes are like nipples, the nose a sharp, elongated pyramid, the forehead a thick bar, and the O-shaped mouth seems suspended in a faint cry. Noguchi fancied this relief as the model for a colossal earthwork and called it Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars. His first title, however, was Memorial to Man, and he reportedly created it with thoughts of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and as a vision of the end of human life on the earth when the only imaginable viewpoint would be outside the planet. 52 This work defied the goal that Noguchi would set for himself shortly thereafter of creating "a sense of belonging out of our loneliness." Indeed it is an extraordinary apocalyptic vision of placelessness. In 1948 he was reportedly working on another project on the theme of "the downfall of humanity." 53 This was the year of the tragic suicide of Noguchi's close friend the Abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky, and Noguchi was later to recall, "My depression was increased by the ever-present menace of atomic annihilation." 54 A more generalized disillusionment with modernity motivated the reform of sculpture Noguchi advocated in 1949. He identified a "moral crisis" and attributed it to the "blight of industrialism," "concepts of power," and "specialization." "Creativity," he maintained, "has become so neglected as to jeopardize [the individual's] very survival." 55 Noguchi's means of escape from this malaise was to leave New York for over a year and

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a half to journey around the world in search of "the temple sculpture of the past" in prehistoric and ancient places such as Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, and Angkor Wat. In such places he expected to discover that which modern art failed to provide, namely, "the forms, communal, emotional, and mystic in character [that] fulfill their purpose." 56 Thus, at the historical

moment

when

Greenberg announced that "the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the US, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power," 57 Noguchi turned his back on the American art world. When Noguchi left New York, Japan was by no means his primary destination. Disturbing memories of his 1931 visit and uncertainty about the effect of the war on Japanese people's feelings toward him led him to approach his "final stop" one year after his departure from New York with "trepidation." 58 Figure 2 6 . Isamu How great was my delight, therefore, to find it altogether different. War had indeed

Noguchi. Sculpture to

improved my own relationship to the Japanese people in the most startling manner.

Be Seen from Mars. 1947.

Where there had been a certain reserve before, there was now open friendliness.

Model in sand. 12 x 12 in.

Indeed, nowhere have I experienced such spontaneous good will expressed between

Unrealized. Photograph

all people as there in Japan in the spring of 1950.59

by Soichi Sunami. Courtesy of The Isamu

Stimulated by this enthusiasm, Noguchi pursued an energetic schedule of activities in Japan in 1950, including the dialogue with Hasegawa Saburö regarding Japanese tradition considered in Chapter 2. Another individual Noguchi met soon after his arrival was Tange Kenzö, perhaps the most influential architect in early postwar Japan. Tange was then working on a large project for Hiroshima. The city center precinct that was devastated by nuclear

Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

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Figure 27. Isamu

destruction was to be completely rebuilt as a symbolic site. Noguchi took it upon himself

Noguchi. Model for Bell

to design a tower for Tange's complex and created a model consisting of clay objects on a

Tower for Hiroshima.

scaffolding-like frame of dowels (Figure 27). This armature appears to be casually

1950. White terra cotta in

engineered: a number of poles rise vertically from the earth and are loosely connected by

wood frame. Lost. Height

a network of crossbars mounted at various angles to create a rather precarious effect. The

of model: 503/s in. Pro-

structure is hung with a solar image at the top and four clay bells. One of these bells sug-

posed height of tower:

gests the prehistoric bronze forms (dotaku) found at Yayoi period sites in Japan. Another

70 feet. © Kevin Noble.

suggests the sort of bronze bell that might be found at a Buddhist temple, while the

The Isamu Noguchi

remaining two bells are deformed as though to defy historical prototypes.

Foundation, Long Island City, New York.

Whether because of these tower models or otherwise, Tange agreed to Noguchi's participation in the Hiroshima Peace Park, and a year later the architect and the sculptor traveled to Hiroshima together to examine the site. The bell towers had been designed and created in Tokyo before Noguchi experienced Hiroshima at first hand. When he arrived in Hiroshima in the spring of 1951, construction had barely begun on Tange's Peace Park, and evidence of the horrible atomic destruction remained very much apparent. According to one reporter's account of the occasion, Noguchi listened to Tange's energetic description of what was to come but was much saddened by the sacrifice that the new plan would require from the poor local people then living in rough barracks on the site of construction. 60 When Noguchi was invited to join a panel discussion about the significance of Hiroshima, he replied that he did not have the courage to talk about Utopian Hiroshima amidst the ruins and preferred to hold the discussion outside the city. When they convened at a quiet seaside restaurant nearby, Noguchi claimed Hiroshima to be "the most modern city in the world," suggesting that the tabula rasa of the destruction permitted the construction of an unusually progressive new city. 61 Indeed, Noguchi's design for Hiroshima was not to be a direct response to what he saw and felt at the site, but rather his conceptualization of what he felt was its broader cosmological significance. Tange would not ask Noguchi to design a bell tower for the Hiroshima Peace Park, but rather to design the railings of two bridges and a cenotaph for the commemoration of those who died in the atomic blast. Tange's plan was organized along a central axis bisecting the triangular area of park grounds bounded by the two branches of a diverging river. To be aligned

Isamu

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on this axis were Tange's own Memorial Museum, the cenotaph, and the ruinous remains of the dome of the Industrial Exposition Hall across the river. The base of this triangle was formed by Peace Boulevard, a broad avenue carrying traffic over both waterways across the bridges for which Noguchi's railings were destined. The bridges themselves had been designed and constructed already: it remained simply to provide railings for the safety of pedestrians and automobiles. But the railings also had the function of signaling the entrances to this symbolic precinct. Noguchi's clay models for the bridge railings were actually realized in concrete and remain in place today. He decided on a design that would formally link the two bridges and at the same time suggest a thematic distinction between them (Figure 28). As realized, the bridge railings are characterized by the strong plastic repetition of vertical supports strung rhythmically along continuous horizontal elements, and both sets of railings rise dramatically into the air with grand gestures at their terminals. The one bridge has single rounded hand boards running uninterruptedly across the bridge to leap into the sky and support large hemispherical finials. This bridge Noguchi called "Tsukuru," meaning "to build." The railings of the second bridge, however, were handled as a set of two thick tubes threaded through stocky curved posts square in section. At each end, one of these posts sprouts higher than its peers

Figure 2 8 . Isamu

to create a finlike shape. This bridge Noguchi called "Yuku," meaning "to depart."

Noguchi. To Build

Noguchi regarded the hemispherical finials of the first bridge's railings as emblems of

(Tsukuru). 1951-1952.

the rising sun, and the verb "to build" in his title was intended to denote life. Opposite them,

Railing of bridge at

in the west where the sun sets, the more severe finials of the other bridge were likened to a

Hiroshima Peace Park.

boat, and the theme of "departing" was intended to convey ominous eschatological significance: "Having built, we die (through holocaust?)."

62

The metaphor of the solar cycle

is absorbed through a ritual procession into the bleak cosmology proposed by the modern possibility of nuclear Armageddon. This allegory was fashioned in a style that was current in international design circles in the early postwar period. Prewar architects such as the German expressionists had started to exploit the lyrical potential of concrete, and architects of Noguchi's generation were to make it seem to take to the air. The runway effect of Noguchi's sleek continuous concrete belts and their breathtaking liftoff is at home among works of the late 1950s and 1960s such as Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, Jorn Utson's Sydney Opera House, and Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal. But Tange's account of this design suggests that Japanese tradition was also an important reference in its conception. The architect wrote that he and Noguchi shared a fondness

Concrete. Courtesy of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

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for the ancient forms of Ise Shrine and recalled that his first thought on seeing Noguchi's maquettes for the railings was "the feeling of Ise."63 Thus, the bridge designs have been esteemed by Tange's biographer for effecting a union of elements thought to "express the spirit of the modern age" with those thought to "reflect traditional Japanese design."64 But more than the bridge railings, it was the cenotaph at the heart of the whole Peace Park that really excited Noguchi. Tange would remember how Noguchi came to his office to work up a model for the cenotaph and, "like a possessed man, began to fight with the clay."65 This direct physical engagement with the earth is a theme that would characterize Noguchi's place-making efforts at other sites, but at Hiroshima it was expressed in the semisubterranean emplacement of the structure rather than in a form with the textures and material sensibilities of the clay used for the maquette. An enigmatic photo collage remains of the plaster model that Noguchi proposed for the cenotaph (Figure 29). The unrealized monument was to be a parabolic arch with legs inflated to great girth and sunk deep in the earth. The smooth contours of the tip of the parabola would rise above grade, but the lowering of the cut of the arch to a minimal underpass would intensify the sense of submission to gravity and articulate a great domelike weight above. The contours of this outcropping would suggest that it was but the excrescence of a form originating deep below, and a subterranean presence was intimated by light that was to radiate in the evening from an aperture in the ground beneath the arch. One would have been able to descend a staircase into a dim chamber between the massive legs of the arch. Daylight would filter in through the aperture beneath the arch and illuminate the top of a granite box mounted between the columnar legs. This box would serve as a repository for the names of the nuclear dead. Though the proposed monument was striking for the strong visual unity of its design, a broad range of allusions were absorbed into its form. Noguchi had submitted an unsuccessful proposal to a competition for the Jefferson Memorial Park in St. Louis, 66 and the famous arch of Eero Saarinen's winning proposal is one conspicuous precedent for his Hiroshima arch. But while Saarinen's gleaming metal arch seems to leap through the sky, Noguchi configured the modern engineering aesthetic of parabolic form to a weighty semisubterranean granite structure. He imagined the thrust of this bulky hull toward the sky in tension with the "ominous weight" of the "mass of black granite," giving the impression of a great "concentration of energies." 67 Alignment with the Nuclear Dome would have ensured that it would call to mind the destructive potential of nuclear science. But the same monument that would have addressed the horror of nuclear death would also have provided an allegory of hope and regeneration. Noguchi envisioned the sanctum sanctorum enshrining the names of the dead as "a cave beneath the earth (to which we all return), it was to be the place of solace to the bereaved—suggestive still further of the womb of generations who would in time replace the dead."68 Rebirth was to be figured by placing the dead in a womb. If the chamber below was to signify a womb, the massive legs of the arch that enclosed this space would be maternal thighs. This implication is made explicit by a group of small

Figure 2 9 . Isamu Noguchi. Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima. 1952. Unrealized. Photographic collage of plaster model. Lost. Proposed height above ground: 20 feet. Courtesy of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

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that Noguchi constructed the following year. He fashioned short coils of clay into

Noguchi. Mother Goddess

loops or miniature arches. Some were titled Mother Goddess; a single loop of clay served as

No. 1.1952. Earthenware.

both torso and legs, while the head, breasts, arms, and vulva were indicated by tiny bits of

Collection unknown.

appended clay (Figure 30). These casually constructed figures appear to be caricatures of

Photograph by Isamu

the prehistoric female images found in many parts of the world, including the Jomon

Noguchi. Courtesy of

figurines

found in Japan, which are commonly regarded as fertility deities. Noguchi's clay

The Isamu Noguchi

studies invite the decoding of a similar fertility goddess motif in the monumental mani-

Foundation, Inc.

festation of the same bipedal arch in the Hiroshima cenotaph design. In his experimental ceramic studies based on the simple loop of clay, Noguchi metamorphosed the arch of the female form into various permutations of beads—or the beads may have come first—some of which seem to wiggle against one another like primitive animals in intercourse (Figure 31). This meditation on the beginning of life associates Noguchi's project with such Surrealist imagery as Wassily Kandinsky's paintings of the 1930s that suggest microscopic organisms. Yet here this modern theme is overlaid with a parallel dredged from the Japanese past. Noguchi's beads tend to have curled tails like tadpoles, and this feature suggests comparison to magatama, commashaped beads from prehistoric Japan. The sequence of clay studies of 1952 demonstrates plainly the idea of a metamorphosis from the bead to the arched thighs of the mother goddess. Thus, the magatama, which according to common speculation were fertility beads, appear to have served Noguchi as a kind of metaphoric germ cell from which the ponderous arch developed in his hands. Noguchi claimed that the symbolism of his cenotaph design derived from haniwa, the pottery models from prehistoric Japanese tombs. 69 The haniwa type that most closely recalls Noguchi's Hiroshima design has a roof contour roughly paralleling that of Noguchi's parabolic arch. But more interesting than this vague formal resemblance is a poetic resonance between haniwa and Noguchi's project. Archaeologists have not been

I sa m u Nog uch i |

f27

able to ascertain conclusively what haniwa meant in the society that produced them, but

Figure 3 1 . Isamu

speculation has focused on their function as representations of that which the deceased

Noguchi. Clay Studies.

would find useful in the afterlife—warriors, shamanesses, horses, shields, as well as archi-

1952. Earthenware.

tectural models. In this line of reasoning, haniwa were objects of this world transmuted into

Present whereabouts

a metaphysical state of utility for the next. Thus, Noguchi's design would seem to invoke

unknown.

the ancient Japanese allegorical architecture of immortality as a way to reconstrue the dead of Hiroshima into a symbol of hope. Noguchi's comment that "Hiroshima is probably the most modern city in the world" implied that the destruction had cleared the blinders of convention to enable a bold modernity founded on primitive universals. 70 Such Jungian thought was a vogue in Noguchi's New York milieu in the 1940s, and Noguchi personally knew three of its most important New York proponents. 71 The allusions embedded in Noguchi's cenotaph design coalesce into a powerful iconographic program that can be likened to a Jungian transformational symbol. Indeed, the cenotaph design performs beautifully when scripted to a Jungian narrative: The libido makes a perilous journey, sinking to a great depth. The divine is near; there humanity would find the maternal vessel of rebirth, the seeding place where one could renew one's life. One reenters childhood memories and vanishes from the existing world. One finds oneself apparently in deepest darkness but then has unexpected visions of a world beyond. The "mystery" beheld here represents the stock of primordial images that everybody bears within as a human birthright, the sum total of inborn forms peculiar to the instincts, the collective unconscious. If this layer is activated by the regressive libido, there is a possibility of life being renewed and also of its being destroyed. 72 Noguchi's monument enacts this Jungian sequence by "inseminating" the nuclear dead into a transformative earth womb as a ritual of rejuvenation. Thus, an unpacking of Noguchi's cenotaph design yields a wide array of cultural references that might be enumerated as follows: the magatama, haniwa, and fertility goddess imagery of prehistoric Japan (and perhaps elsewhere); Jungian ideas about the significance

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of such ancient forms as archetypal symbols; the contemplation of the origins of life through biomorphic imagery in international Surrealism; the contemporary aesthetic sense of the geometry of parabolic form used by Saarinen in St. Louis; and a meditation on the horrific consequences of the awesome nuclear weapons used by the United States against Japan. The combination of these divergent fields of meaning is effected with such formal unity, however, that the formal result by no means reads as a hasty pastiche. But formal unity of design should not be mistaken for the social unity that Noguchi implied when he claimed, "I don't just want to make sculpture, I want to build a nation." 73 This bold declaration of wishing to design national identity suggests Noguchi's desire to assume a Japanese perspective in his work, but it may have been presumptuous of one who was still a recent arrival from the United States (along with the military personnel of the Occupation). Noguchi may have intended the various references in his cenotaph design to the Japanese past to encode a Japanese sense of place in a modern Japanese topography, but they were experienced by most of the Japanese people who encountered them as foreign to Japan. It was in April 1952 that Noguchi's design for the Hiroshima cenotaph was rejected in what he read as a painful sign that it was his personal identity and not his design that was objectionable to the people for whom he wished to create this symbol: I was opposed by the people of Hiroshima because I am an American. Certainly, I am an American, but my heart is that of a Japanese and how it ached in the days of the B29 air r a i d s . . . . My feeling was unbearable when Tokyo was burning and the nuclear bomb was falling on Hiroshima. Therefore, I felt guilty for the people who lost their lives all at once. I wanted them to let me do the design more than anyone else. I told them I would do it without payment. 74

The rejection of Noguchi's design seems to have frustrated his hope that, if only the cenotaph could have been built, it would have legitimized his own desired affiliation with the Japanese nation. Noguchi's plaster model appeared in an exhibition late in 1952 with an addition expressive of this bitter personal disappointment: the character of his own first name "Isamu" appears in the altarlike position of what was to have been the repository of the names of the nuclear dead (see Figure 29). This inclusion suggests that Noguchi imagined the Jungian symbolism of rebirth encoded in his cenotaph design as acting not only on the nuclear dead but on himself as well. In other words, he seems to have envisioned his own return to the earth womb and ritual rebirth on this site of the nuclear bombardment of his father's nation by his mother's nation. If so, the rebirth was aborted. Tange Kenzo later claimed that the design was turned down because the monument was intended as a national symbol of the people of Japan, and it was thought inappropriate for people to pray at a cenotaph designed by a citizen of the nation that dropped the bomb. 75 Noguchi's design had the personal support of the mayor of Hiroshima but was strongly

I sa m u Nog uch i |

rejected by the Committee for the Construction of the Peace Memorial City, without the approval of which construction was out of the question. According to Tange, a consensus emerged that the cenotaph should be designed by Japanese hands, and the opposition to Noguchi's proposal in the construction committee as well as on the Hiroshima City Council was a reflection of this public opinion. 76 An essay published pseudonymously in an influential daily newspaper cast the opposition to Noguchi in terms of antimiscegenation: "In Isamu Noguchi's blood there is mixed half that is from overseas.... Coming to occupied Japan, where nisei have clout, he spread the idea in the press that he, of all people, was the most suitable person to make the monument for the slogan 'No More Hiroshima'—thus showing the mixed character of his temperament." 77 However, a sympathetic essay appeared in a journal of contemporary art criticism and theory. The author, who was from Hiroshima, defended Noguchi with the observation that "to shun a work of art because the artist is a foreigner is to fail to see the internationality of art. Should we not regard the memorial of the victims of the nuclear bomb as a task best left to citizens of the world' who fervently desire a pure peace?" 78 Okamoto Taro also wrote in favor of Noguchi's design. Okamoto was the painter discussed earlier in connection with the contrast of his vociferous condemnation of artists who pandered to Euro-American taste for Japonica and the American position of Okada Kenzo. Okamoto felt that Noguchi "was the most appropriate artist for this kind of monument," because "Hiroshima is already an international place

The fact that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima

is a product of the Japanese lack of awareness of the world." 79 Thus, support of Noguchi's proposal was premised, at least in part, on the international significance of Hiroshima, while opposition was focused on the undesirability of Noguchi's non-Japanese nationality. Neither side suggested that Noguchi's design was capable of representing the Japanese nation. In 1955 the architect Shirai Seiichi proposed his own design for an Atomic Bomb Hall without any specific site in mind or plan for actual construction. His central pavilion suggests Noguchi's precedent in its pure geometry and monumental vertical cylinder pushing through horizontal levels (Figure 32). Shirai's design is also analogous to that of Noguchi in its relationship to Japanese tradition; according to an interpretation of 1955 by the architectural critic Kawazoe Noboru, the atomic memorial harbors significant allusions to the seventh-century temple of Horyuji in Nara. Shirai's identity posed no non-Japanese affiliation to inhibit a nativist polemic; Kawazoe dwelled on the significance of the Hiroshima holocaust to the Japanese people. "Western civilization" (seiyd bunmei) is the weighted term in his view of the historical causes of the disaster. Western civilization produced the technology of nuclear war, Kawazoe maintained, just as it fomented the imperialism that colonized Asia and forced Japan to adopt a similar imperialist stance to maintain its independence, which led in turn to the Japanese atrocities in Asia: "However, in the midst of violent resistance from the peoples of Asia and upon receiving the highest product of nuclear civilization, the nuclear bomb, Japan was knocked out of the

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line of Western powers, and it was only then that Japanese people were pressed back to a self-realization of their real Asian identity." 80 Kawazoe noted that this realization was a particularly bitter irony if, as some suggested, the American bombing of Japan was determined more by racism than by other factors. Thus the conclusion of the war is occasion for a "self-critique of the civilization that Japanese have received." In this destiny the Japanese are unique: "Only the Japanese have directly felt the cruelty possessed by Figure 32. Shirai

the nuclear bomb, and thus we have the strongest knowledge of the dangers of civiliza-

Seiichi. Atomic Bomb Hall

tion." 81 Kawazoe's thinking about Hiroshima corresponds with a larger tendency in post-

(Genbakudd). Detail.

war Japanese views of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) that has turned these places of destruction

1954. Unrealized.

into what John Dower calls "perverse national treasures . . . capable of fixating Japanese

Courtesy of the Shirai

memory on the war on what happened to Japan and simultaneously blotting out recollec-

Seiichi Kenkyujo.

tion of the Japanese victimization of others." 82 This narrative of Hiroshima required dropping nonnational victims from memory. Among the victims at Hiroshima who were forgotten in this national focus of the memory of the disaster were at least one thousand American citizens, nisei Japanese Americans who had gone to Japan temporarily and were stranded there by the war. 83 Similarly, although an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the atom bomb victims in Hiroshima were Koreans, they have routinely been omitted from the official narratives of the nuclear holocaust. 84 It was the will to Japanese cultural exceptionalism, woven into the epic of Japan's defeat, that was threatened by the notion of a cenotaph designed by the Japanese American Noguchi. With the rejection of Noguchi's cenotaph, Tange hastily designed a similar though much less persuasive monument that still stands in Hiroshima today, where it is a center of a semireligious pacifist cult sustaining a national myth of "martyred innocence." 85 Shirai Seiichi's Atomic Bomb Hall was very similar to Noguchi's cenotaph in its assimilation of aspects of Japanese cultural tradition into a modernist design, but the nonnegotiable premise of "usthem identity" rendered Shirai's design conducive to nativist ideology and Noguchi's design anathema. Kita Kamakura: To Dwell in a Nation "In America," Noguchi commented in 1950, "the sense of home is lacking such as exists here in Japan." 86 While designing a public Japanese place at Hiroshima, Noguchi also devoted

Isamu Noguchi |

himself to making a private Japanese place that he intended as his own family residence. To a certain extent, Noguchi's 1950 arrival in Japan had the character of a family reconciliation. He had been estranged from his father early in life, and his previous meeting with the Japanese scholar in 1931 was a strained one. These feelings were no doubt exasperated by the elder Noguchi's passionate support for Japanese imperialism and militarism, perspectives that Noguchi disavowed publicly in New York in the 1930s.87 But Noguchi began to read Yonejiro's early poetry in the United States and developed feelings of affection and nostalgia for his father.88 Noguchi's father had died in 1947, but his widow Noguchi Matsuko and other members of the family came to the airport to welcome him in 1950.89 Although Noguchi would remember that his stepmother had been cold to him during his 1931 visit to Japan, she favored him now, and he stayed at her home in Nakano on the west side of Tokyo. The residence was a makeshift affair hastily erected on the plot of land where his late father's house had stood until American bombing reduced it to ashes. Isamu's stepbrother Noguchi Michio, a young student at the time, soon became a kind of assistant for Isamu. 90 One of Noguchi's many projects in Japan in this period was the interior design of a faculty lounge and adjoining sculpture garden on the campus of Keio University in Tokyo, which had been heavily damaged by American bombing in 1945. Keio was the institution where his father had taught for nearly forty years, and Noguchi intended his design of a solemn hearth as a " m e m o r i a l . . . wherein the spirit of my father could be best perpetuated [and]... a place of relaxation and contemplation upon the ideals of beauty expressed by my father's poetry." 91 But not only did Noguchi eulogize his father and reacquaint himself with his father's family, he also began to form a new family of his own. After four busy months in Japan in 1950, Noguchi returned to New York, but only because he was running low on money and wanted to "find the means to resume living in Japan." 92 In New York he met Yamaguchi Yoshiko, a famous Japanese movie actress, and they subsequently got married at a widely reported ceremony in Tokyo in December 1951. Yamaguchi Yoshiko was born to Japanese parents in Manchuria, where she grew up. She made her debut in 1938 working for the Manchuria Film Corporation, a Japanese company that made Chinese-language films promoting support for the Japanese cause in the war against China. Yamaguchi, who used the Chinese name Li Hsiang-lan, typically played the role of a Chinese girl who fell in love with a Japanese man and helped him. In other words she served as a glamorous role model for Chinese collaboration with Japanese imperialism. In 1946 she escaped from China, where she was endangered by widespread hostility provoked by her wartime manipulation of film audiences' sentiments by dissimulating her Japanese nationality. She returned to Japan to pursue a successful film career in Japanese movies and even acted in some Hollywood movies. After her marriage, Yamaguchi told reporters, "Isamu and I are both busy with our work, so there is no question of designing a new lifestyle (shin seikatsu no sekkei) for us now; we'll go on in a manner suited to ourselves without being tied to convention. We'll be satisfied

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to link our spirits."93 Designing a new lifestyle, however, was precisely what her husband wanted to do. The previous year he had told a Japanese audience that, although modern design was now commonplace in contemporary American housing, "the sense of home is lacking such as exists here in Japan. . . . America needs from Japan the attitude of mind which will permit them [sic] to live in these modern houses."94 Now Noguchi proceeded to plan his own dwelling in this Japanese environment with its attractive "sense of home." Looking for a place for himself and Yoshiko to live, he inquired with the famous gourmet and potter Kitaóji Rosanjin about a two-hundred-year-old thatched farmhouse that the latter had transferred to his property in Kita Kamakura. Rosanjin generously turned the old house over to Noguchi to use as he liked and also invited him to use his kiln on the premises for his clay work. One attraction of this area to Isamu may have been its association with his childhood and his father. Rosanjin's property was not far from a subtemple of Enkakuji in Kamakura, where Yonejiró had a private retreat for writing poetry. In a letter of 1907 Yonejiró mentioned the visit of his son Isamu, who would have been about two and a half at the time.95 Isamu and his mother had just arrived in Japan, and they would subsequently live separately from Yonejiró and his new Japanese wife in the town of Chigasaki, also in the Kamakura area. It was while Noguchi was living on Rosanjin's property in Kita Kamakura with Yamaguchi that he produced much of the earthenware sculpture that so impressed Yagi Kazuo. This was also the context where he created the fertility beads and goddesses described in connection with the Hiroshima cenotaph design. But in addition to these metaphors of fertility with biological and prehistoric associations, Noguchi's ceramic works of 1952 also included images of conjugal bliss, such as Marriage, a clay study of two figures lying serenely beside one another under a blanket. Casual earthenware studies such as Big Boy (Figure 33), created of folded and pinched bits of clay, are quite unusual in Noguchi's oeuvre for a sense of spontaneity so lighthearted that reviewers were reminded of James Thurber's sense of humor or a baker's work with dough.96 Noguchi wrote, "Characteristic of my development now... is my rediscovery of this intimate nature which I had almost forgotten since childhood."97 Big Boy appears to represent a child playing hide-and-seek in an adult's kimono, and a similar playfulness is expressed in other caricatural images of figures, animals, and insects. Together with memories of his own childhood, these figures may also relate to the artist's hopes for raising a family with Yamaguchi.98 Noguchi was not content to fashion clay images of his desired Japanese home life, but actually designed and built his home and studio as well. While work was proceeding on the Keió University memorial to his father in 1951, Noguchi set about modifying Rosanjin's thatched-roof farmhouse and worked with a local carpenter to add an adjacent structure to serve as a studio. In order to make the new studio compatible with the old farmhouse, it was constructed of lattice windows (without glass), mud walls, and wooden posts. The interior of the studio was intended to manifest the rustic simple strain in Japanese archi-

F i g u r e 3 3 . Isamu Noguchi. BigBoy(Oki na ko). 1952. Karatsu ceramic. 7% x 6% in. Photograph by Isamu Noguchi. The Museum of Modern Art, A. Conger Goodyear Fund. Courtesy of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

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tectural tradition that Noguchi was very f o n d of at this point in his career, but it was realFigure 3 4 . Isamu

ized with a most unusual expressionistic vigor. This structure was a lean-to built into an

Noguchi. Earthen Wall

embankment, and its rear wall was f o r m e d by the exposed earth, which Noguchi carved into

in the Studio of the

a dynamic sculptural relief (Figure 34).

Noguchi/Yamaguchi

N o g u c h i b u r r o w e d into the earthen wall of the studio, excavated a r o u g h r o u n d

House. 1951-1952. Kita

fireplace, tunneled a chimney through to the sky, and reserved three humplike protuber-

Kamakura, Kanagawa

ances in the floor to serve as hearth and table surfaces. Earthen walls can be finished with

Prefecture. Destroyed.

considerable refinement, but here Noguchi exposed the horizontal strata of the earth and

Courtesy of The Isamu

emphasized the rough marks of his trowel scarring the wall. Photographs show the wall

Noguchi Foundation,

blackened with soot above the hearth, dry reeds branching out wildly f r o m a hole in the

Inc.

earth all the way to the ceiling, and a fragment of a haniwa figurine in a dark niche. Noguchi

Isamu

related this experience of the earth to childhood, nature, and Japan: "It is anybody's childhood, I suppose, to know nature in this way. Yet to know nature again as an adult, to exhaust one's hands in its earth . . . one has to be a potter or a sculptor, and that also in Japan."99 Noguchi was not just taking up residence on Rosanjin's property; he was submitting himself to a physical relationship with the Japanese earth. This was not Noguchi's only wall relief. In 1936 he had molded colored cement to create a bold multifigured composition with a Marxist iconography for the wall of a public market in Mexico City. In 1948 he had created a wall relief titled Lunar Voyage with erotic swelling biomorphic forms of magnesite and hidden electric illumination in the stairwell of a luxurious ocean liner. And in 1956 he would design a wall for the concourse of a sleek Manhattan office tower with a hissing waterfall behind a row of gleaming stainless steel louvers contoured with rhyming undulating profiles. The ideological and formal contrasts spanned by this twenty-year stretch of wall making demonstrate Noguchi's remarkable sensitivity to the milieus of specific places at specific historical moments. Moreover, the range of Noguchi's wall reliefs also suggests that his work in Kita Kamakura in 1951-1952 arose as a response to that particular place at that time in his life rather than being indicative of some inner unchanging disposition of the artist's sensibility. Nevertheless, this was not the first time that Noguchi responded to a place in Japan with a rite of bodily immersion into the earth. Noguchi had pursued this inclination in 1931 in Kyoto. At that time he "fled" from the strained relationship with his father in Tokyo and also avoided the elegance and industrialization of the contemporary Kyoto pottery world to place himself in what he would remember as "the cottage of a ditchdigger," and he entered a "close embrace of the earth, as a seeking after identity with some primal matter beyond personalities and possessions."100 Shunned by his Japanese father, Noguchi immersed himself into his fatherland. Noguchi's 1968 reminiscence of the youthful experience in Kyoto in 1931, however, may be more apt as a description of his experience in Kita Kamakura in 1951-1952, when Noguchi created a cottage for himself by digging a ditch and entering a "close embrace of the earth." Furthermore, this burrowing into the earth at Kita Kamakura resonates with the Jungian process that Noguchi | seemed to undergo when he placed his name in the subterranean chamber of his Hiroshima cenotaph design.

Noguchi

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But just as the Hiroshima project was derailed by a disparity between Noguchi's aspiration for affiliation and the perception of his identity as foreign to Japan, so his Kita Kamakura dwelling was regarded as a most peculiar manifestation of a Japanese house by the Japanese people around him. Inokuma Gen'ichiro, an artist who was a close friend and collaborator of Noguchi in this period, remembered years later how the raw exposed earth, which composed a whole wall of this small interior, "astonished all the Japanese who saw it in those days." 101 And the industrial designer Kamekura Yusaku, another acquaintance in this period, remembered this house as characteristic of Noguchi's "nearly insane perfectionism . . . in trying to come in contact with the essence of Japan." 102 Meanwhile, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, who was acknowledged even in America as "one of [Japan's] highest paid stage and screen stars," 103 found life in her husband's cottage arduous. Describing the "rigorous demands he made on his wife in those days," long after their 1956 divorce, Yamaguchi recalled that "while living at Rosanjin's folk art style tea house [sic]," Noguchi determined that her footwear should match the tone of the house, which meant wearing zori, the scratchy peasant sandals of wood and straw. Yamaguchi could not get accustomed to them, and she remembered that "even when [her feet] started peeling and bleeding, he would not let me change shoes." 104 The Noguchi-Yamaguchi home was featured in the popular Japanese press with such teasing appellations as "Isamu Noguchi's strange house," "haunted house," "love nest," "eccentric house," and "photo subject." 105 Perhaps the last epithet was the most fitting, for Noguchi's design had the theatrical character of a stage and served well for the press photos of Noguchi and his kimono-garbed wife Yamaguchi posing before the earthen wall and hearth. One weekly magazine published a group of such pictures with comments likening the feeling of ancient Japan in Noguchi's design to the sixteenth-century setting of a movie in which Yamaguchi was to appear. 106 The headline reads "Very Good Japanese Sense" (Bert guddo Nihon no kankaku), transliterating the English words "very good" in such a way as to insinuate the sense of staged exoticism in a foreign formulation of Japanese culture. While the Japanese accounts of Noguchi's house at Kita Kamakura would lead one to believe that it was anything but typical of Japanese dwellings, American observers saw it as the paragon of Japanese culture enhanced by Noguchi's sense of modern design. The design magazine Interiors noted that both the old thatched farmhouse and the studio that a carpenter had just built for Noguchi had "every characteristic of the traditional Japanese house" and that it was difficult to tell which part was old and which was new. 107 Appealing to readers in circles of American design and architecture, the Interiors article maintained that, far from anachronistic, these traditional Japanese features were functionally, economically, and aesthetically well adapted to the particular needs of the occupants. In contrast, an article in the New York Times Magazine appealed to a broader American audience with a description of the exotic spiritual flavor of the Japanese interior:

I s a m u Nog u c h i |

We were in an empty room, empty at least to Western eyes. In the alcove which is known as a tokonoma was the traditional flower arrangement, a hanging scroll, and a bronze Buddha head from old Japan

The muted patter of bare feet on the soft

padded floor in the hushed atmosphere gave the room a dreamlike quality that almost imposed contemplation. That, explained Mr. Noguchi, is the special quality of the Japanese house; it forces one to regard the inner man rather than outer vistas. 108

Thus, Japanese and American readings of the Noguchi-Yamaguchi dwelling place were glaringly at odds with one another. The Japanese weekly sensationalized "Isamu Noguchi's strange house," while the American press wove a spell of exotica and claimed that it was a "typical and traditional Japanese style." American observers might be persuaded that Noguchi's vision of Japanese culture was authentic, but Japanese regarded it as excessive, bizarre, and astonishing. The teasing and sensational accounts of the Yamaguchi-Noguchi house in Kita Kamakura appeared in the Japanese press in the spring of 1952, which was also the time of the rejection of Noguchi's design for the Hiroshima cenotaph. These critical views of Noguchi were part of a tide of sentiment in Japan that turned against him as abruptly as it had favored him in 1950. In 1952 Noguchi's loyal friend Hasegawa Saburo complained that "most Japanese are completely unable to understand or sympathize with how highly [Noguchi] appraised and how deeply he loved ancient abstract Japanese forms." Hasegawa admired this disposition of Noguchi, but he noted that it "submerged [Noguchi] in greater and greater isolation" among Japanese contemporaries. Noguchi had been "pestered by a noisy welcome" when he first arrived in Japan but was increasingly neglected and misunderstood as he attempted to penetrate the contemporary significance of the treasures of Japan's past. 109 The Japanese press attention Noguchi received in 1952 provides ample indication that the admiration of 1950 had disappeared. For the most part the warm tributes by Noguchi's collaborators and admirers gave way to more disinterested or defensive accounts and some expressions of outright hostility. The apparently heated resistance that Noguchi's work provoked in 1952 moved the art critic Takiguchi Shuzo to write: "Words, words, words— arguments after arguments greet the artist. And for criticism's sake the created works are drafted out of doors to set out on a journey destination unknown only to return completely exhausted, scarred perhaps, to crawl back through the threshold a pitiful sight, lost in battle, presumably, and crumble to pieces beyond recognition." 110 What controversy warranted such violent metaphors? What was the "battle" that so effaced Noguchi's work? Takiguchi is vague about the source of this conflict, but his absorption with the ambiguities of national identity posed by Noguchi's work suggests where the contention lay:

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From an American viewpoint, he is probably regarded as an artist of Oriental nature, but from our judgment of his works we detect a considerable amount of Western elements foreign to us. Disregarding diversified opinions, however, no one can deny that his recent works, in medium and subject matter, have become Japanese. And the very fact that he is speaking to us in our own language, though inarticulate, enables us to be on intimate terms with them. Notwithstanding, there still remains something that prevents us from calling them Japanese—something that requires annotation. In other words, underlying his Japanese works there is the logic, or the illogic of Western construction.

Takiguchi was one of the leading art critics in Tokyo at this time and is warmly remembered for his pivotal role in launching the careers of many among the first postwar generation of Japanese artists. But Noguchi's practice seems to have violated the us-them categories that enabled the smooth functioning of Takiguchi's art critical apparatus, leaving the critic wrestling uneasily with Noguchi's status. The difficulty of Noguchi's art for Takiguchi lay in its assertion of a sense of identity that could neither be claimed nor entirely disavowed by Japan. Others were less ambivalent; they simply denied the possibility that Noguchi's art might stake a valid claim to Japanese culture. A pseudonymously signed newspaper column criticizing Noguchi appeared in the fall of 1952. 111 Accompanied by a caricature of Noguchi that gave him the unpleasant guise of a glad-hander, the article expressed irritation with what was described as the uncritical acceptance with which the Japanese people facilitated Noguchi's ambitions: "True to the American manner, he proceeded to stir up a fuss for the journalists with astonishing energy, like an automatic rifle." Such a comment may seem too trivial to belabor, but it is the very triviality of this scornful aside that disciplined the larger problem of the infringement of a nonnative artist on national turf. This hostile attack then turned to Noguchi's investigation of Asian culture, as the columnist enumerated various sources of the "hints" (hinto) in Japanese tradition from which Noguchi allegedly derived his art. Noguchi's cenotaph design for Hiroshima, for example, came from haniwa. His artistic practice as a whole was "a collection of hints assembled with amazing speed, but the work is like easily swallowed boiled rice (ochazuke) with little to offer beyond the hints." In other words, Noguchi was charged with exploiting Japanese tradition without fathoming its profound content. The columnist maintained that it was the presence in Japan of the authentic prototypes that made Noguchi's products look shoddy to Japanese viewers, and the writer therefore supposed that Americans would appreciate them more easily because of their ignorance of the Japanese forms from which they were derived. And in a thinly disguised recommendation that Noguchi conclude his activities in Japan, the writer complained, "One does wish that he would stop preaching Japanese tradition to Japanese people with such poor work,"

adding that "surely he is better suited to introducing Japan in America." That this anonymous columnist presumed to represent the opinion of Japanese society at large is apparent in the significance adduced to the Hiroshima rejection: "If it is the unverbalized criticism of the people, which moves by intuition, that has been aroused, then a certain caution is requisite on Noguchi's part." Thus the Japanese public was totalized as an abstract single-minded whole voiced in vituperative opposition to Noguchi's investigation of Asian culture. Another critic of Noguchi at this time was the yoga painter Suda Kokuta, who commented on an exhibition of the ceramics Noguchi had created in Kita Kamakura and elsewhere in 1952. More moderate than the newspaper columnist, Suda nevertheless voiced his disapproval: Speaking frankly despite the newness of form in the works in this exhibition, because we Japanese imbibe into our blood through tradition such things as haniwa, Jomon pottery, dotaku [prehistoric bronze bell-like objects], calligraphy, and flower vases, I would wish for further development of form

Just as we cannot

swallow as a whole the style and form produced by Western blood, neither can the Westerner take in the oriental style as a whole. 112 The biological metaphor of blood expressed a claim of racial possession of culture. Thus, Noguchi was repositioned from the felicitous to the pathological model of crossbreeding. Similar discontent regarding Noguchi's investigations of Japanese culture emerged in a discussion among some of the most prominent architects in Japan in 1953. 1 1 3 The discussion was convened to consider architecture from the perspectives of "international character" (kokusai-sei), "regional climatic character" (fudo-sei), and "national character" (kokumin-sei). I include a lengthy excerpt here to illustrate the range of the consensus and the terms with which it was accomplished. Sakakura

(Junzo): When I went to Brazil, I took photographs of the

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When I looked at it myself, I didn't think much about it, but when I

museum.

showed it to others, they felt that it seemed Japanese. I didn't design it to show to foreigners, but when they reacted that way, I could see what they meant. Remembering my earlier design at the Paris Exposition and realizing that one can't fight one's own blood, 115 I thought I might as well take courage in it. Yoshida (Isoya): Regarding the extent of Japaneseness, when you make something, it might not look the slightest bit Japanese to a Japanese viewer. But I think that the right degree of Japaneseness is when it looks very Japanese to the foreign viewer

When it looks Japanese to a Japanese viewer, that is too much [laughing

voice]. M a e k a w a (Kunio): I know just what you mean....

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Ikuta (Tsutomu): In that sense, how do you feel about Isamu Noguchi's work? Sakakura: Isamu Noguchi has recently been moving in a dangerous direction. Yoshida: I don't think it amounts to much. Ikuta: Apparently Isamu Noguchi's lanterns and lighting fixtures are greatly admired and popular overseas. 1 1 6 Sakakura: That sort of thing looks Japanese to Japanese viewers. Don't you think he is moving in a dangerous direction? Ikuta: Like [Antonin] Raymond and [Bruno] Taut, 1 1 7 Noguchi does very well with Japanese subjects, but there is a problem with the way he understands them. We think they are very proficient at their treatment of them, but since Japanese people understand these things deeply, it is difficult to design with them. . . . Professor Yoshida, what do you think? Yoshida: Surely, the level of what such people do is well known. Whether [Charlotte] Perriand or Taut, who came before the war or Noguchi, their work is undertaken on the level of an offhand whim. N o doubt Japanese could not do such offhand work. These people work this way because they are not working in their own country—the traveler knows no shame away from home.

This conversation was an exercise in policing the native-alien border of Japanese national culture. Noguchi was identified as a danger by Sakakura. Ikuta and Yoshida took the view that Noguchi's status in Japan was no different from that of any other European or American visitor. Neither the fact that Noguchi was the son of a nationalist Japanese scholar, his Japanese name, nor the extent of his self-identification with Japanese perspectives differentiated him from other foreign perspectives of Japan. The need to naturalize the priority of national identity over artistic identity was so intense here that it led to a censure of all voluntaristic identification with Japanese culture by non-Japanese artists. The valued categorical distinction between native and foreign perspectives of Japanese culture pertained not only to the making of art, but also its appreciation; the foreign artist's pretensions to Japanese culture were, in Ikuta's words, "greatly admired and popular overseas" but not at home, because "Japanese people understand these things deeply." Japanese artistic identity was reserved as a prerogative that ought to operate on an unconscious level, in Yoshida's words repeated by Ikuta, "when it looks Japanese to a Japanese viewer, that is too much." At least some of these criticisms were conveyed to Noguchi directly several years later by one of the participants in this exchange, and he would take them into account in later works dealing with Japanese culture. The critical views of Noguchi published in the Japanese press in 1952 and 1953 indicate a pervasive sentiment in Japan at this time that derailed his desire to create and dwell in places imbued with a sense of Japanese identity. Places do not arise by the individual will of their designer alone; they require some sort of collaborative support or must generate consensual images of the place in order to perform their social function. Noguchi's

Isamu

aspirations as a place maker were deterritorialized from Japan; he was deprived of Japanese territory on which to create places. After 1952 Noguchi would not have another exhibition in Japan for twenty years, and he would not receive another commission for the design of a public work in Japan until 1965. With the failure of his marriage, Noguchi abandoned his residence in Kita Kamakura and would not establish a house and studio of his own in Japan again until the late 1960s. Never again in his lifetime would Noguchi be lionized by the Japanese press or win the affection of leading younger generation figures in the Japanese art world to the extent he enjoyed briefly at the end of the Occupation. Numerous factors underlie the broad disaffection that Noguchi encountered in Japan in 1952. In part, it may have been the suddenness of his transformation from an American visitor with powerful sympathies for Japan to a presumptive insider wishing to play a leading role in Japanese culture, though this transformation was his response to the unexpected warmth with which he was greeted on his arrival. The subsequent critique of Noguchi was probably aggravated by the sensational attention in the mass media Noguchi drew to himself just by marrying Yamaguchi Yoshiko, an "overseas" Japanese herself. And indeed, the theatricality of her identity as an actress may have given Noguchi's efforts an appearance of insincerity dissonant with the ideal of authentic naturalized Japanese identity. Noguchi may also have been victim of petty resentment for his rapid sequence of accomplishments in the Japanese art world at a time when resources were scarce and many Japanese were looking for opportunities to advance their own careers. Contemporary anti-American sentiment of a racist and political nature was also surely an important contextual factor. For while the cooperation of the conservative Japanese government with United States strategic policy objectives brought about a conclusion to the Occupation, many Japanese intellectuals were opposed to the signing of the peace treaty with the United States in 1951, because it denied Japan the possibility of a position of unarmed neutrality in the tense climate of the cold war. Each of these factors exacerbated the conflict between Noguchi's expressed ambition to be a leader in the postwar redefinition of Japanese cultural identity and the fact that he was not accepted as Japanese. Paris: To Pay H o m a g e to the Japanese Garden Severe though Noguchi's deterritorialization from Japan in the mid-1950s was, it did not divorce him from Japanese identity entirely. Rather, it transnationalized his claim to Japanese culture. That is, he became a creator of places outside of Japan that incorporated aspects of Japanese identity. This disjuncture between the expression of Japanese identity in a place design and its location in non-Japanese territory is particularly striking in Noguchi's work at U N E S C O Headquarters in Paris from 1956 to 1958. Before Noguchi's participation in the project was determined, the architects planned a Delegates Patio beneath a corner of the main building and a garden in the adjacent plot of ground. 1 1 8 One consequence of the designation of Noguchi as the designer of these two areas would be their linkage with Japan.

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The garden in particular would come to be associated with Japan in terms of patronage, design concept, materials, technical means, as well as reception. Indeed, Noguchi acknowledged that this effort constituted his own "homage to the Japanese garden." 119 Noguchi's emphatic expression of a Japanese cultural identity in Paris is all the more remarkable because it came at a time in his career when he was unable or disinclined to do so in Japan. It would not be until the late 1960s that Noguchi would gradually begin to address audiences in Japan again. When he did so, the references to Japanese tradition that had become frequent in his work in Europe and America were largely eclipsed by a modern international sort of imagery. At this time Noguchi had the strong impression that many younger Japanese artists saw no necessary relationship between new and ancient culture. 120 He asserted that they were wrong and claimed that some of Japan's best sculpture was to be found in the ancient garden designs of Kyoto. Nevertheless, at the same time, he also provocatively declared that the only sculpture of interest in contemporary Tokyo was to be found at the construction sites of elevated highways, where massive steel columns were silhouetted against the sky. Moreover, he boldly appropriated this industrial imagery when given the opportunity in 1969 to create a sculpture at the entry to the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (Figure 35). The stark geometry of this pair of pillars constructed of welded steel plates betrays no trace of Noguchi's love for ancient rock gardens. And he created places for the glistening natural beauty of wet Japanese rocks in Paris and New York, while shunning them from the futuristic waterworks of stainless steel he created for the Osaka Expo in 1970. Meanwhile, in the period from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s, Noguchi's preoccupation with old Japan was satisfied by traveling to rural districts of Japan remote from centers of contemporary Japanese culture, to places where the nature and the craft traditions of his nostalgic memory could be engaged with less distraction: Why do I continuously go back to Japan, except to renew my contact with the earth? There still remains unbroken the familiarity with earthly materials and the skill of Japanese hands. How exquisitely functional are their traditional tools. Soon these, too, will be displaced by the machine. In the meantime I go there like a beggar or a thief, seeking the last warmth of the earth. 1 2 1

This romance of Japanese earth is becoming a common refrain in Noguchi's itinerary. It was in "close embrace with the earth [in] . . . the cottage of a ditch-digger" that he made pottery in Kyoto in 1931. In the early 1950s, he inserted his name in the underground "womb" of the Hiroshima cenotaph as though in a ritual of rebirth and then bored into a hillside to create a dwelling for himself in Kita Kamakura. Now, in the late 1950s and 1960s, his relationship to the Japanese earth was neither embracing, seeking rebirth, nor dwelling. Now this pursuit of the deeply fulfilling "contact with the earth" was encumbered by the sense that it was illicit, as though the rightful (Japanese) owners of these earthy materials, skills, and motifs

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of preindustrial Japan disapproved of his possession of their property. Nevertheless, with the willing collaboration of local individuals or otherwise, Noguchi pursued a practice of export from rural Japan to urban Europe and America. In Gifu Prefecture, for example, Noguchi made abstract sculptures using the oldfashioned technology of cast iron kettles and designed paper and bamboo lanterns for mass production and marketing overseas. But surely the most extreme form of Noguchi's artistic commute between earthy Japanese venues and European and American publics was his practice of shipping many tons of rock from Japan to the United States for sculptural installation. Any stone sculpture involves a material extraction from the earth and the physical transport of the yield through the infrastructures of the art world. But it made little difference to most sculptors, such as Noguchi's teacher Constantine Brancusi as well as his contemporary and rival Henry Moore, whether the stone they carved originated in Africa, Asia, or anywhere else, so long as it had the proper veining, texture, and coloration, not to mention price. Much of Noguchi's sculpture was like that of Moore and Brancusi in its focus on the autonomous stone object displayed in the relatively neutral surroundings of a museum. But when he exercised his avowed commitment to sculpture as the creation of socially meaningful places, Noguchi's contextualization of stone was very different from that of most sculptors of his generation. To this end, Noguchi

F i g u r e 3 5 . Isamu

masked the artificial aspects of the process of placement with theatrical contrivances that

Noguchi. Gate {Mori).

would infuse the deposited rocks with an aesthetic and social ambiance of "place." While

1969. Painted steel. 1,050 x

sensitivity to the environment of the place under construction was fundamental to this

390 x 550 cm. Photograph

process, he was also uniquely compelled to convey something cultural along with his min-

by Shigeo Anzai. National

eralogical freight from its point of origin. Noguchi's design for U N E S C O in Paris was his first and one of his most striking works involving the export of rocks from Japan. U N E S C O Headquarters was a large complex of three buildings on a seven-and-a-half-acre plot near a group of eighteenth-century buildings not far from the Eiffel Tower. The idea of locating the headquarters of this international organization in Paris had taken hold soon after UNESCO's inception in the late 1940s against the wishes of British and Americans who had hoped to see it unified with the New York headquarters of its parent body, the United Nations. Arguing that "French culture has always been marked by a tendency toward universality," their French counterparts prevailed, and the organization agreed on Paris as the city for its home base. 1 2 2 The eight-story Y-shaped Secretariat Building, with three wings coming together in

Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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Figure 36. Henry Moore. Reclining Figure. 1957-1958. UNESCO Headquarters, Paris. Travertine from Italy. Length: 16 feet. By permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

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curving facades, was designed by an international team of architects led by the American Marcel Breuer, who had emigrated from Germany in 1937. Breuer conceived of the relationship between art and architecture as one of "complementing each other, rather than parts of the same." Quoting this comment of the architect, his biographer admired the undulating biomorphic forms of Henry Moore's massive stone Reclining Figure as a "foil for the crystalline, linear facade" of Breuer's UNESCO Secretariat (Figure 36). 123 In fact, Moore had initially been asked to do a work in bronze for UNESCO, but since this metal quickly darkens outdoors, Moore reasoned that light-colored stone would be much more effective for a sculpture that "would have as its background a building that is mostly glass, which looks black."124 Noguchi's thinking regarding the relationship between art and architecture was similarly based on the idea of sharply contrastive modes: "Architecture is not to be criticized for eliminating the irrational element. It must be free to follow its own ends. So must art, which is the irrational element, the human element. Architecture and art should complement each other."125 This remark might be taken as contradicting Noguchi's 1949 advocacy of "rein-

tegrating" the arts, but his very next comment in this conversation with an American reporter in 1953 suggests otherwise: "Art can include the furniture we sit upon, the lights we use, and all the objects inside and outside a building." In his contribution to the UNESCO project, the irrational and human contrast to architecture would be played out not by sculpture per se, but by seats, lighting, a fountain, trees, rocks, and flowing water. Indeed, the forms Noguchi contributed to UNESCO contrast with the intricate and precise reticulation of Breuer's facade as effectively as the sculpture of Henry Moore. But while both Noguchi and Moore seem to have been motivated by the aim of relating their work to its context through contrastive juxtaposition, Moore was simply not as committed to adapting his art to the particular places where it was installed as Noguchi. Moore prided himself on creating sculptures for all kinds of places including schools, colleges, and churches "without any surrender o f . . . my personal style." 126 Moore's sculptural oeuvre was indeed closer to the uniformity of Rothko's painting than to the diversity of Noguchi's work, and, consequently, the associative link between the carved stone figure at the front entrance of the UNESCO Headquarters and the name "Henry Moore" is very firm. When Noguchi first named his landscape for UNESCO the "Japanese garden," it was because of its sponsorship by the Japanese government as much as the artistic sources of his design, 127 but he was not entirely comfortable with the later routine identification of this work as the "Jardin Japonais." Nonetheless the garden came to be more commonly associated with the nation of Japan than with the name of its designer. 128 Partly owing to conventions specific to gardens (places) as opposed to sculptures (art objects), fewer visitors are aware of the garden's connection to its artist than is the case with "the Henry Moore." 129 And while Moore's sculpture stands as a British artistic contribution to UNESCO on the strength of the Britishness of the sculptor even though he carved it in Italy from Italian stone, the Japaneseness of the garden arises to a great extent from the origin of its material in Japan despite the American passport of its designer. The Jardin Japonais was created from a shipment from Japan of fifty-eight stones weighing eighty-eight tons. Surely, it would seem that equally suitable rocks could be obtained more conveniently in Europe, but Noguchi did not consider this fact relevant: "Various people have asked me why I use Japanese rocks and if there are not good rocks also in Europe. In fact there may be good rocks there and may be not. But that is not the point; it is a question of the spirit of UNESCO." 1 3 0 In the 1945 constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), member nations declared on behalf of their peoples "that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must begin." 131 Conflict was to be prevented not simply by arranging political and economic agreements between nations, but also by furthering mutual respect and understanding for one another's culture. No doubt, Noguchi supported this "spirit of UNESCO" that was implemented in a far-ranging program aimed at the global diffusion of culture and education to break down the barriers of mistrust.

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Indeed artists were invited to contribute to the realization of this vision of peaceful postwar international relations. Conferences were organized to bring artists from many nations together where they could "think internationally a n d . . . act cooperatively" to find solutions "which were not apparent when . . . considered from the solely national points of view." 132 Thus, perhaps the work Moore, Noguchi, and others created for UNESCO Headquarters "testified] to the artists' faith in UNESCO's aims," as it was claimed. 133 But Noguchi's ambitious project of carrying rocks from Japanese territory to the French capital was also dictated by another aspect of the "spirit of UNESCO." He noted that the United Nations Headquarters, which was completed in 1953 in Manhattan, had received donations of art objects from nations all over the world, including many "imitations and copies of objects representative of their various countries," and it was not possible to display them all effectively. Among the donations Noguchi may have been recalling were the bell and pavilion that appeared in 1954 at the site of Wallace Harrison's sleek glass tower in New York, seemingly wrenched out of some medieval Buddhist temple in Japan. 134 At UNESCO Headquarters, Noguchi maintained, "this confusion" was to be avoided and art was to be created in sympathy with the architecture in a more systematic manner adjudicated by the International Committee of Art Advisers. This committee included Breuer, the British critic Sir Herbert Read, the director of the Prado Museum, the director of the Musées Nationaux de France, and other officials from Venezuela, Pakistan, Sweden, Italy, and a nongovernmental official from the UNESCO staff. 135 In Noguchi's account, their aim was "to contain quality objects" and screen out the kind of "strange objects" that were donated to the United Nations. In a program most congenial with the ideal "reintegration of the arts" that Noguchi had articulated in 1949, the architecture, decoration, garden, and gifts were all to "reflect the cooperative participation of artists from all over the world." And he added that this program too was "seen as embodying the spirit of UNESCO." 1 3 6 Thus, the spirit of UNESCO involved creating a space for a harmonious international display of art and design. Works of art would perform as national representatives in an international assembly, not unlike the delegates who gathered here as representatives of eightyone nations in 1958. But, whether for the reason of ensuring the desired aesthetic harmony or otherwise, artistic representation was more exclusive than political representation. Marcel Breuer (a German immigrant to the United States) designed the building as the head of a team including Bernard Zehrfuss (France) and Pier Luigi Nervi (Italy). Artists were commissioned from Britain (Henry Moore), Chile (Roberto Matta Echaurren), France (Brassai, Hans Arp, and the two expatriate Spaniards Picasso and Miró), Holland (Karel Appel), Italy (Afro), Mexico (Rufino Tamayo), and the United States (Noguchi and Alexander Calder). 137 Not all observers agreed that this selection was undertaken in the best manner. One claimed that artistic quality was compromised by the politics of "Unesco-ship," which demanded that "nations had to be represented" equitably by artists. 138 This critic failed to

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point out, however, that this roster reflected contemporary geopolitical tensions in its omission of artists who were citizens of the nations defeated in World War II and the nations of the Soviet bloc. Cold war tensions were more directly expressed by some of the political stories about UNESCO in American newspapers at the time: "DAR Finds Organization Patterned after 'Communist Teaching of USSR,'" "Soviet Threatens to End UNESCO Aid," "US Reverses Stand on New UNESCO Head," "USSR Bid to Seat Communist China Defeated," "Soviet Rebuffed in UNESCO Parley." 139 Political representation at UNESCO was a contentious issue, and in the case of Noguchi artistic representation was carefully scrutinized as well. Initially, Noguchi was selected not to create a Japanese garden, but to design what Breuer intended as the Delegates Patio on the roof of a lower level that extended out below one of the three wings of the Secretariat. On his own initiative, Noguchi enlarged the parameters of his design to incorporate a larger garden area in the yard beyond this roof terrace. The UNESCO Committee agreed to his proposal but could not provide him with the necessary budget, and the plan dangled without resolution for some time while Noguchi considered the problem in terms of design: "For my part, it was not just to be a question of a path, stream, and waterfall; I wanted something luxurious. In other words, I wanted a sense of comfort. I began to think that I wanted to realize something of the spiritual quality of the Japanese garden here. I thought that I would like to place Japanese stones here." 140 The Japaneseness of the desired stones was not primarily a question of distinct aesthetic or mineralogical qualities but rather a cultural tradition focused on stone in Japanese history. The possession of a tradition of stonework is hardly unique to Japan. European cities have been remembered by some Japanese travelers for the cold, damp spaces that are distinctive of stone architecture. And white marble sculpture and architecture are frequently regarded as emblematic of classical Greek culture. But many have suggested that these cultures use stone in a manner quite opposed to that of East Asia. Japanese architecture and sculpture made relatively little use of stone until modern times. But harder granitic stones in their natural or less modified form (as opposed to the softer marble or limestone milled into building material in European tradition) have been objects of a sophisticated tradition of connoisseurship since medieval times in Japan. The garden tradition was focused on the selection and placement of individual stones, which were classified, ranked, named, and sometimes regarded as sacred. Moreover, lanterns, water basins, inscription stele, stupas, and roadside votive images were also carved out of stone, though often they were realized with a minimum of carving and polishing so as to preserve the natural sense of the stone corroded by the elements as the object of aesthetic delectation. And the Shinto cult of kami designated certain rocks or boulders as being the seats of divinities, at times with a sign no more obtrusive than a garland of woven straw. These traditions and others pertaining to stone in Japanese history were presented as a uniquely Japanese cultural complex. 141

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Meanwhile, in the context of prewar European sculpture, unmodified rocks "in themselves fantastically beautiful" were collected as objets trouvés by European Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti. And in England Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore explored the softly worn forms of pebbles and rocks as motifs in abstract sculpture. 142 Takiguchi Shuzô, who is regarded as one of the most important figures in the introduction of Surrealism to Japan, may have been aware of this recent European interest in relationships between natural stone and abstract sculpture. He urged Japanese sculptors to consider "new possibilities in stone sculpture to be gained by reconsidering the plastic form and function of objects such as Japanese garden rocks and stone lanterns" and praised one sculptor for "putting some life into the ancient hard substance that comes out of Japanese earth." 143 It was these modern and premodern cultures of uncarved stone that Noguchi wished to obtain in Japan: I thought I could learn much more by looking for the rocks here [in Japan]. It isn't just me looking for the rocks but looking for them the way people here do so. Japanese people know rocks very well. Rocks are a remarkable "taste" for people here. It is surprising how you can ask almost anybody in Japan where to find good rocks, and they will be able to direct you. There is no other country like this. 144

Thus, Noguchi represents Japan as exceptional among nations of the world owing to its possession of a unique cultural apparatus for discerning aesthetic value in rocks. On these grounds, with great resourcefulness, Noguchi turned to the Japanese government to solicit the additional funding required for the UNESCO project. But his American citizenship posed a potential obstacle to the Japanese patronage that he sought. In a letter to the Japanese ambassador to Switzerland, who also occupied an important post at UNESCO, Noguchi explained his identity as the maker of what was to be a Japanese garden: "At the time when the prospect of this work was first broached to me by M. Marcel Breuer, he told me that my selection was determined in part at least by my part Japanese birth." 145 This sales pitch pivots on a claim to Japanese national identity. Noguchi's language, however, is a telling reflection of the transnational character of his Japanese identity; he appeals to a Japanese government official by reporting a European American's estimation of his Japanese identity. But Noguchi had second thoughts about defining Breuer's view of his association with Japan in terms of "my part Japanese birth." He apparently became uncomfortable with the idea of claiming his involuntary biological identity as a credential. Before sending the letter, he corrected "my part Japanese birth" to read "my Japanese name," 146 referring to the name of his father that he had determined to use instead of his mother's name, Gilmour, at the moment when he decided to become a sculptor in his early twenties. Noguchi's letter to the ambassador continues:

It was realized that I was not a Japanese national but still I was someone they had confidence in working with. Mr. Breuer suggested at that time that the Government of Japan might be so magnanimous as to give assistance in spite of the fact of my not being a national, for the reason that whereas the garden would not be typically Japanese it would still have the essential character of Japanese gardens, which is inherent in my attitude.

While this passage represents the careful wording of one who is appealing to a potential patron, it is also a tortuous rationalization intimating the price exacted by a world divided by legal and racial images of nationality from one whose experiences and affections could not be defined by such borders. In a second letter to another Japanese government official soliciting support, Noguchi conveyed a different nuance. Reporting the support of Breuer and the other architects, he added: "They wished from the first to have an Asian among the artists invited. I was apparently selected by an international committee of the arts partly with this in mind, a compromise, as someone whose work they knew and could work with, the results of whose efforts would be both modern and Japanese in feeling, which is what they wanted." 147 Noguchi suggests here that the European and American authorities of the design of the UNESCO complex regarded him as both an acceptable representative of Japan and uniquely positioned to render this Japanese representation agreeable to the modern (European and American) perspectives that set the tone of the whole ensemble. Noguchi ultimately succeeded in obtaining cooperation and funding from the Japanese Foreign Ministry and the Japanese National Commission to UNESCO. Japanese involvement with UNESCO had begun as early as 1947, and the organization formally invited Japan to join several months before the San Francisco peace conference ended the U.S. Occupation in 1952. Very quickly, Japanese intellectuals and government personnel adopted a posture of vigorous participation in UNESCO activities. For instance, in 1956 Japanese representatives played an important role in the establishment of a special UNESCO project intended to increase "mutual understanding between Eastern and Western cultures and values." 148 Noguchi's proposal for UNESCO in Paris was apparently viewed as amenable to the Japanese diplomatic policy objective of "setting forth the ideal of building a nation dedicated to peace and culture." 149 Indeed, if Noguchi's view of Japanese culture was particularly appealing to EuroAmerican perspectives at UNESCO, as the artist claimed, then his Japanese patrons may have concluded that he was the right person for the job. This apparent advantage was sarcastically predicted by the Japanese columnist who had criticized Noguchi in 1952 with the comment, "Surely he is better suited to introducing Japan in America." Noguchi would have been most unlikely to obtain a commission to create a Japanese garden in Japan in the late

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1950s when he built the Jardin Japonais in Paris. To be sure, different sectors of elite Japanese society were involved in the decisions to reject his cenotaph in 1952 and to accept his Jardin Japonais in 1956—Hiroshima officials in the former case and Ministry of Education officials in the latter. Nonetheless, the fact that he failed to realize his design in Hiroshima but succeeded in securing support for his Japanese garden in Paris underscores the significance of the distinction between native and foreign audiences in representing Japanese culture. Noguchi's stated desire "to build a nation" in Japan was opposed, but his work in Paris was viewed as compatible with Japanese diplomatic policy. In a condition common to exiles, Noguchi's artistic role involved a disconnect between his viability as a provider of representations of Japanese identity abroad and the rejection of his efforts to do so in Japan. 150 The American quotient of his identity was an asset in his work presenting Japanese culture in such venues as Breuer's UNESCO in Paris but disqualified his work at Hiroshima. Having obtained the backing of the Japanese government, Noguchi consulted one of the most eminent figures in garden design in Japan at the time, the scholar and designer Shigemori Mirei. Shigemori directed Noguchi to a source of desirable stones in a river in Tokushima Prefecture on the island of Shikoku: "There were terrific stones lying all around. I shouted for joy. In the falling rain, I took an oilcloth umbrella and went looking all around at the stones, putting checks on the ones I liked."151 Additional stones that required cutting were worked at other Japanese sites: the fountain stone in Okayama Prefecture; stepping stones and water basins in Kyoto; the stone bridge, lanterns, and additional stepping stones from Shodoshima. But Noguchi prided himself on minimizing the number of rocks he purchased from garden suppliers or stone-cutting businesses, because he felt such preselected rocks would bear the taste of whoever chose them and he wanted the project to be his own work. 152 Noguchi made his selection of rocks according to a design he had worked up beforehand, and then the designated rocks were "set up in a trial area."153 In other words, they were arranged in a provisional composition as a sort of rehearsal on Japanese soil for the place making planned in Paris. In Paris, however, Noguchi found that, "French riggers could handle marble statuary but not rocks on a rough terrain," so he sent for three gardeners from Japan, one of whom brought seventy cherry tree saplings and other plantings typical of the Japanese garden.154 Noguchi deployed these various Japanese imports very differently in the two distinct parts of his UNESCO design. Breuer's initial design had stipulated a stone-paved patio and adjoining garden even before Noguchi's participation had been determined. While the idea for the garden was left undefined in the 1953 proposal, the design of the patio was already conceptualized at this stage. Its angular shape and position were determined by the fact that it was the roof of an extension of the lower level of the Secretariat. But it was also the architect who decided on a rougher aesthetic for the patio area than the glass and steel facade above. Breuer and his colleagues decided on the irregular paving stones, a serpentine wall

Isamu Noguchi |

of random ashlar masonry, and the dynamic concrete columns finished with a texture impressed into the concrete by the wood forms. Noguchi's task was essentially that of furnishing Breuer's patio space with a fountain, seating, and lighting. Noguchi's most conspicuous contribution to the patio design is the large vertical fountain stone, a roughly hewn monolith of nine tons (Figure 37). It is engraved with calligraphy, and some might find it reminiscent of an ancient stele of the sort that might commemorate an important historical or religious site in Japan. Unlike a stele, however, water is pumped through an invisible channel up to the top and then streams down across the face of the stone. Moreover, the calligraphy engraved here, which features the single enlarged character "wa" (harmony), is transformed beyond that which most people would recognize as "Japanese calligraphy." The engraving is based on Noguchi's own calligraphy, which he rendered in a style that looks more like Miro's abstraction on a tile mural on the other side of the Secretariat building than like calligraphy. Enhancing the sense of departure from calligraphy was Noguchi's decision to engrave the character in left-right reversal of its lexicographical form. Without stylistic and lexical transformations such as these, which rendered associations with conventional calligraphy ambiguous, this image would have been more likely to perform as a Japanese totem of peace rather than "I'lnsigne du Paix," as it was dubbed by one English reviewer. 155 Noguchi's long experience as a stage designer is apparent in the ritualistic ambiance he contrived for the fountain stone. It stands like a venerated totem at the head of a long ramp leading up from the garden. It is placed in a shallow rectangular pool of water, which flows into a channel in the ramp. Just to the side of the base of the monolith, Noguchi installed a small, flat block of polished black marble, which is quite exceptional, because rough granite is the rule elsewhere in the garden and patio. This stone suggests a step at which sacred rites might be performed in veneration to a symbol of peace. The fountain stone was not the only element in the Delegates Patio related to Japanese culture. A number of rocks were installed protruding from the flat paving surface in a manner reminiscent of the rocks positioned in a bed of gravel in some medieval Japanese rock gardens. Other rocks were roughly hewn, cored, and electrified to form lanterns, which, at one point, Noguchi termed ishidoro, alluding to the stone lanterns often found in Japanese gardens. 156 Noguchi also likened the grouping of concrete seating in one part of the patio to a space for a tea ceremony gathering. And he described the ramp leading down from the patio to the garden as both a rdka (the wooden veranda overlooking a garden on a shoinstyle building) and a hanamichi (the elevated walkway from the rear of a theater to the stage). But none of these allusions was realized in a manner that was conspicuous or even recognizable without Noguchi's exegesis. Indeed, the relationship between the Delegates Patio and the nation of Japan is rendered subtle by its close compatibility with Breuer's design as well as by Noguchi's creative transformation of his Japanese sources. This was not the case, however, with the garden below the patio. Here, Noguchi

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F i g u r e 3 7 . Isamu Noguchi. Waterfall Rock, Delegates Patio. 1956-1958. U N E S C O Headquarters, Paris. Granite from Japan. Courtesy of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

Isamu Noguchi |

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acknowledged, he "paid a more obvious homage to the Japanese garden." 157 The basic plan of the lower garden consists of rounded amoebic forms defining the curbed periphery of the pond, rounded mounds of earth, and patches of gravel, lawn, and paving (Figure 38). Stylistically this composition suggests biomorphic Surrealism, but the experience of walking through the garden and indeed most photographs of it suggest a Japanese garden as recognizable as postcard images from Japan— the pruned pines, the rocks embedded in gravel, a rock composition representing the Isle of the Immortals (Horai), the goldfish, the stone wash basins with their bamboo ladles, and the granite slab footbridge (Figure 39). Moreover, when one encounters these Japanese motifs, they are likely to appear against the backdrop not of the rough stony areas of Breuer's design in the area of the Delegates Patio, but of the upper levels of the facade, which are an intricate pattern of glass and steel. It has become somewhat customary in Japan and elsewhere to insert a "traditional" garden at the foot of a "modern" skyscraper, but when Noguchi experimented with this mannerism in 1958, the "traditional Japanese garden" still seemed to belong with relatively

Figure 3 8 . Isamu

small and modest unpainted wooden structures of temples or villas in Kyoto. Not only did

Noguchi. Jardin Japonais.

Noguchi reproduce Japanese garden motifs on Parisian soil, but he did so in jarring juxta-

1956-1958. UNESCO

position with a building that was admired as "uncompromisingly modern." 158 If the garden

Headquarters, Paris.

was materially, financially, inspirationally, and semantically Japanese, this national identity

Courtesy of The Isamu

was sensationalized by its sharp contrast to its seeming antithesis.

Noguchi Foundation,

Noguchi had anticipated that his garden rocks' possession of both ancientness and newness would produce a great impression in the Paris-centered art world. 159 But he would remember with bitterness that at the time of the opening of the new UNESCO Headquarters, the meager attention given his garden design by the French press consisted of a short notice that "chastised him . . . for affecting a 'Japanese garden' when he was an American citizen."160 The British architectural critic Reyner Banham wrote, "How far this is really Zen, Japanese or only the fashionable ingenuity that has always marked Noguchi's work is hard to decipher." 161 Another critic complained, "The older message that Japan so often suggests . . . appears here, but less convincingly, and with less purity than in more traditional

Inc.

Figure 3 9 . Isamu Noguchi. Hôrai

Grouping

at Jardin Japonais. 1956-1958. UNESCO Headquarters, Paris. Rocks from Japan. Photograph by Isamu Noguchi. Courtesy of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

Isa mu N o g u c h i |

Japanese work." 162 But one of the most stinging responses was surely the slapstick mockery by Noguchi's erstwhile friend the sculptor Alexander Calder. Noguchi had helped Calder with the operation of his ensemble of puppets The Circus in Paris in the 1920s. During the war, when Noguchi's solidarity with Japanese Americans led him to the incarceration camp in the Arizona desert, Calder was proclaimed a national hero at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Calder is an American. The most conspicuous characteristics of his art are those which have been attributed to America's frontier heritage—that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things . . . that restless, nervous energy . . . that buoyancy and exuberance which come with freedom. 1 6 3

In the late 1950s Noguchi and Calder found themselves together in Paris as the only American artists commissioned to create works for UNESCO. Calder's sixteen-foot mobile of painted steel plate and rod was initially planned for installation in the area where Noguchi realized his Japanese garden. But both artists "violently objected," it was reported, "to having their works juxtaposed." 164 Calder's work consisted of a mobile mounted on a large pyramidal base, and it was repositioned elsewhere on the UNESCO grounds, according to Calder, because otherwise Noguchi "would probably cover the base with powdered sugar and call it Fujiyama." Calder claimed that a can of paint called "JAPALAC" that had been ordered for use on Calder's metal sculpture was mistakenly delivered to Noguchi. Calder amused himself by spinning this incident into a pun on the Japanese national character of Noguchi's work: "[Someone] had put all the Japalac in the Jap, alack, rock garden." This sarcasm cruelly ridiculed Noguchi's claim to Japanese identity with the insinuation that his Japanese expressivity was merely kitsch. 165 Noguchi foresaw the vulnerability of his garden to such criticism. While in Japan collecting the UNESCO stones in 1957, he wrote: The most important thing that I have learned is that in order to make something really good that is Japanese, you cannot make something that seems Japanese. In other words, Japónica is not the answer. If it is really good, you don't immediately think it looks Japanese. When you go far away [from Japan] and try to make something in a Japanese style, it inevitably comes out as Japónica. Coming to Japan and walking around looking at gardens, I came to see how important it was not to do that sort of thing. If you remove that sort of thing from your work, it simply becomes something of quality rather than something Japanese. I felt that the former is what I have to make. 166

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Noguchi's thinking here is very close to the sentiments of the Japanese architects who censured what they regarded as the foreign perspective and superficial Japaneseness of his work in the 1953 panel discussion previously quoted. This similarity was not a coincidence. The architect Sakakura Junzó had remarked during that exchange that Noguchi was "moving in a dangerous direction," because his work "looks Japanese to Japanese viewers." In the essay quoted above, Noguchi thanked Sakakura specifically for his advice regarding the design of Japanese gardens overseas. 167 Thus, his new sensitivity to the abhorred Japónica might have been the result of a frank discussion with one of his critics. In a later reference to his U N E S C O project, Noguchi claimed that he had never made a detailed study of the conventions of Japanese garden design; rather, his interest was in adapting its elements to his own expression. And he noted "the contempt of the Japanese for those directors who make 'Japanese' films for the foreign market." 168 In a sense, Noguchi's objectives at U N E S C O were at cross purposes. On the one hand, the aims of Japanese diplomacy required a display of Japanese cultural identity that would be clearly recognized and favorably received by a broad audience of non-Japanese viewers. On the other hand, his desire to avoid the appearance of Japónica required the utmost subtlety and restraint in the use of motifs that foreigners would appreciate as emblematic of Japanese identity. The place Noguchi designed at U N E S C O was split into two sectors, each satisfying one of these incompatible goals and perhaps inevitably falling short of the other: the Delegates Patio avoided Japónica, while the lower garden presented Japanese culture in an easily recognizable form. Commenting on his U N E S C O experience, Noguchi wrote: "To learn but still to control so strong a tradition is a challenge. My effort was to find a way to link that ritual of rocks which comes down to us through the Japanese from the dawn of times to our modern times and needs." 169 In this statement of his ambition at UNESCO, Noguchi seems to espouse a conventional orientalist opposition between a controlling modernity and a to-be-controlled Asian tradition. But his stance arose partly in response to Japanese attacks on the alleged superficiality of his appropriations from Japanese tradition. In terms of the "control" of Japanese tradition, Noguchi succeeded where references to Japan were subtle in his design for the Delegates Patio and failed where they were obvious in his Jardin Japonais. Later he protested that at U N E S C O he had "never wanted to make a purely Japanese garden" after all, 170 and subsequent references to Japanese gardens in Noguchi's place designs would be masked by various interpretive transformations. Manhattan: To Possess the Japanese Garden After UNESCO, Noguchi would never again venture so literal a rendition of that which could be stereotyped as "the traditional Japanese garden." But he did continue to return to Japan "like a beggar or a thief" and make off with chunks of the Japanese earth, though their destination was the United States, not Europe. The places in the United States where he

installed rocks from Japan include a plaza in Fort Worth, Texas (1961), a fountain near Wall Street in Manhattan (1964), a public square in downtown Seattle (1975), a sculpture park in upstate New York (1977), the grounds of a museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1983), and the garden of his own residence (and later museum) in Long Island City, New York (1980s). At the plaza of Chase Manhattan Bank, Noguchi installed seven dark eroded basalt rocks from a river south of Kyoto (Figure 40). This work was neither paid for by Japanese sponsors nor representative of Japan in any official sense. Noguchi's statements about the work indicate that he was more interested in transforming the Japanese garden tradition here than in paying homage to it, and indeed this work looks much less like what most people would regard as "the traditional Japanese garden" than his Jardin Japonais. Nonetheless, the Chase water garden was associated with Japanese culture in terms of its material, formal design, conceptual basis, and reception. Here I investigate these associations with Japan and explore what functions they may have been expected to fulfill for the corporation that paid for the project as well as for Noguchi himself. After its formation by a merger of the Chase National Bank and the Bank of The Manhattan Company in 1955, the Chase Manhattan Bank became the nation's second largest bank. The decision to bring employees from nine different locations together in one headquarters building in the Wall Street area was calculated to strengthen this district's viability as the nation's financial center in the face of the decline with which it was then threatened. Other firms were deserting Wall Street in the late fifties, but John J. McCloy, then chairman and chief executive officer of the bank, decided against moving out, because he felt that "it had some significance not only to the city but to the nation to keep in existence this area, where, in and out of those narrow streets for a period of a century, the progress of the country had been

financed."171

The preservation of the nation's financial center at Wall Street was realized, however, by destroying some of those historic narrow streets in order to create a new superblock for a skyscraper that attracted much attention for breaking records of scale. It was touted as the sixth tallest building in Manhattan (and thus the world, since the other five were also located in Manhattan). It was said to house the most extensive banking operation ever assembled under one roof, including the world's largest computerized check processing system. Its vault was reported to be nearly the size of a football field, larger than any other bank vault in the world, and it contained "a sizable fraction of the nation's securities." 172 The public was assured that this subterranean chamber was "ingeniously anchored to bedrock [so] that even the most fearful tidal wave or other rude act of nature couldn't sweep it down the bay." 173 Even the physical move of the personnel and remarkable assets of this corporation from its old quarters to its new tower was reported as "probably the most expensive in the history of US business." 174 But the new bank was also heralded for what seemed like the radical newness of its design by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (Figure 41).

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F i g u r e 4 0 . Isamu

"Stuffy" was the word c o m m o n l y used to describe the prewar masonry buildings and dark

Noguchi. Sunken

wood-paneled interiors where most banking had been conducted in the financial district,

for Chase

Garden

Manhattan

Bank Plaza. 1961-1964.

including Chase's previous quarters. The rectangular slab profile and the silvery metallic sheen of the new Chase's anodized aluminum panels stood out against the older, lower,

New York City. Basalt

ornate towers in the area. O n the day of the opening ceremony, David Rockefeller, the bank's

rocks from Japan and

president and single largest shareholder, "acted as barker on a helicopter tour [giving] a

granite paving from

running commentary for reporters." He asserted that Bunshaft's design employed "new con-

Vermont. Diameter:

cepts of architecture to express a contemporary image of banking." 1 7 5 O n e journalist wrote

60 feet. Courtesy of

that the "starkly imposing shaft of aluminum and glass" was " s y m b o l i c ] of the aggressive

The Isamu Noguchi

new spirit" that Rockefeller and his staff instilled at Chase. 1 7 6

Foundation, Inc.

In an unprecedented thirty pages of coverage of the new skyscraper,

Architectural

Isamu

Noguchi I

1

Forum declared that "the big, broad-shouldered Chase stated crisply the mood and abilities of a newer age. It was not so much a cathedral of money as a powerful and superbly equipped machine for handling it." 177 Another widely reported feature of the Chase headquarters was the decoration of the interior with hundreds of newly purchased artworks, "a number of them relentlessly avant-garde, reflecting Rockefeller's taste." 178 One journalist expressed his enthusiasm for the new office tower with a violent metaphor: "King Arthur drew Excalibur from the stone. In contrast, David Rockefeller . . . has struck a gleaming aluminum mace into the dark stone of New York's Wall Street." 179 Architectural Forum concluded that the new tower was "a milestone, perhaps even an end point, in the best development of the American skyscraper, which for decades has been the summit

immajEjs.:

meeting place of business, engineering, and art." 180 What purpose did Noguchi's Japanese rocks serve in this bombastic American corporate culture? I would like to return to this question after considering Noguchi's concurrent work on another American bank also designed by Gordon Bunshaft, the much smaller and more provincial First National Bank of Fort Worth, Texas. In i960 Noguchi traveled to Japan in order to obtain stones for the Fort Worth project (Figure 42). In an interview with a Japanese journalist that appeared in a popular weekly magazine at this time, Noguchi described some of the formidable technical problems involved in bringing boulders down from a mountain near the town of Tsukuba for use in Fort Worth. He also commented on the cultural recontextualization involved in exporting rocks: When I take rocks to America, I want to create an environment for them that matches them perfectly in feeling. In Japan, they are one with what surrounds them. Since from ancient times they come to be something like gods (kami-sama mitai ni natte), one has the feeling that you can't move them no matter what. I want to obtain that broad vision in my own work.181 Noguchi was extracting rocks from a Japanese mountain for

Figure 4 1 . Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings,

export to Texas at this time, so it was with some irony that he

and Merrill. One Chase Manhattan Plaza, i960. New

affirmed the rootedness and immovability of such rocks. Never-

York City. Courtesy Chase Manhattan Archives.

F i g u r e 4 2 . Isamu Noguchi examining stones in Japan for his sculptures for First National City Bank, Fort Worth, Texas, c. i960. Photograph by Miki Jun. Courtesy of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

Isamu Noguchi |

161

theless, his broader aim in place making in Fort Worth was to create an intensity of relatedness to the new site that was worthy of their former oneness with their natural environment in Japan. To Noguchi's assent, his interviewer deduced that no matter how much one may like old Japanese gardens such as the famous stone garden at Ryuanji in Kyoto, they could never be recreated as is "in the midst of tall buildings." Kondo Hidezo, the interviewer, who was also an illustrator, expressed the absurdity of such a quixotic endeavor by sketching a cartoon; a few squat garden rocks lie in an empty lot beneath a cluster of anonymous skyscrapers with smoke belching into the sky above (Figure 43). 182 Sure enough, when Noguchi

F i g u r e 4 3 . Kondo

installed the Japanese rocks in the raw space around newly constructed buildings in Fort

Hidezo, "You could

Worth, he did so without any explicit reference to Japanese gardens or the mountain where

try and make a stone

he had found them. Indeed, Noguchi handled most of the Japanese rocks that he brought

garden in a place like

to Fort Worth more like quarry material; they were hewn, fluted, stacked, and cantilevered

this, b u t . . . " Cartoon

(Figure 44). He generated the forms of this rugged grouping not by considering their place

published with his

of origin but by contemplating themes associated with Texas such as oil derricks, water

interview of Isamu

towers, and Native American totem poles.

183

At one point he likened the major components

Noguchi, Shukan

of this ensemble to a "gateway," "an energy symbol (money is energy)," and "a figure like a

Yomiuri, June 19,

man."

184

He further maintained that "only in Texas could there have been this space and

carved pieces of this size to put in it," and he named the work The Texas Sculpture.185 Thus, virtually all vestiges of the Japanese context that was the source of the rocks were abandoned as irrelevant to the radically different context of the installation. This radical recontextualization, however, did not change the material fact of the Japanese provenance of the stone. And this was a much noted element of the work in Texas at the time of its construction and completion in 1961. Noguchi's contract specified "stone native to the Islands of Japan." 186 Gordon Bunshaft, who commissioned Noguchi to do this project as well as the Chase sunken garden, traveled with Noguchi to Japan to inspect and approve the work. He wrote to a colleague in the United States of the "interesting story of these huge pieces being carved in a village surrounded by rice fields in this strange country of Japan for a city in Texas" and added that he had suggested to Noguchi that the Japanese environment where the work was created be photographed. Back in Texas, an important customer wrote to the chairman of the board of the bank: "We would be proud to have in our collection a sphere which he had made from the same stone, from far away in Japan, that formed your famous Noguchi sculpture." But if Noguchi's Japanese stone held exotic appeal, it also provoked xenophobic condemnation; the sculpture was the subject of protests in a Fort Worth newspaper against the "made in Japan"

i960.

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F i g u r e 4 4 . Isamu Noguchi. The Texas Sculpture. Detail. 1960-1961. Entrance plaza of First National City Bank Plaza, Fort Worth, Texas. Granite. Height: 20 feet. Courtesy of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.

sculpture during a "buy American campaign." On the defensive, the chairman of the board wrote back that most of the budget for the sculpture was spent in the United States, that Noguchi was primarily an American sculptor, and that the desired type of stone could only be found in Japan. Thus, this Texan placement of Japanese stones was the occasion for both a confirmation of the agreeable sense of distance between Japan and the United States and fear of the economic threat posed by the transgression of this distance. The global and national position of the Chase Manhattan Bank, however, was very different from that of the Fort Worth National Bank. Chase was a major player in the expansion of American business overseas in the postwar years. In the 1960s it increased overseas operations dramatically, serving the foreign ventures of American firms as well as foreign customers. David Rockefeller was the figurehead of this internationalization, and his business negotiations with heads of state all over the world were the subject of much media attention. In the mid-1960s, foreign leaders visiting the United States were said routinely to schedule meetings with Rockefeller, who, according to a peer in the New York financial community, "always [had] an Emperor or Shah or some other damn person over here." 187

I sa m u Nog uch i |

Rockefeller's internationalization of Chase holdings was reflected in the bank's art collection, which would eventually contain works from over sixty nations. 188 Hence there was little risk of a "buy American campaign" on the threshold of this citadel of international finance. Thus, while Noguchi had no desire to return to his more literal rendition of the "Japanese garden" in Paris, the Chase site held the capacity for the expression of a much more conspicuous Japanese imagery than did Fort Worth. The foregoing gives a sense of why influential individuals at Chase Manhattan Bank might have been amenable to Noguchi's proposal to import Japanese rocks for its new headquarters, and I shall turn to the benefits his design was perceived to yield for its sponsor shortly. As for the artist's sentiments regarding Japanese materials, some of Noguchi's comments and actions suggest that he would have been opposed to the very notion of importing natural Japanese rocks to Wall Street and installing them in a manner reminiscent of prototypes in the Japanese garden tradition. He frequently associated Japan with the media of clay, rocks, and earth, while his New York environment motivated him to focus on a series of sculptures in 1958 and 1959 made out of industrial metals including the silvery anodyzed aluminum that Gordon Bunshaft selected for the facade of the Chase tower at this time: "It seemed absurd . . . to be working with rocks and stones in New York, where walls of glass and steel are our horizon, and our landscape is that of boxes piled high in the air." 189 But this was precisely the incongruity Noguchi undertook at Chase, as though bringing to life the caricature of garden rocks beneath skyscrapers that illustrated his i960 interview (Figure 45). Moreover, according to Sano Touemon, a professional garden designer based in Kyoto who assisted Noguchi on this and other projects, Noguchi obtained these rocks on his own initiative before the bank or the architect had approved his proposal. 190 By the time he finally got the nod to proceed, the rocks had been acquired by another purchaser. Noguchi was so furious that he complained to the mayor of Kyoto. The conflict was not resolved until Sano worked out a deal with the stone merchant, and the rocks were retrieved for shipment to New York. Sano cited this incident as an example of how Noguchi's American ways sometimes got him into trouble in Japan. Thus, if some of the artist's statements about the UNESCO project suggest that its link to Japan was primarily a consequence of its patronage, this was certainly not the case with his water garden for Chase. Overcoming many obstacles, Noguchi insisted on bringing these rocks from Japan to New York. New York was a city of much greater personal and professional importance to Noguchi than Fort Worth or even Paris. By the early 1960s, it was the city where he had lived and worked more than any other for nearly forty years. It was here that he had started his career as an artist in 1924, when he assumed the name Noguchi and attended the workshop of an Italian immigrant sculptor whose extraordinary kindness Isamu would later explain by noting that "Italians were not favored in New York. He sympathized with my position as a child of mixed parentage." 191 And while Noguchi claimed that his American environment

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Figure 45. Isamu Noguchi. Sunken Garden at Chase Manhattan Bank. 1961-1964. New York City. Basalt rocks and granite paving. Diameter: 60 feet. Photograph by Lee Boltin. Courtesy Chase Manhattan Archives.

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lacked the "closeness of earth" that he associated with Japan, New York had other qualities that he valued. Asked in i960 whether he wished to return to Japan, Noguchi replied: I would miss certain kinds of communication—the contact with other artists' thinking which encourages me to follow the sequence of my own thoughts. We all walk one step after another, you know. We all affect each other by supplying footsteps. To live permanently in Japan would ultimately be a hardship for me because I would lose communication with people of similar backgrounds to mine—that is, people like Martha Graham and Bucky Fuller. 192

Thus, Noguchi experienced a sense of community in this city of steel and glass; for him it was a place of resonating footsteps. At about the time he began designing his Chase garden in 1961, he acquired an old factory across the East River from Manhattan in Long Island City and began work converting it into a studio and residence. But, in order to "make this habitable," Noguchi hired "a skilled carpenter from Japan." 193 A visitor some years later described this studio as "a place removed" and "a desolate red brick rectangle in a desolate section." He noted a sharp distinction between the portion of the factory devoted to sculptural work and that reserved for the artist's living quarters. The latter was "a world in which the Oriental takes precedence."194 Thus, in this period Noguchi went about dwelling in his New York community by importing something of the vision of "the Japanese home" that he had sought unsuccessfully in Japan in the early 1950s. But he pursued this Japanese sense of home in a particularly inhospitable American place. A similar pattern was operative in his work at Chase: he sought some contact with the warmth of the Japanese earth by thrusting large chunks of it into the glass and steel jaws of New York's skyscrapers. Noguchi seems to have been energized by this extraordinary conjunction of a common emblem of Japanese identity (the Japanese rock garden) and a common emblem of American identity (the skyscraper). He had been retained as a consultant in the early stages of the design process at Chase and had some influence in this configuration of the plaza. Nevertheless, with Bunshaft's sixty-four-story glass and aluminum tower looming above and the vast flat, white surface of the surrounding plaza, the sixty-foot-diameter glass-walled sunken well was a difficult space to render into a meaningful place of affiliation. Reportedly disparaged as a "sunken art hole" by the architect Eero Saarinen, 195 Noguchi's well was essentially the bottom surface of an overwhelming vertically tiered shaft of space. Noguchi's solution was to conceptualize his design as a horizontal relief to be viewed from above as well as from the sides. The well was recessed a full story below the plaza and walled with glass to introduce daylight into the large public banking concourse beneath the plaza. Thus, Noguchi's installation could be viewed through the glass from the banking

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concourse, from the edge of the plaza above, as well as from the windows of the office tower higher above. Noguchi also hoped to extend the reach of his design into the height above the well by designing a large two-legged sculpture of carved granite elements combined on a posttensioned technique. He was very bitter when the commission for the plaza sculpture was given instead to Jean Dubuffet. 196 The particular rocks Noguchi obtained in Kyoto for installation in the sunken well were very unusual garden rocks; they were eroded into distinctive and intricate wavelike forms. While Noguchi refrained from carving or constructing these rocks, he attempted to sculpt their setting in the well in such a way as to give them strength to hold their own in this overscaled space. The stress was on the possessive when Noguchi later dubbed this design "my Ryuanji," referring to the famous rock garden in Kyoto. 197 He continued: "It is an utterly modern garden. The chief interest here is the use of rocks in a non-traditional way." He was determined to remold aspects of the Japanese garden tradition in response to the modern spatiality he was up against in Manhattan. While the rocks at Ryuanji seem embedded deeply into the ground like the tips of icebergs, Noguchi attempted to position his rocks so that they would seem "to levitate out of the ground." 198 Using small blocks of light gray granite quarried in Vermont, he composed a bed of cobblestone paving in intersecting concentric circles. This relief was perforated with wells for movable planters as well as nozzles for fountain jets. Each circle of this undulating surface was mounded into a round protuberance rising slightly above the level of the water flowing across the paving. The rocks were placed on these rounded summits. During a break from his supervision of fifteen workmen hoisting the rocks into place in 1962, Noguchi told a reporter, "Instead of being sunk in the g r o u n d . . . they're volatile. They're bursting out of the ground right up at you. They might have shot out of a volcano. I'm thinking of calling the sculpture 'Exploding Universe.' We live in an expanding universe; we're going to the moon. I've built a moonscape." 199 And ruminating on the effect of his design on a quiet Sunday soon after its completion, Noguchi wrote, "The great building emits an eerie music, and I can see that looking down on the garden with its water flowing will be like looking into a turbulent seascape from which immobile rocks take off for outer space."200 Thus, in Noguchi's thinking, the travesty of garden rocks overwhelmed and trivialized by skyscrapers was averted by presenting the rocks in such a way that they would enter into a muscular engagement with the tremendous space above them by means of space age allusions. Noguchi assessed his accomplishment at Chase in terms of an extraordinary distance traveled from Japan: "The origin of [the plaza] may be said to be Japan. I like to think, however, that its link is more to a distant star."201 In part, this distance seems to have been freighted with Noguchi's desire to avert the occlusion of his individual artistic voice in this place design by a strong resemblance to such Japanese historical models as Ryuanji. But, in view of Noguchi's confession that, when he appropriated the Japanese earth, he felt something like a thief or a beggar, perhaps one can see the satisfaction he imagined in remov-

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ing Japanese earth far away from Japan as a move away from the Japanese society that disapproved of his handling of its terra firma. In both of these senses, Noguchi's import and transformation of Japanese rocks at Chase was an exercise in possessing these rocks and the values he associated with them. Nevertheless, Noguchi's intentions were often contradicted by others' interests in the places he designed. What sense of place did Noguchi's patrons at Chase Manhattan Bank read in his water garden? Chase Manhattan Bank had purchased two and a half acres of extremely valuable land in the densely built financial district only to leave 70 percent of the lot practically empty. Doing so was economically advantageous, however, because the provision of the large public plaza earned the bank zoning approval to build its tower on the remaining 30 percent of the plot without any light-saving stepbacks and to a much greater height than would otherwise have been permitted. Rockefeller represented the plaza as an act of philanthropy and public relations: "Because there are stretches of pavement in the congested financial district which get less than twenty-four hours of sunshine in a full year, we felt that an open plaza would be a welcome addition to the scene

We have been told frequently—and we like

to think it is true—that public-spirited gestures of this kind have reinforced our slogan about the 'friend at Chase Manhattan.' " 2 0 2 The promotion of the plaza assumes language here that resists the aggressiveness popularly associated with the intrusion of the bank tower into its environment. The references of Noguchi's design to the Japanese garden tradition may have been seen as complementary to this stance of corporate altruism. Despite Noguchi's emphasis on his transformation of Japanese prototypes at Chase, he did not erase allusions to Japanese garden traditions. His design suggests Japanese precedents in its conception as a spectacle rather than a space for physical entry and in its composition primarily of stone with a minimum of plant matter. But perhaps most conspicuously, the asymmetrical placement of uncarved rocks on a white plane with linear patterns relates Noguchi's design to prototypes such as the stone garden at Ryuanji that he acknowledged. Sure enough, most observers seemed to sense the water garden's relationship to Japan, whether in the New York Times' ironic description of the plaza's opening festivities in 1963 ("Thousands Munch Popcorn in Oriental Setting") or an art historian's exegesis of Asian cultural allusions. 203 Indeed, at times the association of the rock installation with Japan could be weighted about the same as its association with Noguchi. Thus, in its 1964 annual report, the bank announced its "Japanese water garden, created by the noted sculptor, Isamu Noguchi." 204 By the late 1950s, "the Japanese garden" was familiar to many Americans as a landscape motif associated with calm, restorative natural beauty. For example, there had been a Japanese garden and tea house since 1908 at the estate of David Rockefeller's father, grandfather, and brother in Kykuit, New York. 205 Although Noguchi may have imagined the rocks bursting out of the garden like an "exploding universe," the reception of his work was more in keeping with the conventional reading of the Japanese garden in terms of restful qualities. The Chase

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garden was seen as "a meditation space in the midst of urban frenzy," "a tranquil pool," and "a place for contemplation amidst the confusion of New York's Wall Street area." 206 Such associations of Noguchi's garden with calmness and with Japan strike a sharp contrast with the admiration of the Chase tower as "relentlessly avant-garde" and for possessing an "aggressive new spirit" and the sensational image of Rockefeller striking "a gleaming aluminum mace into the dark stone of New York's Wall Street." This contrast between Noguchi's water garden and the skyscraper is analogous to the contrast between Okada Kenzo's gentle "oriental abstraction" and the more dynamic and intense forms of abstraction of his European American colleagues in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism. However, the juxtaposition of Japanese serenity and American vitality at the plaza of Chase Manhattan Bank had an additional function; the former was positioned where it could serve as a palliative for the excess of the latter. Perhaps Noguchi's material and cultural import from Japan was embraced by his corporate American patrons as a salutary means of softening the stresses produced by American capitalism. If Rockefeller's tower could be experienced as an exhilarating sword plunge, perhaps Noguchi's plaza cushioned the blow with a soothing vision of serenity. The Chase water garden marks a transfer not only of Japanese rocks but of certain design motifs from Japanese garden prototypes into the possession of an American bank that was well-known for its avid pursuit of accounts in nations all over the world. Noguchi conceived and facilitated this international transaction, and he was generally credited as "the artist." But he would remember with some bitterness that the opening ceremony of the Chase plaza was no different from that of UNESCO Headquarters; none of the official speakers bothered to mention his name at either occasion. 207 If Noguchi's creative work at this place was energized by a desire to possess a certain earthy quality from Japan by transporting it across a vast physical and spiritual distance to his American city, his act of possession was by no means unchallenged. As a major player in contemporary international finance, Chase Manhattan Bank was entirely accustomed to importing commodities from foreign nations to the United States, and scrutiny of the artist's personal identity was not necessary to justify foreign acquisitions by this multinational bank. From Rockefeller's point of view, Noguchi's conception of the Japanese garden tradition was Chase Manhattan Bank's possession: "Every company has an opportunity to project a corporate identity that is clear, forceful, and unmistakably individual.... The arts provide a fertile field for building the corporation's image." 208 The G r o u n d as a M o d e r n M e d i u m "The earth is modern, not old-fashioned; the ground is a modern medium." 2 0 9 Noguchi made this comment in the context of a discussion about sculptural materials in the last decade of his life. He affirmed his belief in "the idea that an intrinsic quality resides in materials" in distinction from other sculptors who "mak[e] things in an indirect way with mate-

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rials." Here Noguchi may have been referring to such sculptors as John Chamberlain, whose work with old automobile parts he mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. He suggested that the view that such materials were modern was shortsighted. Noguchi acknowledged others "who have more or less come around to my point of view," indicating artists such as Robert Morris associated with the Earth Art movement. They worked with the earth, but Noguchi could not sympathize with their propensity to work in deserts and other remote locations. The art he was most interested in, Noguchi explained, "has to do with people's places in the world, their sense of belonging." These comments of 1979 constitute a clear statement of the objectives Noguchi had pursued earlier in his career in the four place-making episodes examined in this chapter. I will conclude by considering further implications of the idea that the ground is a modern medium used by the sculptor in the making of places. Noguchi developed his unusual ability to fathom the earth itself as a medium partly as a response to feelings of estrangement from a satisfying sense of place. In an earlier interview, he declared, "I'm like a soldier in a campaign in the desert—far off, but always with the idea that there's some place I'm going back to someday . . . where I won't be alone, chasing the enemy on a camel."210 During his itinerary from Hiroshima and Kita Kamakura in Japan in the early 1950s to Paris in the late 1950s and New York in the early 1960s, Noguchi approached places of affiliation, but he also withdrew to the solitary hunt. In his place making at each of these contexts, however, the medium of the earth was marked in one way or another with some vision of a Japanese homeland. At Hiroshima, Noguchi sought a personal rebirth by inserting his own name in the subterranean womb where he envisioned commemorating the Japanese nuclear dead. At Kita Kamakura, he burrowed into the side of a hill in search of a Japanese sense of dwelling. He pursued his interest in the Japanese garden tradition at Paris by obtaining the support of the Japanese government to import Japanese rocks and create a "jardinjaponais." And finally Noguchi displaced Japanese rocks to the American city of steel and glass skyscrapers that was the location of the community that, he professed, commanded his greatest loyalties at this time in his life. Noguchi's late statement regarding the Japanese earth as a modern medium of place making poses a striking contrast to such mythopoetic linkages of the Japanese earth and the Japanese people as that advanced by the popular Japanese nationalist writer Watanabe Shoichi at about the same time. Watanabe claimed that "the extraordinary attachment of the Japanese to their islands" was a semiconscious awareness that "the soil of those islands has been fertilised by the urine and faesces of gods and goddesses with whom we are connected by blood." This scatological communion of the nation with its place on the earth is proffered as a fundamental basis of Japanese national identity: We Japanese ourselves have received life and have grown by eating the cereals produced as a result. . . . We in our turn give back to that soil our own urine and faeces

By this means our children are born, are bred and flourish. That fact lies

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in the profoundest depths of our awareness. The earth of Japan is our ancestors themselves, and if there is an immortality for human beings, it flourishes in the soil of Japan (Nihon no tsuchi).211

It is the involuntariness and fixity of this allegory of belonging and rootedness that is disavowed when one approaches the soil as a modern medium in the sense of something to mold and sculpt willfully according to one's own individualistic sense of ideal belonging. Nonetheless, like Watanabe, Noguchi idealized a notion of homeland through a physical relationship between the body and the soil. Moreover, the intensity of Noguchi's engagement with this earth suggested that he too attached a metaphysical importance to the earthy substance of the homeland. In the contexts I have examined, Noguchi's bicultural position did not lead him to disavow or deny the proposition that artistic identity should be fundamentally contingent to national identity; rather, it complicated his implementation of this ideal. His continuing absorption with various forms of the Japanese earth was a means by which he could obtain possession of a dimension of his identity that he defined by association with Japan. Sometimes he exercised his compulsion to come in contact with the Japanese earth as though such contact could be a solitary endeavor divorced from the living human population that was Japan. But this land was claimed as property by the society living there, and Japanese critics had deterritorialized Noguchi's standing by declaring him an outsider in 1952 and 1953. Indeed, in each of the four contexts where Noguchi endeavored to create places of affiliation, he encountered resistance from other parties invested in the places he wished to design. The American quotient of Noguchi's identity was ruled unacceptable in his bid to design the Hiroshima cenotaph for the victims of the American nuclear attack. His attempt to create a Japanese sense of home at Kita Kamakura was accepted as a representation of Japanese life neither by his Japanese wife nor by the voyeuristic journalists who reported on his efforts. In both cases, Noguchi's ambition to make places in Japan was disabled by negative judgments from Japanese perspectives of artistic nationalism. Nevertheless, a few years later, in the 1950s, Noguchi successfully appealed to Japanese government officials that he was uniquely well suited to represent Japanese cultural identity in Paris for foreign viewers. Under these conditions it is perhaps understandable that Noguchi internalized the dislocative action that his efforts to possess Japanese earth encountered in the early 1950s. Thus, the initiative to display Japanese rocks at Chase Manhattan Bank was very much Noguchi's own determination. Indeed, he launched his plan to import Japanese rocks to New York before obtaining his patrons' approval, seemingly motivated by the thought that the transfer of these rocks far away from Japan would be a transfer of them into his personal possession. But his act of possession did not yield a place that he would experience as a focus of belonging. Visiting the sunken garden soon after it was completed, he experienced it as

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"a turbulent seascape" provoking the question "can it be that nature is no longer real for us or, in any case, out of scale?" 212 The four place-making experiences of Isamu Noguchi that I have investigated comprise only one portion of an energetic itinerary among many other scattered places that he pursued until his death in 1988. The many place-making episodes occurring late in Noguchi's career suggest many possible epilogues for this chapter. Most, however, would indicate that the dislocative and transnational qualities of Noguchi's earlier approach to the creation of places continued. Noguchi's sculptural work gravitated increasingly in his late years to the production of large, roughly fractured rock sculptures, starting with such works as Deepening Knowledge of 1969 (see Figure 25). Many of these works were largely autonomous from any specific place. Sometimes the raw rock material was acquired without any particular site of installation in mind and only later shaped for a specific place. Other works were shaped before any place was determined but subsequently installed permanently by the artist in specific contexts. Still others were acquired by collectors or museums after the artist's death and installed by other individuals. Some of these autonomous sculptures are substantial chunks of the earth weighing many tons and requiring considerable resources and powerful equipment to create, transport, and install. So huge are these boulders that they almost seem to constitute a sense of place in and of themselves. But despite their great girth and their display of the evidence of their geological formation somewhere in the earth, many of these sculptures were left unmarked by any trace of an origin in a specifically Japanese or other cultural context. The viewer experiences these chunks of rock that are so much heavier than his or her own body without any means of determining their place of origin and without assurance that they will not be relocated to some other museum or venue at some point in the future. Speaking of such stone objects in the 1979 discussion of sculptural materials, Noguchi proposed rather grandly, "I am associated with all sculpture from the beginning of time," and likened his large rock sculptures to the monoliths of Stonehenge. Then he added, "One might ask, 'Well, what's your identity then? Is it Japan? Is it New York? What is it? Why are you in New York?' " 2 1 3 Thus, while the four earlier place-making episodes examined here suggested that to grasp the potential of the earth as a medium was to deploy cultural as well as mineralogical imports to create a new place elsewhere, in the late work quite a contrary meaning of this medium is at work. Grasping the earth itself as a modern medium came to support a fantasy of relating to it by removing it from history and culture altogether. In other words, the large autonomous rock sculptures facilitated a vision of primal identity with the earth that transcended social belonging, and these weighty displaced chunks of the earth were possessions connoting a Utopian placelessness. Noguchi's friend Buckminster Fuller sometimes referred to people as "Earthians" and calculated each human being's share of "Spaceship Earth's resources" at about two billion tons per capita. 214 In Noguchi's mobi-

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lization of earth across and beyond national borders, he came closer than the vast majority of people to cashing in on his share of the earth's tonnage. But a more legalistic perspective recovers the binational parameters of much of the production of this placeless sense of belonging to the earth at large. Noguchi established a residence and studio in Long Island City, near Manhattan, in i960, and he continued to work and live here for the rest of his life, establishing a public museum of his sculpture here in the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, in the late 1960s Noguchi began to make use of the skills and equipment of a professional stonecutter in the small town of Mure on the island of Shikoku in Japan. In subsequent years Noguchi established a residence, workshop, and even a permanent gallery to display his sculpture on the property of this stonecutter. During the last three decades of his career, he moved continually back and forth between these two places (and others). By the time of Noguchi's unexpected death in 1988, he had established a foundation to provide for the continued functioning of his museum in New York, but no similar institution existed in Mure. It took almost ten years after Noguchi's death for his successors in New York and Mure to work out an agreement regarding the ownership of the many complete and incomplete stone sculptures that were located at the Mure facility. 215 Though they may have been objects enabling the contemplation of a metaphysical sense of belonging transcending any real place, they were also objects destined to remain caught in an ongoing contest for cultural possession.

Conclusion

Patterns of Interactivity

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his book outlines three distinctive vehicles of artistic nationalism. In Chapter 2, the analysis of various American positions of Abstract Expressionism vis-à-vis Japanese artistic immigrants and East Asian cultural traditions demonstrated how a marginalized

foreign art could play a supportive role in the definition of national identity by an art move-

ment. The art world emerged as a specialized organ of the nation entrusted with preserving and fostering an aesthetic component of national identity in the analysis of Japanese calligraphy and pottery in the third chapter. The place designs examined in Chapter 4 pose a third vehicle of artistic nationalism, for the making of places entailed defining images of homeland. The advance of a nation's art by means of any one of these vehicles typically involved engaging it in a close relationship with foreign art. Various patterns of interactivity spurred by artistic nationalism can be discerned recurring throughout the diverse U.S.-Japan artistic encounters discussed in this study. In one pattern, the art of the foreign nation could be positioned as a contrastive foil to promote the recognition of native artistic qualities. The identification of Hasegawa Saburô and Okada Kenzo as "Nipponists" in the American milieu of Abstract Expressionism by Thomas Messer exemplified this maneuver. In a second pattern, native art could be dispatched abroad for the purpose of diplomacy, that is, to attain favorable foreign recognition for national culture as in the Japanese government's sponsorship of Noguchi's Jardin Japonais in Paris. But diplomacy could also be the mission of an individual such as Hasegawa Saburô, the "ambassador of art," though his ideals of Japanese art were at odds with those of most people in the Japanese art world, not to mention the Japanese nation. Another pattern of interactivity can be seen in the acquisition of a foreign artistic property as a demonstration of the international reach of a particular representative of the nation. "Noguchi's Japanese garden," for example, was acquired 173

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by an American corporation for display in the national and international center of finance in Manhattan. But the assimilation of aspects of foreign art into native artistic practice is also a strategy for strengthening the latter, a transaction often undertaken by erasing markers of foreign identity to naturalize the appropriation. For example, Morita Shiryü incorporated aspects of Western abstract painting into Japanese calligraphy, and, conversely, Mark Tobey attempted to incorporate aspects of East Asian calligraphy into American painting. These patterns of interactivity are each set in motion by strategic initiatives of particular nationalistic positions, yet each holds the risk of subjecting art to a dislocative transfer away from its presumed national base. For example, for foreign art to provide dramatic contrast to native art, it has to assume an ongoing and conspicuous presence in native venues. Similarly, the use of art for diplomacy requires sending that art beyond the borders of the nationstate and providing it with a visage that appeals to foreign spectators. Furthermore, the acquisition of artistic properties by foreigners disengages those properties from native strategies and subjects them to management by foreign interests. And finally, in perhaps the most radically dislocative pattern of interactivity considered in this study, the assimilation of foreign aesthetic properties can be conducted so as to suppress evidence of their foreignness or to subordinate them to a native voice. Thus, this mapping of formations of national culture reveals a topography that defies the commonsensical regard for Japanese and American art as separate and clearly divided national categories. While the binational fluctuation in Noguchi's sense of belonging was exceptional among the Japanese and American artists of his generation, the same could not be said for his border-crossing mode of innovation. To be sure, his apprehension of the Japanese earth as a sculptable and exportable medium of artistic expression was unusual, but most of the artists examined in chapters 2 and 3 engaged in an international commerce of artistic properties regarded as national properties. The earthy homeland is one of the more common media through which nationalists define national identity, but art objects, artistic practices, genres of art, and aesthetic sensibilities were similarly both claimed as national properties and disowned as foreign. Each of the artists examined, perhaps even Franz Kline, created works that can be likened to a nue, the grotesque mythical bird that came to Yagi Kazuo's mind when he reflected on the interstitial quality of his work between sculpture and pottery. Is there some objective method of art historical analysis that can differentiate the nue belonging to one nation from that belonging to another without reference to the artists' intentions or viewers' responses? Although many purported to value and analyze artworks in this manner, their conclusions often seem determined by the belief that artistic identity is or should be fundamentally contingent to the national identity of the artist. Noguchi's binational identity presented a challenge to this system: did his artistic engagement with the Japanese earth signal an expropriation of that medium away from its Japanese proprietorship (Kita Kamakura), or did it earn Japan favorable recognition before

CONCLUSION

foreign eyes (UNESCO)? Such contradictions, however, were not unique to Noguchi. For example, American critics could condemn the "French" painting Okada Kenzó created before moving to New York for being divorced from what they imagined was his essential Japanese identity. Meanwhile Japanese critics could censure his New York "Oriental Abstraction" for its alleged subservience to shallow American taste for Japónica. Nevertheless, a sympathetic view of Okada's work must confront the fact that estrangement from certain parameters of Japanese national identity was the indispensable condition for the creation of art expressive of new parameters of Japanese national identity. The foreign encounters of the artists examined here demonstrate how deeply Japanese and American artistic cultures were imbricated with one another. The museological and art historical convention of assigning a single unproblematic national identity to each artwork, each artist, and frequently whole art movements is defied by the complexity of their international experiences. Nevertheless, the exposure of such deeply imbricated relations does not warrant the conclusion that the distinction between Japanese and American art underwent a blurring during the postwar years. Much of this study is focused closely on the opinions of people— whether artists, journalists, architects, critics, or patrons—regarding the relationship between art and national identity. These observers typically demonstrated a keen interest in interactions and combinations of aspects of the art of Japan and the United States. But invariably, their readings of combination were premised on the assumption that ultimately the categories of Japan-United States or East-West were binary and admitted little room for a third cultural formation such as "Asian American," a term that only emerged in the late 1960s. Hybrid works of art were customarily evaluated in terms of a binary us-them cultural difference that ensured that the hybrid process of their formation was rarely perceived to be a blurring of national difference. Even in the case of Isamu Noguchi, who was usually considered by his contemporaries in terms of his combination of the art of two cultures, the tendency was to assert a greater role for one nation over the other either consistently throughout his practice as a whole or variously for his individual works or place designs. Thus, Noguchi's liminal condition may prove less the exception than the clearest exemplification of cultural work in the zone of interactivity between the art of Japan and that of the United States. The sense of most of his fellow travelers of belonging to a single nation merely yoked the hybridity of their innovations to one nation more readily than was the case for Noguchi. While the interactivity between the art of Japan and that of the United States was stimulated by artistic nationalism, this ideology also disciplined these contacts. Let me briefly recap some of the border-strengthening transactions described in this book. The artistic immigration of Okada Kenzó and Hasegawa Saburó did not result in a broadening of the American milieu of Abstract Expressionism to embrace an Asian constituent alongside its European constituents; rather, they became "Nipponists" in the margins of Abstract Expressionism. The Asian quotient of Mark Tobey's calligraphic abstraction and its perceived

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deficiency of graphic power diminished its appeal in the milieu of Abstract Expressionism. And the failure of his Sumi Paintings, which linked a bold, spontaneous gestural abstraction with Asian models, to enhance his American following ultimately led to his expatriation from the United States. While Tobey guardedly affirmed a link between his abstraction and East Asian calligraphy, the resemblance of his compatriot Franz Kline's black and white abstraction to calligraphy was an "oriental interpretation" that this painter "fought . . . throughout his career." Morita Shiryu dreamed of an East-West combination of art like a rainbow with one leg in the calligraphy of the East and the other in modernism of the West, but subsequently he became more concerned with "trying to protect the border of calligraphy . . . from the world of painting." Yagi Kazuo had wished to find "harmony... between modern painting and . . . the Japanese potter's wheel," but he would be lauded for expressing a "Japanese aesthetic awareness based on the sense of the material of clay." Isamu Noguchi envisaged himself as a designer of places using the medium of the Japanese earth in Japan, but his lease on this medium was deterritorialized by positions of Japanese nationalism, and he subsequently exported it for place-making projects outside of Japan. But the works he created in this manner were often appreciated less for their innovative cultural hybridity than for some predominant identification, whether the finally American character of his Texas Sculpture or the "Japanese water garden" for Chase Manhattan Bank. Indeed, even the analysis of his work into "Eastern" and "Western" influences could be conducted in such a manner as to affirm that this distinction was essential after all. Thus, while the analysis of Japanese and American art in this book divulges widespread patterns of interactivity and even dislocative international engagement, the zone of interactivity has served as a laboratory for experimenting with and producing new artistic conventions of native-alien difference for the Japanese and American nations. But perhaps the products of this interactivity hold the potential to erode native-alien difference for future identities. The interactivity between Japanese and American art of the early postwar period could serve as a legacy that future generations will compute very differently. Artists with plural national affiliations like Isamu Noguchi are increasingly common, and the day may be approaching when few will feel themselves to be firmly rooted in one art world concentrically configured in one nation. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes a world of interwoven "ethnoscapes" projected across national lines by such forces as transnational capital, mass intercontinental travel, and global flows of electronic images. While pan-Asian American identity formations suggest the redefinition of Japanese American identity, immigration is increasingly becoming "transmigration" across nations. 1 These developments constitute an increasing threat to the nation-state's investment in the continuous body of a bounded territory. Until now, the accomplishments of the artists discussed in this book have generally been interpreted in ways that contribute to Japanese or American national histories of art. No doubt they will be reconfigured to serve the needs of future identity formations that defy national borders as they are presently conceived.

Notes

Notes to Chapter 1 1. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 26. 2. See, for example, H o m i K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the M o d e r n Nation," in Nation and Narration, ed. H o m i K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291-322. 3. Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 8. 4. Among the two most influential expressions of this view are Ernest Renan's likening of a nation's existence to "a daily plebiscite" and Benedict Anderson's definition of the nation as an "imagined community." Renan, "What Is a Nation?" (1882), in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 19; Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 5. See Philip Schlesinger, "Media, the Political Order and National Identity," Media, Culture and Society, vol. 13, no. 3 (July 1991), 297-308. 6. For a critique of "conservative nationalists" for their excessive concern for national identity at the expense of other identities, see Bhikhu Parekh, "The Incoherence of Nationalism," in Beiner, Theorizing Nationalism, 295-325. 7. Particularly helpful works include Beiner, Theorizing Nationalism; Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991); Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

8. Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1966), 98. 9. Joseph Stalin, "Marxism and the National Question" (1913), in The Essential Stalin, ed. Bruce Franklin (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), especially 57-65. 10. Sarah M. Corse, Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1-2. And see Wendy Griswold, "American Character and the American Novel: An Expansion of Reflection Theory in the Sociology of Literature," American Journal of Sociology, vol. 86, no. 4 (January 1981), 740. 11. Todorov, On Human Diversity, 244. 12. For Douglas MacArthur's 1949 quote, see John W. Dower, "The U.S.-Japan Military Relationship" (1969), in Postwar Japan: 1945 to the Present, ed. Jon Livingston et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 236. 13. Robert H. Sharf, "Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited," in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994), 47. 14. F. S. C. Northrop, TheMeetingof East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1959), 11,454. 15. Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 282. 16. The term "Asian American" was coined in 1968 by Yuji Ichioka through analogy with African American identities 177

178

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

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as a tool for uncovering and reconstructing the buried past of Asian America. Arif Dirlik, "Asians on the Rim: Transnational Capital and Local C o m m u n i t y in the Making of Contemporary Asian America," Amerasia Journal, vol. 22, no. 3 (1996), 5Julia Meech and Gabriel P. Weisberg, Japonisme Comes to America: The Japanese Impact on the Graphic Arts, 1876-1925 (New York: H. N. Abrams and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 1990). Henry Adams, "John La Farge's Discovery of Japanese Art: A New Perspective on the Origins of'Japonisme.'" Art Bulletin, vol. 67, no. 3 (September 1985), 449-485. See ibid, and Henry Adams, "The Mind of John La Farge," in Henry Adams et al., John La Farge (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 13-77. For discussions of the American response to Japanese displays in Philadelphia in 1876, see Neil Harris, "All the World a Melting Pot? Japan at American Fairs, 1876-1904," in Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations, ed. Akira Iriye (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); and Anna Jackson, "Imagining Japan: The Victorian Perception and Acquisition of Japanese Culture," Journal of Design History, vol. 5, no. 4 (1992), 245-256. Kuwabara Sumio, "Surechigai n o taiwa—Nichibei bijutsu köryü no közö," in Kuwabara Sumio, Bijutsu ronshü, Nihon hen (Tokyo: Okisekisha, 1995), 42. See his comparison of a sword guard to a m o d e r n cathedral. John La Farge, An Artist's Letters from Japan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970; first published 1897), 140. Ibid., 246. For a discussion of this passage and of the ongoing American predilection for an aesthetics of Japanese smallness, see Ian Littlewood, The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 92-95 and passim. As quoted in Lawrence W. Chisholm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 50-51. For Fenollosa's dubious dealing and museum practices, see Warren Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 41-42, 211. The figure 17,000 is cited in Walter Muir Whitehall, Museum of Fine Arts Boston: A Centenial History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), vol. 1,116. Kevin Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), 77. This was Ernest Fenollosa's characterization of Meiji intellectuals' development in general, but Okakura manifested this pattern more clearly than most of his contemporaries. Ernest Fenollosa, "Chinese and Japanese Traits," Atlantic Monthly, vol. 69, no. 416 (June 1892), 772.

28. Sato Doshin, "Nihon bijutsu" no tanjo (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1996), 199. 29. The Critic (NewYork), vol. 46, no. 1 (January 1905), 13, and vol. 48, no. 4 (April 1906), 295-296. 30. Horioka Yasuko, The Life of Kakuzo (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1963), 24. 31. Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1956), 4-7. 32. Fujita Tsuguji, "Sensoga seisaku no yoken," Bijutsu (May 1944), 22-23. For further discussion of Japanese painting during the war, see Bert Winther-Tamaki, "Embodiment/ Disembodiment: Japanese Painting during the FifteenYear War," Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 52, no. 2 (Summer 1997). 145-180. 33. Toyama Takashi, "Yokoyama Taikan gahaku n o seishin," Nihon bijutsu, vol. 2, no. 7 (July, 1943), 17. 34. Yokoyama's inaugural speech as leader (tosotsusha) of the Nihon Bijutsu Hokokukai, quoted in Kawaji Ryuko, "Riso gaka Yokoyama Taikan," Nihon bijutsu, vol. 2, no. 7 (July 1943), 8. 35. Yashiro Yukio, Nihon bijutsu no tokushitsu (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1943), 6. 36. The nineteen yoga painters included were Aso Saburo, Ebihara Kinosuke, Hayashi Takeshi, Inokuma Gen'ichiro, Kawabata Minoru, Kazuki Yasuo, Komai Tetsuro, Migishi Setsuko, Mori Yoshio, Munakata Shiko, Murai Masanari, O k a m o t o Taro, Oosawa Shosuke, Oka Shikanosuke, Umehara Ryuzaburo, Wakita Kazu, Yamaguchi Kaoru, Yasui Sotaro, and Yoshihara Jiro. This is according to Segi Shin'ichi, Sengo kuhakuki no bijutsu (Tokyo: Shichosha, 1996), 68. 37. These were "Kindai kaiga n o hihyo," Bijutsu hihyd, vol. 8, no. 8 (August 1952), and "Nihon no bijutsukai ni uttaeru," Tokyo shinbun August 1-2,1952. The present account is based on the second of these essays, which is reprinted in Imaizumi Atsuo, Chosakushu, in six volumes (Tokyo: Kyuryudo, 1979), vol. 2, 257-262. 38. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, in four volumes, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 2,128. 39. Greenberg, "The Decline of Cubism" (1948), in ibid., vol. 2,215. 40. Kuwabara, "Surechigai no taiwa," 37. 41. Marilyn Ivy, "Formations of Mass Culture," in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 249. 42. In 1946 approximately 465,000 American soldiers were stationed in Japan. Although this n u m b e r decreased to 125,000 over the next two years, it rose again during the Korean War to 260,000 before declining to 87,000 in 1958 and about 46,000 in the mid-1970s. Sheila K. Johnson, The

NOTES TO

Japanese through American Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 76. 17. Notes t o Chapter 2

1. Piet Mondrian, "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality" (1919),in H.B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 321. 2. Hilla Rebay, "The Beauty of Non-Objectivity" (1937), in Modern Art and Modernism, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (London: Harper and Row, 1982), 145-148. 3. Aline B. Louchheim, "Brazil's Biennial a High Point," New York Times, January 3,1954, 2:10. 4. Louchheim is here sharing an account of the Säo Paulo discussion back in New York. American Abstract Artists, "Abstract Art around the World Today," transcript of a forum held on March 16,1954, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), 2. 5. Louchheim, "Brazil's Biennial a High Point," 10. 6. The seven painters who exhibited at Säo Paulo in 1953 were Fukuzawa Ichirö, Kawaguchi Kigai, Mizukoshi Shönan, Okamoto Taro, Tsuruoka Masao, Ushijima Noriyuki, and Yamaguchi Kaoru. Museum of Modern Art, Säo Paulo, II Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de Säo Paulo: Catàlogo (1953), 240-241. 7. Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Company, 1969), 23. 8. Clement Greenberg, "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture" (1947), in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:166. 9. David and Cecile Shapiro, "Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting" (1977), in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 139. 10. Jackson Pollock (1944), in Readings in American Art since 1900, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968), 152. 11. Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 12. David J. Clarke, The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture (New York: Garland, 1988). 13. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 14. Jeffrey Wechsler, ed., Asian Traditions; Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945-1970 (Rutgers and New York: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1997). 15. Kuwabara, "Surechigai no taiwa—Nichibei bijutsu köryü no közö," 37. 16. Clement Greenberg, "Foreword to the Tenth Anniversary

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

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Exhibition of the Betty Parsons Gallery" (1956), in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, 3:256. These photographs are reproduced in Kenzo Okada and Nature (New York: Marisa Del Re Gallery, 1986), n.p. For Okada's accent and his relationship to Rothko, see Seldon Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: DevinAdair, 1957), 92-96. Mitaka Shotaro, "Amerika ni kaketa gaka, Okada Kenzo, ruten no hansei," Bijutsu techo, no. 152 (January 1959), 150-151. Furihata Chikako, "Okada Kenzo nenpyo," Okada Kenzo ten (Toyama: Toyama Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1989), 144-156. Thomas M. Messer, "Nipponism," Art in America, vol. 46, no. 3 (fall 1958). 59Stuart Preston, "International Gathering of Six Painters," New York Times November 15,1959, 2:9. Robert M. Coates, "The Art Galleries: East Is West and West Is East," New Yorker, vol. 32, no. 36 (October 27,1956), 131-133Messer, "Nipponism," 59. E[leanor] C. M[unro], "Kenzo Okada," Art News, vol. 55, no. 7 (November 1956), 7-8. Reported by Uemura Takachiyo, "Okada Kenzo, 'Noki,'" Nihon keizai shinbun, May 13,1958 (clipping from Okada Kenzo Artist's File, Tokyo Kokuritsu Bunka-zai Kenkyujo). Okamoto Taro, Konnichi no geijutsu: seikatsu o Sozo suru enerugi no genten (Tokyo: Kobunsha, 1969; first published 1954), 122, 284. Stuart Preston, "Art of All Kinds in Venice Biennale," New York Times, July 25,1954, 2:8. Richard Haag, "Memo to Japanese Designers," Shinkenchiku, no. 30 (February 1955), 6-7. Campbell's remarks at the Sixth National Conference of the United States National Commission for UNESCO appear as "The Cultural Setting of Asian Art," College Art Journal, vol. 18, no. 1 (fall 1958), 30. Edward Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," in Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference, 1976-84, ed. Francis Barker (London: Methuen, 1986), 215. Makoto Ueda, "Yugen and Erhabene: Onishi Yoshinori's Attempt to Synthesize Japanese and Western Aesthetics," in J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 290-297. Okada was still reporting that he liked the word "yugen" in 1962. Okada Kenzo, interview with Yamada Chizaburo, "Mo hitotsu no kukan no jigen: Okada Kenzo no kinsaku o megutte, taidan," Mizue, no. 682 (January 1962), 5. But three years later, "yugenism" had become a term he "formerly used." Gordon Washburn, Kenzo Okada, Paintings,

180

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TO

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27-39

1931-1965 (Buffalo: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1965), n.p. 33. Munro, "Okada Kenzo," 7-8. 34. The Yoshida Memoirs, translated by Kenichi Yoshida (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 288. 35. James A. Michener, "Japan," Holiday, vol. 12, no. 2 (August 1952), 26-41,76-78. For discussion of Michener, see Johnson, The Japanese through American Eyes, 80-83, 94-955 and Littlewood, The Idea of Japan, 70-72,145-147. 36. "Oriental Abstractions by Kenzo Okada," Time, vol. 81, no. 4 (January 25,1963), 62-63. 37. Quoted in Washburn, Kenzo Okada, Paintings, n.p. 38. Ogawa Masataka, "Jun na Nihon no kokoro o motomete: 'Okada Kenzö ten' e no jo," in Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art et al., Okada Kenzö ten, 14-16; see translation on pp. 17-1939. Ibid., 15, my translation. 40. Kenmochi Isamu, "Japanizu modän ka, Japonika sutairu ka—yushutsu kögei no futatsu no michi," Kögei nyüsu, vol. 22, no. 374 (1954), 37441. Sö Sakon, Hanjidaiteki geijutsuron: Nihonjin bi ishiki közö shiron (Tokyo: Shichiyösha, 1963), 137. 42. Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 52. 43. Okada Kenzö, in interview essay, "Tokujitsu naru gaka: Okada Kenzö o tou," Bijutsu techö, no. 1 (January 1948), 46. 44. Okada, interview with Andö Tsuguo, "Diarögu 8: Okada Kenzö," Mizue, no. 787 (August 1970), 35. 45. Ogawa, "Jun na Nihon no kokoro o motomete," 17. 46. Okada, interview with Andö, "Diarögu 8: Okada Kenzö," 3547. Mitaka, "Amerika ni kaketa gaka, Okada Kenzö," 148. 48. Ogawa, "Jun na Nihon no kokoro o motomete," 17-18. 49. This was the comment of Ebihara Kinosuke (1904-1970), who worked in France from 1923 to 1934. Quoted in Mitaka, "Amerika ni kaketa gaka, Okada Kenzö," 150. 50. Okada, interview with Andö, "Diarögu 8: Okada Kenzö," 3551. Ibid., 35. 52. Ibid. 53. Okada Kenzö, "Okada Kenzö shichi-nen buri ni raigetsu kikoku," Tokyo shinbun, October 28, 1957 (Artist's File: Okada Kenzö, Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyüjo). 54. Ibid. 55. Okada, interview with Andö, "Diarögu 8: Okada Kenzö," 36. 56. Ibid., 35. 57. The exhibition was the Third International Art Exhibition. See Mainichi Shinbunsha, Dai3~kai Nihon kokusai bijutsu tengashü, (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1955).

58. See Yashiro Yukio, 2000 Years of Japanese Art, ed. Peter Swann (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1958), 20-21. 59. Yashiro Yukio, Nihon bijutsu no tokushitsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2d edition, 1965), 11. 60. Imaizumi Atsuo, "Nihon no enerugl," Tokyo shinbun, January 24-25,1959, reprinted in Imaizumi Atsuo, Chosakushü (Tokyo: Kyüryüdö, 1979), 2:305. 61. Hasegawa Saburö, "Amerika geijutsuka no shukumei" (i955)> in Hasegawa Saburö, Ga ron, in two volumes (Tokyo: Sansaisha, 1977), 2:187-191. 62. Hasegawa refers to this copy in ibid. I have not seen a photograph of the work. 63. For Hasegawa's leadership in abstract painting, see Hayami Yutaka, "Chüshö no na no moto ni," in Itabashi Art Museum et al., Nihon no chüshö kaiga (Tokyo: Itabashi Kuritsu Bijutsukan et al., 1992), 100. 64. This according to Akane Kazuo, "Hasegawa Saburö" (1964), in Itan no gakatachi, ed. Takumi Hideo (Tokyo: Kyüryüdö, 1983), 155. 65. Hasegawa Saburö, "Bijutsu no tözai" (1950), in Ga ron, 2:92. 66. Hasegawa Saburö, "Isamu Noguchi to no hibi" (1950), in Ga ron, 2:101. 67. Hasegawa Saburö, "Noguchi Nihon," Bijutsu techö, no. 33 (August 1950), 58-59. 68. Hasegawa, "Bijutsu no tözai," in Ga ron, 2:96. 69. Hasegawa Saburö, Abusutorakuto äto (Tokyo: Atorie-sha, 1937), 156. 70. Ibid., 150-154. 71. Hasegawa in Paul Mills, ed., "Sabro Hasegawa, Artist of Controlled Accident" (unpublished manuscript, Archives of the Oakland Museum, 1957), 51. 72. Inui Yoshiaki, "Hasegawa Saburö—geijutsu to shisö," in Hasegawa, Ga ron, i:n.p. 73. Hasegawa Saburö, "Nihon bijutsu no minzoku-sei to sekai-sei" (1955-1956), in Ga ron, 2:219. 74. Hasegawa Saburö, "Furansu to Amerika kara no tayori, atarashii Seiyö to furui Töyö ni kansuru zuisö" (1951), in Ga ron, 2:130. 75. Hasegawa Saburö, "Hansei, atarashii Seiyö to fiirui Töyö to ni kansuru zuisö" (1951), in Ga ron, 2:141. 76. Hasegawa, "Furansu to Amerika kara no tayori, atarashii Seiyö to furui Töyö ni kansuru zuisö," in Ga ron, 2:131. 77. Hasegawa, "Hansei, atarashii Seiyö to furui Töyö to ni kansuru zuisö," in Ga ron, 2:138. 78. Hasegawa, "Bijutsu no tözai," in Ga ron, 2:96. 79. "I think that true orientalism (oriental spirit) must play a greater role in contemporary society. However, there are probably more true orientalists abroad rather than in Japan." Hasegawa letter to Isamu Noguchi, January 1951,

NOTES TO

80. 81.

82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94. 95.

96.

quoted in Hasegawa, "Hansei, atarashii Seiyö to furai Töyö to ni kansuru zuisö," in Ga ron, 2:138. K. I. L., "The Japan Abstract Art Club," Art News, vol. 53, no. 2 (April 1954), 26,67. Hasegawa Saburö, "Nyü Yöku no inshö" (1954), in Hyögo Prefectural Modern Art Museum, Tokubetsu ten: Hasegawa Saburö (Kobe: Hyögo Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1977), 12,14. Reinhardts witty caricature of American artists appeared in the College Art Journaland was quoted in Rodman, Conversations with Artists, 99. On Reinhardt's own Asian interests, see Walter Smith, "Ad Reinhardt's Oriental Aesthetic," Smithsonian Studies in American Art (Summer-Fall 1990), 23-45Irving Sandler,"The Club," Artforum, vol. 1, no. 1 (September 1965), 27-31. Hasegawa reports this in "Nihon bijutsu no minzoku-sei to sekai-sei," in Ga ron, 2:215. Hasegawa, "Amerika geijutsuka no shukumei," in Ga ron, 2:187. Akane Kazuo, "Hasegawa Saburö," 169. American Abstract Artists, "Abstact Art around the World Today," 9. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (New York: International Universities Press, 1953), 16. Hasegawa, "Hansei: Atarashii Seiyö to furui Töyö to ni kansuru zuisö," in Ga ron, 2:137-138. Alan Watts, In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 1915-1965 (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 247. Ibid., 270. This is Akane Kazuo's account of the responses of the yoga painters Masuda Yoshinobu and Wakita Kazu and other unnamed Japanese visitors to Hasegawa in California. Akane, "Hasegawa Saburö," 170-171. Mark Tobey, "Japanese Traditions and American Art," College Art Journal, vol. 43, no. 1 (Fall 1958), 22. The article quoted is Hasegawa, "Abstract Art in Japan," in The World of Abstract Art, ed. The American Abstract Artists (New York: George Wittenborn, 1957), 69-74. Barnett Newman, "The Ideographic Picture" (1947), in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 550. For studies on the influence of Asian calligraphy on Abstract Expressionism, see Clarke, The Influence of Oriental Thought, 200-214; and Barbara Rose, "Japanese Calligraphy and American Abstract Expressionism," in Library of Congress, Words in Motion, Modern Japanese Calligraphy (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984), 38-43. Stuart Preston in The New York Times in 1949 according to Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock,

97.

98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

111.

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an American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989), 599Parker Tyler, "Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth," The Magazine of Art (March 1950), reprinted in David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, eds., Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 365. In 1944 Pollock said, "Some people find references to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures. That wasn't intentional; probably was the result of early memories and enthusiasms." And in 1950 he said, "I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual—the Orientals did that." For these passages, see Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990 (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1992), 561 and 576 respectively. Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, 665. Clement Greenberg, " American-Type' Painting" (1955, revised 1958), in Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 220. William C. Seitz, Mark Tobey (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1962), 86, n. 99. For these and other details of Tobey's career, see Eliza E. Rathbone, Mark Tobey: City Paintings (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1984). Mark Tobey, "Japanese Traditions and American Art," College Art Journal, vol. 18, no. 1 (Fall 1958), 22. Quoted in Mark Tobey (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1966), n.p. It has been noted that there is also an Asian precedent for this style of white writing on a dark ground, namely the tradition of ink rubbings from stone surfaces into which inscriptions have been incised. See Clarke, The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture, 210. Quoted in Seitz, Mark Tobey, 51. See Clarke, The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture, 162; and Fred Hoffman, "Mark Tobey's Paintings of New York," Artforum, vol. 42, no. 8 (April 1979), 24-29. Hoffman, "Mark Tobey's Paintings of New York," 29, n. 7. This is according to Rathbone, Mark Tobey: City Paintings, 66, 67,104 Mark Tobey, letter to Marian Willard dated July 1957. Text of letter printed in Kosme de Baranano and Matthias Bärmann, eds. Mark Tobey (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1997), 393-394. The 1957 Willard Gallery gallery announcement reads, "Mark Tobey, Sumi Paintings. November 12-December 7, 1957." Artist File: Mark Tobey (Munson Williams Proctor Institute, Utica, New York).

1 8 2

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112. D. T. Suzuki, "Sengai: Zen and Art," Art News (Annual Christmas Edition, November 1957), 115-118. 113. The Hasegawa Saburö exhibition at the Willard Gallery, a memorial exhibition opening shortly after Hasegawa's death, was held f r o m April 23 to May 6,1957. 114. Amano Kazuo et a l , Sho to kaiga to no nekkijidai, 19451969 (Tokyo: O Bijutsukan, 1992), 116. 115. Quoted in Rodman, Conversations with Artists, 6. 116. Matthias Bärmann, "Patterns of Nomadism: The Transcultural Art of Mark Tobey," in Baranano and Bärmann, Mark Tobey, 59-90. 117. Mark Tobey, statement in Dorothy Miller, Fourteen Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 70. 118. Takiguchi Shüzö, a leading critic and poet, quoted Tobey's statement of Janus-faced ambition for American art and, noting that he felt a certain "cold hardness" in Tobey's work that repelled him, wondered: "How will his work be read in times like these? I have yet to come into contact with a system of appreciation that can embrace his art." Takiguchi Shüzö, "Mäku Tobi to Morisu Gurébuzu," Mizue, no. 575 (July 1953), 7. 119. Mark Tobey, "Reminiscence and Reverie," Magazine of Art vol. 44, no. 6 (October 1951), 228-232. 120. Published as Mark Tobey, "Japanese Traditions a n d American Art," College Art Journal, vol. 18, no. 1 (fall 1958), 20-24. The conference was the Sixth National Conference of the United States Commission for UNESCO held at San Francisco in November 1957. 121. George Nelson, "The Japanese House" (1955), in Nelson, Problems of Design, 2d ed. (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1965), 130. 122. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the 'Yellow Peril': Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 135. 123. Mark Tobey, "Aus Briefen u n d Gesrächen," in Düsseldorfer Kunsthalle, Mark Tobey (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorfer Kunsthalle, 1966), quoted in Siegfried Wichmann, Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: H a r m o n y Books, 1980), 392,396. 124. Kenneth Rexroth, "Mark Tobey of Seattle, Wash.," Art News, vol. 50, no. 3 (May 1951), 61. 125. Mark Tobey, untitled essay about the Seattle Market dated 1964 in Seattle Art Museum, Mark Tobey: The World of a Market (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1964), n.p. 126. Mark Tobey, letter to Dorothy Elmhirst, July 1935. Archives of Dartington Hall, Devonshire, England, quoted in Hoffman, "Mark Tobey's Paintings of New York," 29. 127. Merrill C. Rueppel, Mark Tobey Retrospective (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1968), n.p.

128. 129. 130. 131.

Seitz, Mark Tobey, 22. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 7. Cognate tendencies toward hegemonic implications of the universalistic language created by modernist painters have been discussed in connection with late-nineteenthcentury Symbolism. Natasha Staller, "Babel: Hermetic Languages, Universal Languages, and Anti-Languages in Fin de Siècle Parisian Culture," The Art Bulletin, vol. 76, no. 2 (June 1994), 347-348.

132. Mark Tobey, commenting on his painting Extensions from Bagdad (1944), quoted in Seitz, Mark Tobey, 21. 133. Abd al-Bahä (1912), quoted in George Townshend, The Glad Tidings of Bahà'u'llàh (London: Murray, 1949), 24. 134. Abd al-Bahä, quoted in J. E. Esslemont, Bahà'u'llàh and the New Era (Wilmette, 111.: Bahai Publishing Committee, 1950), 1. 135. Mark Tobey, "Excerpts from a Letter by Mark Tobey," The Tiger's Eye, no. 3 (March 15,1948), 52. 136. Abd al-Bahä, at Public Library Hall, Washington, D.C., April 20,1912. Quoted on a printed brochure announcing a Bahä'i-sponsored lecture by Mark Tobey on the subject "The Innermost Motive of Society," March 3,1947 (American Archives of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Mark Tobey Papers, roll no. 3206, frame 118). 137. Thomas Hess, Abstract Painting, Background and American Phase (New York: Viking Press, 1951), 121. 138. Irving Sandler, The Triumph ofAmerican Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper and Row, c. 1970), 113. 139. Judith S. Kays, "Mark Tobey and Jackson Pollock: Setting the Record Straight," in Baranano and Bärmann, Mark Tobey, 91-115. 140. Serge Guilbaut, "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America," in Frascina, Pollock and After, 161. 141. Letter f r o m Tobey to Arthur Dahl, in Mark Tobey: Paintings from the Collection of Joyce and Arthur Dahl (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford University, 1967), 10. See also the surprise with which Tobey's European success is reported in New York. Tobey (New York: Willard Gallery, 1954), n.p. 142. Emphasis in original. Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon Press, 1964), 35. 143. P. T„ "Mark Tobey," Art News, vol. 56, no. 8 (December 1957), 10. 144. D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 30. 145. This quote is f r o m a long evasive answer Tobey wrote to Kuh's question about the Sumi Paintings. Katherine Kuh,

NOTES TO

146.

147.

148. 149.

150.

151. 152. 153.

154. 155.

156.

157. 158.

159.

The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 244-248. Georges Mathieu, "Towards a New Convergence of Art, Thought, and Science," Art International, vol. 4, no. 4 (May 1, i960), 34; Patrick Heron, Arts (London), vol. 32, no. 4 (January 1958), 18, quoted in Rathbone, Mark Tobey: City Paintings, 106. Katherine Kuh in Avis Berman, "An Interview with Katherine Kuh," Archives of American Art, vol. 27, no. 3 (1987), 29. My emphasis. Clement Greenberg, " 'American-Type' Painting" (1958), in Greenberg, Art and Culture, 220. See "'American-Type' Painting" (1955), reprinted in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, 3:227. My emphasis. Reported by Jules Langsner, "Franz Kline, Calligraphy and Information Theory," Art International, vol. 7, no. 3 (March 25,1963), 25. Alfred Barr, Jr., in American Abstract Artists, "Abstract Art around the World Today," 6. Hess, Abstract Painting, Background and American Phase, 13 7Letter from Kline to Hasegawa, published in Hasegawa, "Furansu to Amerika kara no tayori," in Hasegawa, Ga ron, 2:131. Hasegawa Saburo, "Ryokan no gaku o megutte," Bokubi, no. 2 (July 1,1951), 23. Letter from Franz Kline to Morita Shiryu dated March 18, 1952. Published in Bokujin, no. 2 (May 1952); reprinted in Tsuji Futoshi, ed., Bokujin 40-nen (Gifu City: Bokujinkai, 1991), 98-99.1 have not seen the English version of this letter; this quotation is translated from the published Japanese version. Inoue Yuichi, "Kurain-shi no tegami o yonde," Bokujin, no. 2 (May 1952); reprinted in Tsuji, Bokujin 40-nen, 98-99. Hasegawa, "Nyuyoku no insho," 14. Kline, quoted by Ivan C. Karp, "The Unweary Mr. Franz Kline: Artist without Metaphysics," Village Voice, March 7,1956,10. Lawrence Alloway, "Sign and Surface: Notes on Black and White Painting in New York," Quadrum, no. 9 (i960), 49-62; Elaine de Kooning, "Franz Kline: Painter of His Own Life" (1962), reprinted in de Kooning, The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 198; Frank O'Hara, Franz Kline, a Retrospective Exhibition (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1964), 10; Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, 245-249; Harry F. Gaugh, The Vital Gesture: Franz Kline (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1985), 18; David

PAGES 5 6 - 6 2

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Anfam, Franz Kline: Black and White, 1950-1961 (Houston: Menil Collection and Houston Fine Art Press, 1994), 10. 160. Martica Sawin, "An American Artist in Japan," Art Digest, vol. 29, no. 19 (August 1,1955), 13. 161. Harry F. Gaugh makes this claim on the basis of an interview with Grace Hartigan in 1984. Gaugh, The Vital Gesture: Franz Kline, 18. 162. Kuh, The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, 144. 163. David Anfam, "Kline's Colliding Syntax: 'Black, White, and Things,' " in Anfam, Franz Kline: Black and White, 1950-1961,19. 164. Helen Westgeest, Zen in the Fifties, Interaction in Art between East and West (Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders Uitgevers, 1996), 64. 165. The Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa discussed this notion of Zen in connection with Josef Albers, who was her teacher at Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1949. Interview with the author, San Francisco, October 21, 1995166. Langsner, "Franz Kline, Calligraphy and Information Theory," 25. 167. Kline said, "A person who wants to explore painting naturally reflects: 'How can I in my work be most expressive?' Then the forms develop" (emphasis in original). Rodman, Conversations with Artists, 109. 168. Hasegawa, "Furansu to Amerika kara no tayori," in Ga ron, 2:131. 169. Kline's words, transcribed from conversation by Frank O'Hara, were "the way you have to in order to give, that's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving. The question about knowing will naturally be wrong. When you've finished giving, the look surprises you as well as anyone else. Of course, this must be an American point of view." Frank O'Hara, "Franz Kline Talking" (1958), reprinted in Stephen Foster et al., Franz Kline: Art and the Structure of Identity (Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1994), 157. 170. Karp, "The Unweary Mr. Franz Kline: Artist without Metaphysics," 10. 171. O'Hara, "Franz Kline Talking," 155. 172. De Kooning, "Franz Kline: Painter of His Own Life," 189. 173. James Schuyler, "As American as Franz Kline," Art News, vol. 67, no. 6 (October 1968), 30-33,58-59. 174. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, 15. 175. Gibson identifies the "essential eight" as Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, xx.

184

| NOTES TO PAGES

63-72

176. Arif Dirlik, "Asians on the Rim," 3-4. 177. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, 49. 178. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, i993)> M4 and passim. 179. Hasegawa, "Nihon bijutsu no minzoku-sei to sekai-sei" in Ga ron, 2:223. 180. Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 174. 181. In addition to Hasegawa and Okada, the exhibition included I n o k u m a Gen'ichirö, Öhashi Yutaka, James Suzuki, Takai Teiji, and Noriko Yamamoto. Thomas M. Messer and Anne L. Jenks, Contemporary Painters of Japanese Origin in America (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1958). 182. Thomas M. Messer, "Museum Trends, Nipponism," Art in America, vol. 46, no. 3 (Fall 1958), 58-59. 183. Gordon Washburn, Kenzo Okada, Paintings, n.p. 184. Gordon Washburn, "Japanese Influences on Contemporary Art: A Dissenting View," in Chizaburoh F. Yamada, ed., Dialogue in Art: Japan and the West (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1976), 196-209. See Yamada's description of the larger project, which was sponsored by UNESCO, on page 7. 185. Washburn, "Japanese Influences on Contemporary Art: A Dissenting View," 209. 186. S. P. Mohanty, "Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism," Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 2, no. 2 (spring 1989), 15. Notes to Chapter 3 1. Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Company, 1969), 42. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. S. Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 229. Emphasis in original. 3. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 35. 4. O n the relative stength of Japanese ceramics, Frederick Baekeland wrote: "For potters, the West is a desert. Japan is their oasis." In Frederick Baekland and Robert Moes, Modern Japanese Ceramics in American Collections (New York: Japan Society, 1993), 15. 5. For perspectives on the relationship between Japanese and American ceramics, see Louise Allison Cort and John Neely, eds., Japan and America: Myth and Reality in Ceramics, special issue, The Studio Potter, vol. 21, no. 1 (December 1992). 6. For a discussion of the teaching of the craft of silk weaving to urban Japanese women as an exercise in national belonging, see Millie R. Creighton, "Nostalgia, Identity, and Gender: Woven in 100 Per Cent Pure Silk," in Making

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

and Metaphor: A Discussion of Meaning in Contemporary Craft, ed. Gloria A. Hickey (Quebec: Canadian Center for Folk Culture Studies and Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994), 100-113. Cecil H. Uyehara, "The Rite of Japanese Calligraphy and the Modern Age," Oriental Art, new series vol. 33, no. 2 (Summer 1987), 181. Saiichi Maruyama, A Mature Woman, trans. Dennis Keene, (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995), 215.1 am grateful to Steven D. Carter for directing my attention to this reference. This is Tejima Yukei's comment in an interview with Hidai Kazuko, "Shojisusho n o miryoku," in Hidai Nankoku and Uno Sesson, eds., Gendai sho, in three volumes (Tokyo: Yusankaku, 1983), 2:60. Mainichi Shinbunsha, Dai 48-kai Mainichi shodo ten sakuhinshu (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha and Zai Mainichi Shodokai, 1996). For discussions of the art salon system in contemporary Japan, see T h o m a s R. H. Havens, Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan: Dance, Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts, 1955-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), especially 112-118; Brian Moeran, "The Art World of Contemporary Japanese Ceramics," Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (Winter 1987), 27-50. Leo Rabkin, Foreword, in American Abstract Artists, American Abstract Artists, 1936-1966 (New York: The Ram Press, 1966), n.p. The 1937 "constitution" of the American Abstract Artists, quoted in Ruth Gurin, "Towards a Fourth Decade," in ibid., n.p. The expression "open their portals widely" (hiroku ippan ni monko 0 hiraite imasu) appears in a preface to the catalogue signed simply by the Mainichi Newspaper Corporation. Mainichi Shinbunsha, Dai 13-kai Nihon togei ten (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1995), 2. Kawakita Michiaki, "Nihon togei ten no kaisai ni yosete," in ibid., 3. These are illustrated in Mainichi Shinbunsha, Dai 13-kai Nihon togei ten, 90-93. In the order of their appearance in the Mainichi Calligraphy Exhibition catalogue, the seven categories are "Chinese Characters" (kanji), "Japanese Syllabary" (kana), "Modern Poetry and Prose Calligraphy" (kindai shibun sho), "Large Character Calligraphy" (daiji sho), "Seal Carving" (tenkoku), "Carved Characters" (kokuji), and"Avant-Garde Calligraphy" (zen'ei sho). Mainichi Shinbunsha, Dai 48-kai Mainichi shodo ten sakuhinshu. These descriptions are based on works illustrated in the exhibition catalogue Dai 48-kai Mainichi shodo ten saku-

NOTES TO PAGES 7 3 - 8 7

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

hinshü. For examples, see pages 22-23,84,273,284-285,590, 612, and 613. For this Japanese perspective on the international exhibition, see Kitazawa Noriaki, Me no shinden (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1989), 302. For more on Japanese participation in international exhibitions in this period, see Harris, "All the World a Melting Pot?", 24-54. See also Ellen Conant, "Refractions of the Rising Sun," in Tomoko Sato and Toshio Watanabe, eds., Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue, 1850-1930 (London: Lund Humphries, 1991), 79-92; Anna Jackson, "Imagining Japan: The Victorian Perception and Acquisition of Japanese History," Journal of Design History, vol. 5, no. 4 (1992), 245-256. On the controversy over whether calligraphy was to be regarded as an art form, see Kitazawa, Me no shinden, 258-263. See Tanaka Atsushi," 'Bunten' and the Government-Sponsored Exhibitions (Kanten)," in Ellen Conant, Nihonga: Transcending the Past, Japanese-Style Painting, 1868-1968 (Saint Louis: The Saint Louis Art Museum, 1995), 96-97. This is according to Uyehara, "The Rite of Japanese Calligraphy," 178. For these dates and name changes, see Hosono Masanobu, "Nitten 80-nen no ayumi," in Yomiuri Shinbunsha, Nitten 80-nen kinen ten (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1988), n.p. For a discussion of the modernization of Japanese calligraphy, see Uyehara, "The Rite of Japanese Calligraphy," 174-182. For Hidai Tenrai, see Nakamura Nihei, Tözai bijutsu shi— koryit to söhan (Tokyo: Iwasaki Bijutsusha, 1994), 324-326. Inoue Yüichi, writing in 1958, quoted in Amano Kazuo, Sho to kaiga to no nekkijidai, 1945-1969 (Tokyo: O Bijutsukan, 1992), 9. Hidai Nankoku in interview by Hidai Kazuko, "Rinsho to gendai sho (III)," in Hidai and Uno, Gendai sho, 2:35. Morita Shiryü, "Niji no yo ni . . . " (1948), reprinted in Amano, Sho to kaiga to no nekkijidai, 1945-1969,138. Nanette Gottlieb, "Language and Politics: The Reversal of Postwar Script Reform Policy in Japan," Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 53, no. 4 (November 1994), 1183. This is recalled by Uno Sesson in the transcript of a discussion with Hidai Nankoku, "Gendai sho no seiritsu," in Hidai and Uno, Gendai sho, 1:46. Morita Shiryü, "Isamu Noguchi sakuhin ten o miru," Sho no bi, no. 30 (October 1950), 15. Hasegawa Saburö, "Ryökan no gaku o megutte," Bokubi, no. 2 (July 1,1951), 23. The manifesto is signed by the five founding members of Bokujinkai: Inoue Yüichi, Eguchi Sögen, Sekiya Yoshimichi, Nakamura Bokushi, Morita Shiryü. "Bokujinkai

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

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1 8 5

keisei aisatsu" (1952), in Tsuji Futoshi et al., eds., Bokujin 40-nen (Gifu City: Bokujinkai, 1991), 84-85. The "Alpha Section" (Arufua bu) was begun in 1950 in the journal Sho no bi, edited by Morita Shiryü. When Morita founded the journal Bokubi in 1951, Hasegawa continued the "Alpha Section" in the new journal, where it ran until 1953. The "Alpha Section" is discussed in Nakamura Nihei, Tözai bijutsu shi, 406-415. Morita's announcement of the Alpha Section in Sho no bi, no. 29 (September 1950), quoted in Ikeda Suijö, "Shiryü sokuseki shö," Bokubi, no. 87 (June 1959), 6. Morita Shiryü, "Kurain no kinsaku o mite—ichi sho sakka no kansö," Bokubi, no. 12 (May 1952), 5. Morita in panel discussion "Gen shodan o kataru: Zadankai," Bokubi, no. 33 (May 1954), 46. Tejima Yükei in an interview with Hidai Kazuko, "Shöjisüsho no miryoku," in Hidai and Uno, Gendai sho, 2:55. Tejima Yükei, ibid., 2:56. Morita, "Gendai bijutsu konwakai" (1953), in Tsuji, Bokujin 40-nen, 103. Yoshihara Jirö, in transcript of panel discussion "Sho to chüshö kaiga: Zadankai," Bokubi, no. 26 (August 1953), reprinted in Hyögo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Morita Shiryü to "Bokubi" (Kobe: Hyögo Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1992), 118. Discussion between Hidai Nankoku, Morita Shiryü, Tokudaiji Kimehide, "Nani o dö kangaete iru? Teidan," Bokubi, no. 87 (June 1959), 31-40. Ibid., 38. Nishikawa wrote: "I think that the first motivation of the avant-garde movement in Japanese calligraphy was imitation. Yes, imitation of the West. Of Western painting." Nishikawa Yasushi, Shohin, no. 63 (December 1955), 74. "In petto" because the commissioner Tokudaiji Kimihide stated: "I will be promoting all of the Japanese work for the Japanese side as a kind of representative. What I say here [in Japan] is only for this side, and in Säo Paolo I will not make value judgments, or rather I shouldn't do so." Tokudaiji in discussion with Hidai Nankoku and Morita Shiryü, "Nani o dö kangaete iru? Teidan," 31. Ibid., 32. This was Morita's argument to Kaneko Ötei during the course of the panel discussion "Gen shodan o kataru: Zadankai," 44. Takiguchi Shüzö,"Higashi to nishi no sho," Bokubi, no. 62 (January 1957), and in Takiguchi, Ten (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobö, 1963), 147. This according to Nakamura, Tözai bijutsu shi, 437 and passim.

186

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PAGES

87-94

50. Morita in Bokubi, no. 76 (August 1958), quoted in ibid., 435. 51. Morita Shiryü, "Sho to Nyüyöku gadan," Bokubi, no. 132 (November 1963), 44. 52. Morita relates the story of his name in "Sho, kaite kangaete 60-nen," in Hyögo Prefectural M o d e r n Art Museum, Morita Shiryü to "Bokubi," 4. 53. Morita Shiryü, "The Dragon: East and West," in Kyoto City Art Museum, Morita Shiryü: Sakuhinshü (Kyoto: Kyoto Shiritsu Bijutsukan, 1964), n.p. 54. Morita, Bokubi, no. 137 (April 1964), quoted in ibid., 460, no. 46. 55. Nakatsuka Hiroshi," 'Shohin to 'Bokubi' ni miru sengo no sho n o rinen," in Kiyö 1900 (Sapporo: Hokkaido-Ritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1990), 46. 56. Naoki Sakai, "Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro's Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity," in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 258, no. 26. 57. For example, Takiguchi Shüzö wrote that "it is not just recently that European and American painters have begun to demonstrate an admiration for Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. The attention to oriental calligraphy is an inevitable outcome of the development of m o d e r n painting." Takiguchi Shüzö, "Sho to gendai kaiga ni tsuite" (1955), in Takiguchi, Ten, 135. 58. Georges Mathieu to Imai Toshimitsu, "Shodö to n o taiketsu," as quoted in Amano Kazuo," Anforumeru' to wa nan datta n o ka," POSI, no. 6 (February 1996), 27. 59. Georges Mathieu (1967) quoted in Siegfried Wichmann, Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 406. 60. Quoted by Segi Shin'ichi, "Sho to sengo geijutsu," in Hidai and Uno, Gendai sho, 1:102. 61. Ibid., 102. 62. For references to Yagi in English, see Alexandra Munroe, Scream against the Sky: Japanese Art after 1945 (New York: Ab rams, 1994), 132-133; Baekland and Moes, Modern Japanese Ceramics in American Collections, 181-183; Rebecca Salter, "Kazuo Yagi," Ceramic Review, no. 82 (July-August, 1983), 28-29; and "Japanese Black Fire," Ceramic Review, no. 85 (January-February, 1984), 19-20. For well-illustrated monographs of Yagi's ouevre, see National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Yagi Kazuo ten (Kyoto: Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1981); Inui Yoshiaki, Yagi Kazuo (Gendai Nihon tögei zenshü, vol. 14) (Tokyo: Shüeisha, 1981); Inui et al., Yagi Kazuo sakuhinshü (Tokyo: Ködansha, 1980). 63. Inui Yoshiaki, "Mingei to zen'ei" (1979), in Inui, Gendai tögei no keifü (Tokyo: Yöbisha, 1991), 123. The slightly later date of Voulkos' nonvessel is confirmed by his biographer.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

Rose Slivka, Peter Voulkos (New York Graphic Society, 1978), 23-42. Yagi's essays were anthologized twice: in Kaichü no fükei (Tokyo: Ködansha, 1976) and Kokukoku no honoo (Tokyo: Shinshindö, 1981). Yagi Kazuo, "Watakushi n o töjishi" (1975-1976), in Yagi, Kokukoku no honoo, 33. For this episode see Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi (1934-1939), trans. C. Terry (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 129-130. My translation. Eiji Yoshikawa, Miyamoto Musashi (Tokyo: Ködansha, 1995), 238. Yagi, "Watakushi n o töjishi," 33. Quotations in this paragraph are f r o m C. Terry's translation. Yoshikawa, Musashi, 393-394. For a concise account of these reforms of Japanese pottery in the prewar period, see Brian Moeran, "A Survey of Modern Japanese Pottery," parts 1 and 2, Ceramics Monthly, vol. 30, no. 8 (October 1982), 30-32, and vol. 30, no. 9 (November 1982), 44-46. My emphasis. Kusube Yaichi, another member of Akatsuchi, was destined for a m u c h more prominent career in the pottery world than Yagi Issö. The Akatsuchi group is discussed in Inui Yoshiaki, "Hito to sakuhin, koten kara kindai e, Kusube Yaichi n o tögei," in Kusube Yaichi (Gendai Nihon tögei zenshü, vol. 10) (Tokyo: Shüeisha, 1981), 86-88. For more on the Akatsuchi group, see National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Kyoto no kögei, 1910-1940 (Kyoto: Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1998), 10-13.

72. This according to Inui, Gendai tögei no keifü, 473. 73. For more about Numata's workshop, see National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Kyoto no kögei, 16-18. 74. Yagi Kazuo, "Wasurarenu hito—Numata Ichiga sensei," in Yagi, Kaichü no fükei, 48-49. 75. Yagi, "Watakushi no töjishi," 23. 76. Yagi used this metaphor in a discussion of the tremendous popularity of ceramics in postwar Japan. Ibid., 54. 77. Inui, "Mingei to zen'ei," 147. 78. Ibid. 79. According to Kaneko Kenji, "Zen'ei tögei kara, seitö no tögei e," in Showa no bunka isan: Dai 6-kan, kögei I (Tokyo: Gyösei, 1990), 135. 80. Yagi Kazuo, "Miro no töki" (1963), in Yagi, Kokukoku no honoo, 196-197. 81. This is according to several clippings of Japanese newspaper articles from 1950 to 1951 that Yagi Kazuo saved in his personal scrapbook, now in the archives of the Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan. The visitors f r o m New York are identified variously as a Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Rockefeller (both identified as trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), and the architect and interior designer

NOTES TO

82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99.

100. 101.

Noemi Raymond. One of these articles however, dated 1951, reports that the plan to show the works at the Museum of Modern Art was aborted, and they ended u p at the exhibition space of the nearby Woolworths. "Kyo no zen'ei toki Beikoku bijutsukan e," Yukan Asahi shinbun, March 28, 1950. Newspaper clipping in Yagi Kazuo's scrapbook, now in the archives of the Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan. Iwakuni Kikuo, Gyakko nofurato raito: Mumei no kiyomizuyaki shokuningunzo (Kyoto: Kyoto Shoin, 1991), 90-91. Yagi quoted in "Kyo no zen'ei toki Beikoku bijutsukan e," March 28,1950. Anna Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 174. Inui, "Uno Sango ron" (1976), in Inui, Gendai togei no keifu, 451-452. Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 21. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 34. Yagi in discussion with Inui Yoshiaki and Horiuchi Masakazu, "Zadankai, bokkoki no zen'ei togei—Sodeisha kessei n o shisoteki kyoten" (1975), in Yagi, Kokukoku no honoo, 346. Suzuki Osamu, "Kaiso: Yagi Kazuo to Sosoki no Sodeisha," in Yagi Kazuo sakuhinshu (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980), 225. Inui, "Gendai togei to purimitibizumu," in Shiga Prefectural Ceramic Park and Ceramic Art Museum, Tsuchi no hakken (Shigaraki: Shiga Kenritsu Togei n o Mori Togeikan, 1990), 97,100-101. Yagi, "Doki n o sekai," in Yagi, Kokukoku no honoo, 94. Kanashige Toyo, "Noguchi-shi n o shigoto ga oshieru mono," Nihon bijutsu kdgei, no. 168 (October 1952), 37. Suzuki, "Kaiso: Yagi Kazuo to sosoki n o Sodeisha," 225. Quoted in Inui, "Togei n o kaiho: Yagi Kazuo no geijutsu to shiso" (1982), in Inui, Gendai togei no keifu, 480. Reported in Onishi Nobuyuki, "Kyoto Gojozaka togei nidai Yagi Isso Kazuo," Geijutsu seikatsu, no. 290 (October 1973). 83. Hamamura Jun,"Hi o toshita tsuchi n o obuje: Yagi Kazuo no sakuhin," Bijutsu techo, no. 91 (February 1955), 26-27. For a relatively recent European attempt to articulate a universal system of connoisseurship for ceramics based on the primacy of the vessel, see Philip Rawson, Ceramics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984, first 1971). Inui, "Togei n o kaiho, Yagi Kazuo no geijutsu to shiso," 482-483. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, trans. A. L. Lloyd (New York: Vanguard Press, 1946), 54.

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102. Yagi regularly served as a volunteer at the O m i Gakuen in Shiga over a period of many years starting in the mid1950s. See The Works of Kazuo Yagi and Mentally Handicapped Person—Clay Formative (Shigaraki: The Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, 1993). 103. Yagi, "Kogei ten ni tsuite" (1978), in Yagi, Kokukoku no honoo, 73-75. 104. Yagi, "Fugetsu no sekai ni tsuite—gijutsu n o ba kara" (1969), in Yagi, Kokukoku no honoo, 106. 105. Inui et al., Yagi Kazuo sakuhinshu (Tokyo: Kyuryudo, 1969). Inui's texts are "Geijutsu to shite no yakimono" (1982), "Togei n o kaiho" (1982), and "Yagi Kazuo no shigoto" (1980). They are all included in Inui's collected writings on contemporary pottery, Gendai togei keifu. 106. Inui, Yagi Kazuo (Gendai Nihon togei zenshu, vol. 14). Inui was one of two editors of the overall series of fourteen volumes as well as author of one of two texts in the volume on Yagi. 107. For Nihonjinron, see Harumi Befu, "Nationalism and Nihonjinron," in Cultural Nationalism in East Asia, ed. Harumi Befu (Berkeley: University of California Institute of East Asian Studies, 1993), 107-135; Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986); Kosaku Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan (London: Routledge, 1992). 108. Inui, "Togei no kaiho: Yagi Kazuo n o geijutsu to shiso," 486. 109. Yoshino, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan, 11-12. 110. See Tsuji Shindo, Yagi Kazuo, Horiuchi Masakazu: Tsuji Shindo botsu go 10-shunen kinen tokubetsu kikaku ten (Yonago, Tottori: Yonago Shi Bijutsukan, 1991). 111. Yagi (May 1964), quoted in "Togei no kaiho: Yagi Kazuo n o geijutsu to shiso," 487. 112. Ibid., 459-460. 113. Ibid. 114. Miwa Ryosaku in the transcript of a discussion with Nakamura Kinpei and Nakagawa Yukio, "Utsuwa to obuje," Me no me, no. 144 (October 1988), 27. 115. John Clark, "Modernism and Traditional Japanese-Style Painting," Semiotica, vol. 74, no. 1 - 2 (1989), 44. 116. Inui, "Togei n o kaiho: Yagi Kazuo n o geijutsu to shiso," 461. 117. Other abstract painters who joined Morita's discussions and exhibited their paintings together with his calligraphy were Tsutaka Wa'ichi, Nakamura Shin, Shiraga Kazuo, and Suda Kokuta. See Amano, Sho to kaiga to no nekkijidai, 1945-1969,76-85. 118. Inui Yoshiaki would contrast the circle motifs Yoshihara

188

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108-116

began painting in the early 1960s to the "Western rational thinking" manifested in Mondrian's abstraction to illucidate Yoshihara's "oriental harmony." Inui, "Yoshihara Jiro no geijutsu," in Yoshihara Jird ten (Kamakura: Kanagawa Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 1973), 2. 119. Otani Senji, Sengo Nihon no sho o dame ni shita shichinin (Tokyo: Nichobo Shuppansha, 1985), 158-160; on Nishikawa's Sinophilism, see page 185. 120. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 15-16. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Quoted in Noguchi, interview with John Gruen, "The Artist Speaks Out: Isamu Noguchi," Art in America, vol. 56, no. 2 (March-April, 1968), 31. 2. See Noguchi's autobiography, A Sculptor's World (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Bruce Altshuler, Isamu Noguchi (New York: Abbeville, 1994); and Dore Ashton, Isamu Noguchi, East and West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 3. This account o f Noguchi's parents is based on Kamei Shunsuke, Yone Noguchi: An English Poet of Japan (Tokyo: The Yone Noguchi Society, 1965). 4. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 15. 5. Noguchi, quoted in David L. Shirley, "Noguchi," Newsweek vol. 71, no. 18 (April 29,1968), 94. 6. Oka Makoto, Gendai bijutsu ni ikiru dento (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1972), 8. 7. Yagi Kazuo, "Doki no sekai," in Yagi, Kokukoku no honoo, 948. This is the comment o f Hiroshi Teshigahara, who had an important position in the Japanese art world as the head o f a progressive school o f flower arranging and who was a close friend o f Noguchi. Quoted in Ashton, Isamu Noguchi, East and West, 237. 9. Thomas B. Hess, "Isamu Noguchi '46," Art News, no. 45 (September 1946), 34. 10. Sam Hunter, Isamu Noguchi (New York: Abbeville Press, 1978), 22-24. 11. This is anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro's characterization o f antimiscegenation doctrine, in Race Mixture (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), 42. 12. Frank F. Chuman, The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese-Americans (Del Mar, Calif.: Publishers Inc., 1976), 33313. Noguchi reprinted the text of this racist remark much later in his autobiography, A Sculptor's World, 23. The column originally appeared as "Attractions in the Galleries," The New York Sun (February 2,1935), 33.

14. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 13. 15. This is the comment o f Sano Tòuemon, a garden designer and builder who first met Noguchi in the late 1950s. Sano, "Isamu Noguchi to iu hito," in Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Play Mountain Isamu Noguchi + Ruis Kan (Tokyo: Marumo Shuppan, 1996), 144-146. 16. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 115-116. 17. See Sheng-mei Ma's discussion o f the "immigrant schizophrenic" in Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), chap. 3. 18. This is the comment of Tadayasu Sakai, "Isamu Noguchi and Rosanjin Kitaóji," in Sezon Museum o f Art, Isamu Noguchi to Kitaóji Rosanjin (Tokyo: Sezon Museum of Art, 1996), 278. 19. This is the comment of Dore Ashton in Isamu Noguchi, East and West, 295. 20. The exhibition referred to here was Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes, which was curated by Martin Friedman in 1978 and traveled to five cities in the United States. Benjamin Forgey, "Isamu Noguchi's Elegant World o f Space and Function," Smithsonian, vol. 9, no. 1 (April 1978), 47. 21. Noguchi was referring to his first major retrospective, which was held in 1968 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Quoted in Noguchi, interview with John Gruen, "The Artist Speaks Out," 31. 22. Noguchi was a particularly close friend of Arshile Gorky, an important early figure in the movement. He also exhibited in many o f the same galleries and museum shows as Abstract Expressionists, though he did not regularly frequent gatherings where they were present. 23. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 269. 24. This was reported by the artist Hedda Sterne in an interview with Ann Gibson. See Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 95. 25. Noguchi, interview with Paul Cummings, Artists in Their Own Words (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), 107. 26. Noguchi, interview with John Gruen, "The Artist Speaks Out," 30. 27. Margaret Sheffield, "Perfecting the Imperfect: Noguchi's Personal Style," Artforum, vol. 18, no. 8 (April 1980), 69,70. 28. In Katherine Kuh, "An Interview with Isamu Noguchi," Horizon, no. 11 (March i960), 108. 29. R. Buckminster Fuller, "Foreword," in Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 7-8. 30. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES

3 1 . The first comment appears in Altshuler, Isamu Noguchi, 85; the second in Altshuler's commentary in D. ApostolosCapadona and B. Altshuler, eds., Isamu Noguchi, Essays and Conversations (New York: Harry N. Abrams and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, 1994), 93. 32. Noguchi, interview with Paul Cummings, Artists in Their Own Words, 107. 33. Isamu Noguchi, "The Sculptor and the Architect," Studio International, vol. 176, no. 902 (July-August 1968), 19. 34. "Isamu Noguchi 'Kuroi taiyo' ni idomu," Shukan shincho, no. 641 (June 13,1968), frontispiece. 35. Martin Friedman, quoted in Forgey, "Isamu Noguchi's Elegant World of Space and Function," 46. 36. Martin Friedman, Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1978), 7,23. 37. Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernities (London: Routledge, 1991), 47,61. 38. Quoted by Hayashi Fusao, "Isamu Noguchi no geijutsu o mite," Tokyo shinbun (November 6,1952), 8. 39. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 22. 40. Henry McBride, quoted in ibid., 23. 41. This and the following quotation are from a letter Noguchi wrote from Poston, Arizona, in July 27, 1942. The letter appears in its entirety in Robert J. Maeda, "Isamu Noguchi: 5-7-A, Poston, Arizona," Amerasia Journal, vol. 20, no. 2

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

( 1 9 9 4 ) , 68.

42. Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:313,2:296. 43. Ibid., 2:296, 2:140. Emphasis in original. 44. Noguchi's 1949 statements are "Meanings in Modern Sculpture," Artnews, no. 48 (March 1948), 12-15, 55—56; "Towards a Reintegration of the Arts," College Art Journal, no. 9 (autumn 1949), 59-60; "From an Interview with Isamu Noguchi," League Quarterly, no. 20 (Spring 1949), 8-9; and "Proposal to the Bollingen Foundation: A Proposed Study to the Environment of Leisure" (1949), The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, web site, http://www. n0guchi.0rg/pr0p0sals.html#guggenheim, accessed December 2,1997. 45. Noguchi, "Proposal to the Bollingen Foundation." 46. David Smith, "Economic Support of Art in America Today" (1953), in David Smith, ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973), 109. 47. Clement Greenberg, "The New Sculpture" (1949), in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:314. 48. Noguchi, "Towards a Reintegration of the Arts," 59-60. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 5 1 . Hersey's Hiroshima was published in the New Yorker in August 1946. For American reactions to this and other representations of Hiroshima, see Paul Boyer, "Exotic Res-

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74.

1 16-1 28 |

189

onances: Hiroshima in American Memory," Diplomatic History, vol. 19, no. 2 (spring 1995), 297-318. Nancy Grove, Isamu Noguchi: A Study of the Sculpture (New York: Garland, 1983), 147. Ishigaki Ayako, "Isamu Noguchi no geijutsu," Bijutsu techd, no. 8 (August 1948), 18. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 30. Noguchi, "Towards a Reintegration of the Arts," 59-60. Noguchi, "Proposal to the Bollingen Foundation." Greenberg, "The Decline of Cubism" (1948), in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, 2:211-215. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 31. Ibid. Funato Kokichi, "Musshu Noguchi," Geijutsu shincho, vol. 2, no. 10 (October 1951), 123-126. Quotations in ibid. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 163. Tange Kenzo, "Goman-nin no hiroba—Hiroshima Pisu Senta kansei made" (1956), in Tange and Kawazoe Noboru, Genjitsu to sozo: Tange Kenzo, 1946-1958 (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1966), 91. Udo Kultermann, Kenzo Tange, 1946-1969 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970), 24. Tange Kenzo, "Ireihi," Shinkenchiku (January 1954), 14. Noguchi's proposal, illustrated in Grove and Botnick, The Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi, cat. no. 238. Isamu Noguchi, "A Project, Hiroshima Memorial to the Dead," Arts and Architecture, no. 69 (April 1953), 16. Ibid. Ibid. Funato, "Musshu Noguchi," 123. The Jungians that Noguchi was acquainted with were the philanthropist Mary Mellon, whose Bollingen Foundation funded his 1949 trip around the world; the choreographer Martha Graham, who underwent Jungian analysis and for whom Noguchi had been designing stage sets since 1935; and the popular Jungian writer Joseph Campbell, whom Noguchi had known since the 1930s. For the Jungian beliefs of each of these individuals, see Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and Modern Experience (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 45-51. According to Campbell's widow, Jean Erdman, Noguchi probably met Campbell early in the 1930s; telephone interview with the author, New York, November 1989. This sequence is paraphrased from C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 408. Quoted in Hayashi,"Isamu Noguchi no geijutsu o mite,"8. Noguchi, interview, "Isamu Noguchi no naka ni aru higashi to nishi," Fujin gaho, no. 672 (July i960), 224-225.

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PAGES

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75. Tange Kenzö, interview with the author, Tokyo, June 7, 1990. 76. Tange Kenzö, "Goman-nin no hiroba—Hiroshima Plsu Sentä kansei made," 91. 77. Shichikenjin [pseud.], "Isamu Noguchi to furukusai Nihon n o genjitsu," Tökyö shinbun (April 28,1952). 78. Shingaki Hiroshi, "Hiroshima Genbaku Ireihi no mondai," Bijutsu hihyö, no. 7 (July 1952), 36. 79. Okamoto Tarö, "Isamu Noguchi n o shigoto," Bijutsu techö, no. 63 (December 1952), 43-44. 80. Kawazoe Noboru, "Genbakudö" (1955), in Kawazoe, Hyöronshü, in three volumes (Tokyo: Sangyö Nöritsu Tanki Daigaku, 1976), 1:215-216. 81. Ibid., 220. 82. John W. Dower, "The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory," Diplomatic History, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995), 281. 83. This according to ibid., 293. 84. A separate memorial outside the official Peace Park was finally established in 1967 to acknowledge the Korean victims. This has been a source of continuing controversy. See Lisa Yoneyama, "Memory Matters: Hiroshima's Korean Atom Bomb Memorial and the Politics of Ethnicity," Public Culture, no. 7 (1995), 499-527. 85. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 92-111. 86. Noguchi made this comment in a lecture delivered at the Mainichi Press auditorium in Osaka on June 13,1950, published as Noguchi, "Art and the People," The Mainichi, June 17.1950. 87. For Noguchi's public gesture to show that "not all the Japanese are militaristic," see "New York, Art for China's Sake," New York Times, December 12,1937,4:23. 88. This is according to Noguchi's testimony in the interview "Isamu Noguchi n o naka ni aru higashi to nishi," 220-225. 89. "Isamu Noguchi rainichi," Mainichi shinbun, May 3,1950. 90. Noguchi Michio, interview with the author, Tokyo, June 23, 1991. 91. Noguchi, "The Faculty Retreat of Keiö University," Shinkenchiku, vol. 27, no. 2 (February 1952), 58. This project was undertaken with the collaboration of the architect Taniguchi Yoshirö. For further discussion on the Keiö design, see Bert Winther, "Isamu Noguchi: Conflicts of Japanese Culture in the Early Post-War Years" (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1992), 173-202. 92. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 32. 93. "Kekkon hirö m o katayaburi," Yomiuri shinbun, December 16.1951. 94. Noguchi, "Art and the People." 95. Yonejirö wrote about the visit of "my boy Isamu and Mrs.

96.

97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111.

112. 113.

Noguchi" in a letter of 1907. Ikuko Atsumi, ed., Yone Noguchi Collected English Letters (Tokyo: The Yone Noguchi Society, 1975), 205. The first comment is in Sidney B. Whipple, "Noguchi's Unique Sculpture in Kamakura," Nippon Times, n.d., 4 (newspaper clipping in Artists' File: Noguchi, Foreign Press Club, Tokyo). The second is in "Back to Clay," Newsweek, no. 44 December 6,1954,83. Noguchi, untitled statement in Takiguchi Shüzö, Hasegawa Saburö, Isamu Noguchi, Noguchi (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1953), n.p. In her autobiography, Yamaguchi mentions that she had two miscarriages during her four-year marriage with Noguchi. Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Ri kö ran: Watakushi no hansei (Tokyo: Shinchösha, 1987), 385. Noguchi, untitled statement in Noguchi (Bijutsu Shuppansha), n.p. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 21. Inokuma Genichirö, interview with the author, Tokyo, September 7,1990. Kamekura Yüsaku, "Kyoshö jidai n o saigo n o hito," Approach, no. 109 (Spring 1990), 4-5. "Charmer's Confusion," Newsweek,vol. 45, no. 1 (January 3,1955), 60. Yamaguchi and Fujiwara, Ri kö ran, 384. "Isamu Noguchi no hen na ie," San shashin shinbun, March 19,1952. "Higashi wa higashi, Berl guddo Nihon n o kankaku," Shükan sankei, April 13,1952. "Noguchi in Kitakamura [sic]," Interiors, no. 112 (November 1952), 116-122. Betty Pebis, "Artist at Home," New York Times Magazine, August 31,1952, 6. Hasegawa Saburö, "Isamu Noguchi ten," Bokubi, no. 19 (December 1952), 29-31. Takiguchi Shüzö, "A Strange Art Journey (Isamu Noguchi)," English trans, in Takiguchi et al., Noguchi (Bijutsu Shuppansha), 1. Originally published in Japanese as "Fushigi na geijutsu no ryokö—Isamu Noguchi shöron," Mizue, no. 568 (December 1952), 20-31. Signed "Tenchijin," the column "Hito Samazama" appeared regularly in the Asahi shinbun, each column featuring a well-known artist whose foibles or excesses were liable to be skewered with sarcasm, though not usually with quite the intensity meted out to Noguchi. "Hito Samazama: Nihon shökai ga hamariyaku, Isamu Noguchi," Asahi shinbun, October 18,1952. Suda Kokuta, "Isamu Noguchi ten o miru," Bokubi, no. 19 (December 1952), 33. In addition to the participants appearing in this sequence

NOTES TO

were Ikuta Tsutomu, an editor of the journal, and Tange Kenzö, who remained silent during the criticism of his friend Noguchi. "Kokusai-sei, füdo-sei, kokumin-sei: Gendai kenchiku no zökei o megutte," Kokusai kenchiku, vol. 20, no. 3 (March 1953), 9. 114. Sakakura is referring to his own Corbusian design of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura. 115. Sakakura had designed the Japan Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1937. 116. For more on Noguchi's lantern designs, see Winther, "Isamu Noguchi: Conflicts of Japanese Culture in the Early Post-War Years," 278-291. 117. The Czech American architect Raymond, the German architect Taut, and the German designer Perriand had each realized a significant body of design work in Japan. 118. See plans in Marcel Breuer, Bernard Zehrfuss, Pier Luigi Nervi, UNESCO Preliminary Project, Place Fontenoy Paris (Paris: UNESCO, 1953). 7119. Noguchi, "Garden of Peace," The UNESCO Courier, no. 11 (November 1958), 33. 120. This and the views of Noguchi mentioned subsequently are quoted in "Isamu Noguchi chökoku, haniwa, sekitei ni kantan," Yükan sankei shinbun, February 27,1969. 121. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 40. 122. James P. Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics: Engaging in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 77. 123. Cranston Jones, Marcel Breuer: Buildings and Projects, 1921-1961 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), 94. 124. Henry Moore, interview with Carlton Lake, "Henry Moore's World," Atlantic, vol. 209, no. 1 (January 1962), 43125. Noguchi in Herrymon Maurer, "Noguchi, an Abstract Sculptor Puts His Art to the Uses of an Industrial World," Fortune, vol. 48, no. 3 (September 1953), 118. 126. Henry Moore, "The Sculptor in Modern Society," in The Artist in Modern Society, International Conference of Artists, Venice, 22-28 September 1952 (Paris: UNESCO, 1954). 97-102. 127. Noguchi stated that he named the garden the "Nippon no Niwa" (Garden of Japan), in Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," Geijutsu shinchö, vol. 8, no. 7 (July 1957), 154. 128. For Noguchi's uneasiness regarding the sobriquet "Jardin Japonais," see Noguchi, "UNESCO Gardens in Paris," Arts and Architecture, vol. 76, no. 1 (January 1959), 12-13. In 1983 Nancy Grove wrote, " I t . . . is an anonymous [garden], known to the guidebooks simply as the 'jardin japonais.'" Grove, Isamu Noguchi, a Study of the Sculpture, 162.

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129. In the special issue of the UNESCO Courier devoted to the new Paris complex, a map of the complex identifies Noguchi's work as the "Japanese Garden," while works by Moore and others are identified by their artists' names. UNESCO Courier, no. 11 (November 1958), 16-17. 130. Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," 153-156. 131. The UNESCO Constitution can be found in Michel Conil Lacoste, The Story of a Grand Design, UNESCO 1946-1993 (Paris: UNESCO, 1994), 449-467. 132. Thornton Wilder, "General Report," in The Artist in Modern Society, International Conference of Artists, Venice, 22-28 September 1952,121-124. 133. Georges Salles, director of the Musées Nationaux de France and vice chairman of the UNESCO Committee of Art Advisers, as quoted in Aline B. Saarinen, née Louchheim, "Six Top Artists to Brighten UNESCO Home," New York Times, June 13,1956,1:10. 134. For the "Japanese peace bell," see Edward B. Marks, A World of Art: The United Nations Collection (Rome: II Cigno Galileo Galilei, 1995), 50. 135. As listed in Saarinen, "Six Top Artists to Brighten UNESCO Home," 1:10. 136. Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," 153-156. 137. Based on the list published in "UNESCO's Cheerful New Home," Architectural Forum, vol. 109, no. 6 (December 1958), 78-88. 138. John Ely Burchard, "Unesco House Appraised," Architectural Record, vol. 127, no. 5 (May i960), 153. 139. These are headlines from the New York Times, 1955-1958. See also James P. Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, chap. 4. 140. Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," 153-156. 141. See, for example, Kitao Harumichi, Ishi no zökei (Tokyo: Shökokusha, 1953). 142. Ernst quoted in Aniela Jaffe, "Symbolism in the Visual Arts," in Man and His Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung (New York: Dell, 1968), 260. For Hepworth's efforts at "deliberately renew [ing] stone's essential shapes," see Adrian Stokes, "Miss Hepworth's Carving" (1933), in Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography (Bath, U.K.: Adams and Dart, 1970), 29. 143. This was in a 1959 essay about the abstract stone sculpture of Kimura Kentarö, but Takiguchi claims that he had already made this point in a text twenty years previously. Takiguchi Shüzö, "Kimura Kentarö ten" (1959), reprinted in Takiguchi, Yohaku ni Kaku (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobö, 1982), 17-18.

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148-161

144. Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," 153-156. 145. Undated letter from Noguchi to Hagiwara Töru, Bern, Switzerland (Projects, UNESCO Gardens—Correspondence, 1955-1956. Archives, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, Long Island City, New York). 146. This correction appears on the undated copy of the letter to Hagiwara mentioned above. 147. Letter from Isamu Noguchi to Ambassador Kase Toshikazu, New York, Permanent Japanese Observer to the United Nations, September 24,1956. (Projects, UNESCO Gardens—Correspondence, 1955-1956. Archives, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, Long Island City, New York). 148. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 148149. 149. These are the words of Shigemitsu Mamoru, minister of foreign affairs of Japan, to a UNESCO conference in 1956, in Records of the Regional Conference of Representatives of National Commissions for UNESCO in Asia (Tokyo: Japanese National Commission for UNESCO, 1957), 101. 150. See, for example, Reina Lewis' discussion of "[Jewish] aliens at home and Britons abroad" in Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), chap. 5. 151. Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," 153-156. 152. "Isamu Noguchi, Chökoku no seishin o motomete, shizenseki o keiryü kara toru," Yükan Tokyo shinbun, June 18,1957,8. 153. Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," 153-156. 154. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 165-167. 155. Burchard, "Unesco House Appraised," 156. 156. For these allusions to Japan in Noguchi's descriptions of the garden, see Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 165-167; Noguchi, "Garden of Peace," 33; letter from Isamu Noguchi to Ambassador Kase Toshikazu, New York, September 24,1956. 157. Noguchi, "Garden of Peace," 33. 158. Jones, Marcel Breuer Buildings and Projects, 1921-1961,78. 159. Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," 156. 160. Reported in Hunter, Isamu Noguchi, 105. 161. Reyner Banham, "Unesco House," New Statesman, no. 55 (December 6, 1958), also in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 31162. Burchard, "Unesco House Appraised," 156.

163. James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Colder (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 7. 164. Burchard, "Unesco House Appraised," 154. 165. This anecdote and Calder's words are recounted in Jean Lipman, Calder's Universe (New York: Viking, 1976), 38. 166. Noguchi, "Ishi: Pari no 'Nihon no niwa' o tsukuru," 153-156. 167. Ibid. 168. See David J. Clarke's notes from a 1980 conversation with Noguchi in The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture, 224. 169. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 167 170. Ibid., 167. 171. Quoted by John Donald Wilson, The Chase: The Chase Manhattan Bank, N.A., 1945-1985 (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1986), 112. 172. Ogden Tanner with David Allison, Peter Blake, and Walter McQuade, "The Chase: Portrait of a Giant," Architectural Forum, vol. 115, no. 1 (July 1961), 63, 65-95. 173. This quote from "Talk of the Town: Harmonies," The New Yorker, vol. 37, no. 32 (September 23,1961), 33; the preceding facts reported also in "Chase Manhattan Wins 'Friends'—and Influences People," Newsweek, vol. 61, no. 14 (April 8,1963), 76. 174. "Chase Manhattan's Big Move," Fortune, vol. 64, no. 1 (July 1961), 150-155. 175. Quoted in Charles Grutzner, "Chase Bank Opens 64Story Tower," New York Times, May 18,1961, 24. 176. "Chase Manhattan Wins 'Friends'—and Influences People," 76. 177. Tanner et al., "The Chase: Portrait of a Giant," 65. 178. "Chase Manhattan Wins 'Friends'—and Influences People," 76. 179. Walter McQuade, "Architecture," Nation, no. 193 (September 23,1961), 186. 180. Tanner et al., "The Chase: Portrait of a Giant," 95. 181. Noguchi quoted in an interview with Kondo Hidezo, "Chokokuka Isamu Noguchi," Shukan Yomiuri, June 19, i960, 61. 182. Ibid., 60. 183. At an early stage in the process of planning the sculpture for Fort Worth, Noguchi commented: "When I think of Texas I think of their water towers, and I'm inspired to make a sculpture out of a series of globules of air or oil spouting from the earth, very tall and strangely shaped. I'd like to make them out of aluminum or stainless steel in the Convair factory out there." Something of these shapes seems to be preserved in the work as realized, though the material was altered from metal to stone and the place of production from Texas to Japan. Quoted in

NOTES TO PAGES

Kuh, "An Interview with Isamu Noguchi," n o . For Noguchi's reference to totem poles, see Ashton, Noguchi, East and West, 179. 184. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 169. 185. I am grateful to Bonnie Rychlak for providing me with this undated statement by Isamu Noguchi from the archives of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation. 186. For this and subsequent references to the reception of the Fort Worth sculpture, see Fort Worth National Bank Papers, microfilm roll no. 1913 (frames 88-107), and Sam Cantey Papers, microfilm roll no. 1690 (frames 657-660), American Archives of Art, Smithsonian Institution. 187. "Profiles: Resources and Responsibilities—I, David Rockefeller," New Yorker, vol. 40, no. 47 (January 9,1965), 47. 188. Wilson, The Chase, 112. 189. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 35. Noguchi made more than thirty sculptures in aluminum, anodyzed aluminum, stainless steel, and Cor-ten steel in 1958 and 1959. Fifteen of these were exhibited at the Cordier and Warren Gallery in New York in 1961. Nancy Grove and Diane Botnick, The Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi, 1924-1979: A Catalogue, 80-86. 190. Sano Tóuemon, interview with the author, Kyoto, February 22, 1990. See also Noguchi's comment quoted in Friedman, Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes, 61. 191. The sculptor was Onorio Ruotolo. Noguchi, "Isamu Noguchi no naka ni aru higashi to nishi," 222. 192. Noguchi in Kuh, "An Interview with Isamu Noguchi," 111-112. 193. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 37. 194. Noguchi, interview with John Gruen, "The Artist Speaks Out," 28. 195. This according to Harriet Senie, "Urban Sculpture: Cultural Tokens or Ornaments to Life?" Artnews, vol. 78, no. 7 (September 1979), 111. 196. See Noguchi's four plaster models for this unrealized work in Sezon Museum of Art, Isamu Noguchi to Kitadji Rosanjin, 108-110. 197. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 171. 198. Isamu Noguchi, "New Stone Gardens," Art in America, vol. 52, no. 3 (June 1964), 89. 199. Noguchi quoted in "Total Sculpture," The New Yorker, vol. 39, no. 43 (December 14,1963), 46. 200. Noguchi, "New Stone Gardens," 89.

161-176

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201. Isamu Noguchi, the Sculpture of Spaces (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980), n.p. 202. David Rockefeller, Culture and the Corporation, address at the Fiftieth Anniversary Conference, National Industrial Conference Board, New York City, September 20, 1966 (New York: Chase Manhattan Bank, 1966), 6. 203. Robert Trumbull, "Chase Bank Plaza Opens with Party," New York Times, May 7,1964,61; Ashton, Noguchi East and West, 186-192. 204. The Chase Manhattan Bank Annual Report (New York, 1964), 1. 205. For the Rockefeller family's Japanese garden, see Mary Louise Pierson, The Rockefeller Family Home, Kykuit (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), 144-145. 206. These quotes are from, respectively, "Water Garden to Offer Quiet Spot for Wall St.," New York Times, September 13,1963,19; J. Walter Severinghaus, "Work Places for Art," in Art at Work: The Chase Manhattan Collection, ed. Marshall Lee (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), 20; Martin Friedman, Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes, 62. 207. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, 175. 208. Rockefeller, Culture and the Corporation, 9. 209. Noguchi in Cummings, Artists in Their Own Words, 111. 210. Noguchi, interview with Gruen, "The Artist Speaks Out," 31211. Watanabe Shöichi, Nihon, soshite Nihonjin (Tokyo: Shödensha, 1980), 46; translated as The Peasant Soul of Japan, (Hampshire, U.K.: MacMillan Press, 1989), 30. Emphasis in original. 212. Noguchi, "New Stone Gardens," 89. 213. Noguchi in Cummings, Artists in Their Own Words, 113. 214. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 119. 215. For a report on this agreement, see Kay Itoi, "The Stones of Mure," Artnews, vol. 98, no. 8 (September 1999), 90-94. Notes to the Conclusion

1. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Bäsch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, "From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration," Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 1995), 48-63.

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Index

"Abstract Art around the World Today," 20,41,57 Abstract Expressionism, 2 , 4 , 1 9 - 2 0 , 2 1 , 27,29,31,42-43,44,46,55-57,61-63, 67,114-115,119; and American identity, 44, 46, 55, 57, 61-62, 64,173; as an art world, 67; and Asian Americans, 22; Asian thought, 2-3, 22,40, 44-45, 46,56-57, 63, 65; and calligraphy, 44-46, 50,57; canon of, 20, 62-63; diversity of, 21-22, 63; and European Americans, 19,50,62,63; individualism, 21,61,114; Japanese margins of, 2, 4,19, 20, 29, 62, 63; "The Club," 40; and universalism, 21, 64; written language, 44. See also Hasegawa; Kline; Noguchi; Okada; Tobey abstraction, 2,3, 20, 27,30,32,33,35,40, 41, 74,108,114,148; associated with Asia, 41,50; associated with Japan, 31-32,35,41; associated with modernity, 3, 74,108; and graphology, 61-62; and national identity, 20-21, 25,34,40,51, 61-62, 86; and tradition, 40; and universality, 20. See also calligraphy Adams, Henry, 11 Albers, Josef, 60

Alloway, Lawrence, 58 Altshuler, Bruce, 116 American Abstract Artists, 39-40,70 American Academy of Asian Studies, 42 American identity: of abstract painting, 21, 60-62; Asian supplement, 12, 63; boldness, 61-62; democracy, 14; "East-West," 51; "frontier heritage," 155; magnitude, 55; materialist, 39; "melting pot," 52-53; modernity, 2, 18; national motto, 52; new beginnings, 105; power, 21, 61; protection of, 51; skyscraper, 20,165; universalism, 54-55, 64; unrefined, 29; virility, 2,55-56, 62,168; Wall Street, 157. See also Kline; Noguchi; Tobey Anfam, David, 58, 60 Appadurai, Arjun, 176 artistic nationalism, 2 , 4 , 5 - 9 , 1 4 , 1 5 - 1 6 , 31-32,34, 61, 63,110,170,173-174 art worlds, 7,66-67,69,72,106,108,115; borders of, 3, 66,74, 86-87, 91,103, 107-108; defined by media, 66,115; identification with, 69,115; and nations, 3,7, 66-67,70-71,108,173; strengthening of, 106,108 Asian Americans, 11, 22, 63, i77n. 16. See also Japanese Americans avant-garde, 71-72,159

Bahá'í World Faith. See Tobey Barr, Alfred, Jr., 57 Becker, Howard, 66-67 Belgrad, Daniel, 22, 62 Bhabha, Homi K., 5 Bokubi, 57-58,75 Bokujinkai, 57-58, 75, 77-79- 83, 86,109 borders, 3 , 5 , 8 , 1 6 , 2 1 , 1 0 8 , 1 1 0 , 1 1 6 , 1 4 0 , 149,171-172,174,176. See also art worlds Bourdieu, Pierre, 67 Brancusi, Constantin, 94,143 Breuer, Marcel, 143-144,146,148,149, 150,151,153 Bunshaft, Gordon, 157,159,161,163,165 Calder, Alexander, 146,155 calligraphy: abstract, 72,75,82-84,89, 106,108-109; and abstract painting, 35-36,39,44,58,61,77-78,82-83, 86-89,106,107, i86n. 57; "art calligraphy," 74; art status denied, 73; as an art world, 68-69; crisis, 74,76,78; exhibited abroad, 79-81; exhibition societies, 69-72; foreign viewers, 76, 77, 80-81, 86,108; "functional calligraphy," 74; genre categories, 71-72; "illiterate foreigners," 77,79; inferiority of, 72-74; and Japanese identity,

203

204

I INDEX

39, 68-69, 86,107-108,151; and Kline, 58; lexical form, 61,72,74,75; preMeiji, 35, 56,58,77; and race, 69, 81, 108; revitalization of, 78; and script reform, 76-77. See also moji-sei Campbell, Joseph, 25 ceramics: Akatsuchi, 91; as an art world, 71; avant-garde, 71; Bizen, 93, 96, 99; exhibition societies, 69-72; figurines, 91-92, 96; Hagi ware, 105; inferiority of, 72-74, 91; and Japanese identity, 68-69, 71» 103-105; "Kingdom of Pottery," 71; nonfunctional, 72,89; physical handling, 90, 92; pre-Meiji pottery, 90,97,100; and sculpture, 66,91, 92,99,103-104,105,106,107, 174; Seto, 96; Shigaraki, 97; Shino, 93; tea bowl, 90, 92, 93,100,104; tradition, 68,71, 93,100,103,105; vessel pottery, 71,74,90,100-101,105, 108-109. See also kiln-fired objet; tsuchi Cézanne, 35,68 Chamberlain, John, 169 Chase Manhattan Bank, 157,159,162, 163,165-166,167,168 Chow, Rey, 108 Clark, John, 106 Clarke, David J., 22 cold war, 18,27,41,50,141,147 Coomaraswamy, 22 crafts, 12, 68, 69,72-73, 90-92,101,103, 142 de Kooning, Elaine, 58,61 Deutsch, Karl, 7 D'Harnoncourt, Rene, 20 diplomacy, art used for, 8,14,40-41,43, 149-150,156,173-174 Dirlik, Arif, 63 Dower, John, 130 Dubuffet, Jean, 166 Earth Art, 169 East-West rhetoric, 4,10-11,115-116; contingent quality of, 107; and dualism, 87; "fusion," 46,112-113,117; "hiatus," 51; "linkage," 34-35,39; in modern Japanese thought, 112; "mutual understanding," 149; and

national difference, 11, 43,103; and painting, 25,39,47,76; politics of, 10-11,112; and race, 11,114,116; and schizophrenia, 114; "synthesis," 116; "vast distance," 34-35. See also Hasegawa; Morita; Noguchi École de Paris, 27,30,33 exhibitions, 12, 69-74, 81, 90, 91-92,102, 114; international exhibitions, 8,16, 20-21,31,72-73, 80-81, 86,102. See also under exhibition title exoticism, 2,11,12,14, 23, 28, 42,46, 136-137 Fauvism, 32-33 Fenollosa, Ernest, 13-15, 25,41, 68 Ferren, John, 40 Fifteen Year War, 74,92-93. See also World War II First National Bank of Fort Worth, 159, 161-162 Francis, Sam, 22 Friedman, Martin, 117 Fujita Tsuguji, 15-16 Fuller, Buckminster, 116-117,165,171 Gaugh, Harry, 58 Gibson, Ann, 21-22,62-63 Gojözaka, 90, 93,99 Gilmour, Leonie, 111,113,132,148 Gorky, Arshile, 119,120 Gottlieb, Adolph, 44 Gottlieb, Nanette, 76 graphology, 61-62 Greenberg, Clement, 17,20,21,29-30, 46, 55, 56-57,58, 61,119-120,121 Guilbaut, Serge, 21-22,55, 64 Gutai, 82 Hakuin Ekaku, 35,77 haniwa, 96,97,126-127,134,138,139 Hasegawa, Saburö, 2,32-43,50,57,62, 63, 67, 70, 88,107; Abstract Art, 35; and Abstract Expressionism, 63,173, 175; advocacy of abstraction, 35, 39-40; alienation, 33,43-44; "Alpha Section," 78, i85n. 34; "art ambassador," 40,43,173; "artistic colonialism," 35; in California, 42-43; calligraphy, 35,39, 58, 77; cold war,

41; critical stance of, 19,35, 41-42; disavowal of oil painting, 35-36; East-West rhetoric of, 32,34-35,39, 41-42; frottage, 36; ink monochrome, 36,50; Japanese identity, 43, 62, 63,173; and Kline, 36,39, 58; in New York, 40, 42,58, 67; and Noguchi, 33-34,36,77,110,112,121, 137; Sesshu, 33; tea ceremony, 33,35, 41, 43; tradition, 33,35,43; yoga, 67. Works by: Goodness is Like Water, 41-42; Metropolis, 35-36; Yugen, 36-37 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 8 Heron, Patrick, 56 Hersey, John, 120 Hess, Thomas, 54,57,113 Hidai Nankoku, 74,75, 83-87, 89; materials, 83; and Morita, 84-87, 89,107. Works by: Work 1: Variation on "Den," 75,83; Work 22, 83,85 Hidai Tenrai, 74,83 hierarchy of arts, 72-74, 91-92 Hiroshige, 32 Hiroshima nuclear destruction, 118,120, 121-124,129-130 Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, 81, 87 Hokusai, 57 Hon'ami Kôetsu, 90 Horiuchi Masakazu, 104 Horiuchi, Paul, 49 Hunter, Sam, 113 hybrid formations, 3,4,5,9, 66,72, 106-109,175 Ijima Tsutomu, 81, 87 Imaizumi Atsuo, 16-17,32 "Imaizumi storm," 16 Ike no Taiga, 85 influence, art historical, 8-9 ink monochrome, 23,34,40, 46, 47, 49-50, 56,58, 60,78, 86. See also calligraphy; sumi-e Inokuma Gen'ichirô, 136 Inoue Yuichi, 58, 83. Works by: Work A, 83-84 internationality, 34,123,129,142,146; of communication, 73,76,86,145-146; of creative range, 105,168; kokusaisei, 139; as a measure of importance,

INDEX I

4i> 43, 78, 87,108,129; of perspective, 39» 97-98,146,149; of power, 71,74, 162-163,173-174; of property, 108, 163; of rivalry, 29,31,32, 63. See also exhibitions; world character Inui Yoshiaki, 35,97,99,102-104 Ise Shrine, 31,124 Japan Abstract Artists Club, 40 Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition, 70-71,72 Japanese Americans, 22, 49,118-119,129, 130,155 Japanese identity: in abstract painting, 31-32, 86; clay, 96; "cloudy moistness," 97; debated, 139-140,155; gardens, 148,165; gendered, 56; ink monochrome, 34,86; soil symbolism, 104-105,169-170; spiritual, 39; stone, 147-148; tranquillity, 27,34,36, 41, 42, 56, 62,167-168; victimization, 130. See also ceramics; calligraphy Japanophilism, 40,41 Japónica, 28, 81,129,155-156 Japonisme, 11-12,46 Jenkins, Paul, 22 Jómon. See prehistoric Japan Kafka, Franz, 99-100 Kamekura Yüsaku, 136 Kanashige Tóyó, 96,99 Kató Hajime, 96 Kawabata Minoru, 22 Kawazoe Noboru, 129 Kays, Judith, 55 kiln-fired objet, 99-102,103,106, 108-109. See also ceramics Kitaóji Rosanjin, 96,132,135,136 Kiyomizu Rokubei, 99 Kline, Franz, 9,36,43, 45,49,56-62, 68, 89; and Abstract Expressionism, 19; American identity, 9,61,62; Asian influence, 39, 45,57,174; and Bokujinkai, 57, 58, 78, 86, 88; denial of Asian influence, 3,19,45,56-57, 58-60,63, 65,88-89,176; and Hasegawa, 36,39,58; ink sketches, 58, 61; and Morita, 78-79, 86, 88-89, 106; and Noguchi, 36,57,58,110. Works by: Cardinal, 36,38,39,58; Untitled (1950), 58-59

Koide Narushige, 32 Körin, 26, 57 Koyama Shötarö, 73 Kyoto School, 81-82, 87 Kuh, Katherine, 56 Kuwabara Sumio, 12,17, 22 La Farge, John, 11-12,13 Langsner, Jules, 61 Lassaw, Ibram, 22,40 Leja, Michael, 114 Lippold, Richard, 22 Louchheim, Aline B., 20, 41, 86 MacArthur, Douglas, 10,113 Mainichi Calligraphy Association, 69-70,71-72 Marchetti, Gina, 51 Mathieu, Georges, 56,85,88,89 Matisse, Henri, 35,39,76 McBride, Henry, 113 Messer, Thomas, 64,173 Michener, James, 27 Mirò, Joan, 93,146,151 miscegenation, 113,129 Miwa Ryösaku, 105. Works by: Black Sonatina, 105 modern art, 108; abstraction, 20, 23,39, 41,45,61,66,79, 89; artistic modernization, 13-14, 89,105-106,109; associated with Euro-America, 3,24-25, 65, 89,121; associated with Europe, 2, 16, 22,33,35, 67, 76; associated with United States, 29-30,32,55, 65, 96; critique of, 121; in Japan, 25,32,33, 66,74, 8o, 89,91,106,142; related to Japanese pasts, 23, 24-25,33-35,39, 4i> 43, 65,74,77, 94,96-97, 99,105, 126,148; universality, 20, 76. See also Noguchi m o d e r n design, 124,130,132,136,153; related to Japanese pasts, 153,166; spatiality, 166. See also Noguchi modernity, 7,120; aesthetic, 124; associated with Euro-America, 11,18, 25; associated with the United States, 2; and calligraphy, 4, 68,70, 74, 75,103, 108; and ceramics, 4, 68,70, 74, 92, 93-94,105,108; and garden design, 153,156; in Japan, 3, 4,18,74,108,112,

205

118,122,128; and nuclear destruction, 122,123,127 moji-sei, 75,78,79, 82-83, 87, 89,107,109 Mondrian, Piet, 20,34,35,76, i88n. 118 Moore, Henry, 143,144-145,146,148. Works by: Reclining Figure, 144-145 Morita Shiryü, 3, 66,74-89,106-108; and abstract painting, 79, 82-83, 84-89,174,176; "Alpha Section," 78; criticism of, 107; definition of calligraphy, 82; dragon symbolism, 87; East-West rhetoric of, 78, 87,176; and Kline, 78-79, 86,106; "Like a Rainbow," 76; and Noguchi, 77,110. Works by: Kóru, 79-81; Dragon, 87-88 Motherwell, Robert, 22,45 Musashi, 89-90, 92,104 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 20, 23, 40, 41,50, 53,79,94 Nakatsuka Hiroshi, 87 nanga, 85 nations, 6, 8; art of, 14-15,15-16, 67,105; relations between, 20,22,73,96; symbol of, 128. See also under art worlds national identity, 6-7,25,31,34,39,44, 51, 56, 62,140; alienation from, 43-44, 51,128; ambiguities of, 43, 137-138; design of, 128; dissimulated, 131; essentialized, 39,105; everyday life, 68; overrules artistic identity, 7, 139-140,170; and places, 110,117,118; and race, 138-139,169; reassured, 51; reorientation of, 112; representation of, 7-8, 20, 61, 62,110,145; transcended, 113; typecasting by nationality, 62-63. See also American identity; Japanese identity nationalisms, 5-9,11,29,70,71,103,111; American, 21, 44, 50-51,54,55, 61; antinationalism, 54,116; Japanese, 14,18,31, 56, 63, 68, 88,103-104,111, 169; and universalism, 54, 64,71, 88. See also artistic nationalism Nelson, George, 51-52 Newman, Barnett, 23, 44, 68 nihonga, 68-69,7 2 > 1 1 2 Nihonjinron, 103-104

206

I

INDEX

Niizuma, Minoru, 22 Ninsei, 100 Nipponism, 64,173,175 Nishikawa Yasushi, 85, 87,107-108 Nitten, 74,75 Noguchi, Isamu: and Abstract Expressionism, 114-115,119,120; and American identity, 111,113,128,148,150,162, 170; affiliation with Japan, 117,118, 128; appropriations from Japanese sources, 96,124,138,151,153; A Sculptor's World, 115; associated with Japan, 77,114; biculturalism, 3,111, 114,116; biracial identity, 112-113,116; and Bokujinkai, 77-78,96; ceramic work, 94-99,126-127,132-133,139; criticism of, 28,113,118,119,137-141, 149, 153-156; "cross-breeding" of, 113, 114,116; and East-West rhetoric, 112-113,115-116,117,176; export of rocks, 3,111,142-143> 145, 148,150, 156-157,159-163,166,168,169-171; and Hasegawa, 33-34,36,39,77-78, 96,112,121,137; and Hiroshima, 118-130; interlocutory role, 33-34, 57, 58,77-78, 94-96,110,138-139, 149-150; in internment camp, 118-119,155; in Japan (1950), 117-118, 121,131,137; and Japanese earth, 94-96,111,124,135,142,148,149,163, 169,174,176; and Japanese gardens, 142,149,151,153,156,161,163,166-168; and Japanese identity, 34, 77,112,114, 128,138,140-141,148,150,155,169, 170; and Japanese tradition, 34,124, 138,142,147,156,167; Japonica, 28; Jungian thought, 127-128, i89n. 71; and Kline, 57,58,77,96,110; in Kyoto (1931), 118,121,135,142; metal sculpture, 116,135,142,163; mixed parentage of, 97,163; and modern art, 112, 113,116,117,119,121,148,168; and modern design, 124,130,132,149,153, 166,168; and Morita, 77-78,96; Mure (Japan), 172; name of, 111-112,148; and New York City, 111,135,163-166; parents, 111,132,148; place design, 3, 110-111,117,120,131,140,141,143,165, 169,170-171,176; placelessness, 120, 171; places of belonging, 3,120,170;

racially characterized, 97,112-113, 116,118,129,139; residence in Long Island City, 165,172; Ryüanji, 166-167; stone sculpture, 115-116,143, 171; Surrealism, 126,128,148,153; and Tange, 121-124,128; "Towards a Reintegration of the Arts," 119-120, 144-145,146, i89n. 44; and Yagi, 94, 96-97,106,111,112. Works by: Big Boy, 132-133; Breakthrough Capestrano, 115-116; Clay Studies, 126-127; Deepening Knowledge, 115-116,171; Delegates Patio, UNESCO, 141,147, 150-151,152,153,156,168; Fountains for Expo '70,142; Frontier, 118; Gate, 142-143; Jardin Japonais, UNESCO, 142,145,147,149-151,153-156,168, 169,170,173; Lunar Voyage, 135; Marriage, 132; Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima, 118,124-130,137,138, 150,169,170; Model for Bell Tower for Hiroshima, 122; Monument to a Plow, 118; Mother Goddess N0.1,126; Mrs. White, 96-97; Noguchi/Yamaguchi House, 132-137,141,170; Play Mountain, 118; Sculpture to be Seen from Mars, 120-121; Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank, 157-159, 162-164,166-167,169-170,176; The Texas Sculpture, 159-162,192n. 183, 176; To Build (Hiroshima Bridge), 122-123 Noguchi Michio, 131 Noguchi Yonejiró, 111,131,132,135 Northrop, F.S.C., 10 Numata Ichiga, 91-92 Nute, Kevin, 14 objet. See kiln-fired objet Occupation. See United States Occupation O'Hara, Frank, 58,61 Okada Kenzo, 2,22-32, 62,76; and Abstract Expressionism, 19,23,25, 27,63, 64,173,175; abstraction, 27,30, 32; American career success, 22-24; American citizenship, 31; criticism of, 28n. 81; and France, 27,28-30, 67-68,175; Japanese identity, 27, 30-32, 62, 63, 64; Japanese tradition,

23,24-25, 27, 64; Japonica, 81,129, 175; move to New York, 27-30, 64, 67; "Oriental Abstractions," 27,168,175; reception of, 22-25; war painting, 27; and yoga, 67-68; yugenism, 22, 26-28,36, 42, 62, 86, i79n. 32. Works by: By the Window, 29; Height, 26; Quality, 23-24 Okada Kimi, 23,30 Okamoto Taró, 25-26, 28,129 Okakura Kakuzö, 13,14-15, 22,41, 68,73 Onslow-Ford, Gordon, 22 orientalism, 25-26,39,40,42,54,64,156 Osawa Gakyü, 75 Otani Senji, 107-108 Pacific War. See Fifteen Year War Parsons, Betty, 23 Picasso, Pablo, 25, 29,93-94,100,146 Pollock, Jackson, 21,39,40,44, 45-46, 49,52, 55-56, 61 pottery. See ceramics prehistoric Japan, 96,122,126-127, 138-139. See also haniwa race, 11, 51-52, 69, 81, 97,108,116,139, 141,149. See also East-West rhetoric; Noguchi Reinhardt, Ad, 22,40,45 Rexroth, Kenneth, 52 Rockefeller, David, 158-159,162-163, 167-168 Rodin, August, 91 Rosanjin. See Kitaöji Rosanjin Rosenberg, Harold, 56 Rothko, Mark, 30,31,40,68,115,145 Rubin, William, 55 Rueppel, Merrill, 53,56 Saarinen, Eero, 123,124,165 Said, Edward, 26, 63 Sakaida Kakiemon, 69 Sakakura Junzö, 139-140,156 Salon de Mai, 16 Sandler, Irving, 55,58 Sano Töuemon, 163 Säo Paulo Biennial, 20-21,79, 81, 86 Satö Döshin, 14 Sayonara, 52 Schuyler, James, 61

INDEX I

sculpture, 66, 91-92, 96,103,106-107, 115-116,119-120, i43-i45> 163,168,171 Segi Shin'ichi, 88-89 Seitz, William, 46,53-54,56 sekai-sei. See world character Sesshu, 33 Sharf, Robert, 10 Shields, Rob, 117 Shigemori Mirei, 150 Shirai Sei'ichi, 129-130 Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. See Bunshaft, Gordon Smith, David, 45,119 Smith, Tony, 46 Sodeisha, 93,97,102,105,109 Sotatsu, 33 Stalin, Joseph, 7 Stamos, Theodoros, 22, 45 Suda Kokuta, 139 Sullivan, Michael, 10-11 sumi-e, 23, 50,52 surrealism, 25,33,126,128,148,153 Suzuki, D.T., 10, 22,49, 50,56, 60 Suzuki Osamu, 97, 99 Sweeney, James Johnson, 20 Takiguchi Shuzo, 51,86,137-138,148 Tange Kenzo, 121-124,128,130 Taoism, 41-42,43 tea ceremony, 14-15,33,35, 41,43,93, 104,151 Tejima Yukei, 80-81,108 Tenrai. See Hidai Tenrai Tobey, Mark, 2-3,9,31,40,43-56,79,88; and Abstract Expressionism, 2,19, 63,175-176; American identity, 9, 50, 52-53,54; Asian culture, 19, 40, 46-47,49,52,56,62, 65; Baha'i World Faith, 46,54; calligraphy, 2, 46-49,52,55-56,79,174,175-176; criticism of, 3,46,54-56; expatriation of, 55-56,176; ink abstraction, 49-50,52,55-56,63,79; nationalism of, 50-51; "Occidental," 52; Pacific Northwest, 46,49,52,63; reception, 53-54,55-56; Sumi Paintings, 49-50,

52,55-56,176; trip to Asia, 46,51,53; white writing, 44,47,49,52,54-55, 18m. 105. Works by: Broadway, 47-48; E Pluribus Unum, 52-53; Space Ritual N0.1,48-50,56,79; Universal Field, 44-45,47,53 Todorov, Tzvetan, 8 Tomlin, Bradley Walker, 30 tradition, 2,11,13,31,44,64,68,71,78, 88,100,104-105,106,124,156; neotradition, 68. See also Noguchi tranquillity. See under Japanese identity tsuchi (soil and clay), 90,92-93,94-96, 103,104,105,109,111,169-170. See also ceramics Tsuji Shindö, 104 Tsutakawa, George, 49 Ueda Sökyü, 75. Works by: Ai, 75 UNESCO, 141,143-148,149,151. See also United Nations universality, 11, 20-22,50, 54, 56, 64,78, 88, 89,127,143, i82n. 131 Uno Ninmatsu, 94 United Nations, 63,143,146. See also UNESCO United States-Japan relations, 9,51-52, 63,64; American domination, 17-18, 22,28,29; artistic interactivity, 3-4, 5,18,173-176; difference, 5,12-13,176; East-West rhetoric, 10,51; gender, 13, 27, 28, 51-52; Japanese compliance, 27; Japanese surrender, 17; role of Europe, 11-12,50-51, 61, 67-68; scale contrast, 12-13,30. See also U.S. Occupation U.S. Occupation (1945-1952), 17-18, 28-29,74, 75, 77, 89,96,106,117,128, 141,149 Venice Biennial, 23,31 Voulkos, Peter, 89 Washburn, Gordon, 64-65 Watanabe Shöichi, 169 Watts, Alan, 22, 42

207

Wechsler, Jeffrey, 22 Westgeest, Helen, 60 Willard, Marion, 49 Willard Gallery, 50 world character (sekai-sei), 15,28-29,76, 77. See also internationality World's Columbian Exposition (1893), 73 World War II, 2,15-17, 27,50,51,96,114, 118,121,147. See also Fifteen Year War Worringer, Wilhelm, 41 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 14 Yagi Issö, 90,91,100 Yagi Kazuo, 3, 66, 89-105,174; attachment to clay, 104,176; Gojözaka, 90, 93, 99; kokutö, 104; Korean ceramics, 104; modern painting, 93-94,176; and Noguchi, 96,97,100,106,110, 113; nonfunctional ceramics, 99-102; and Picasso, 93-94,100; shiwayosede, 101; tea-bowl maker, 100,104; vessel pottery, 100-102. Works by: Jar with Inlaid Figure, 94-95; Portrait, 101-102; Shigaraki jar, 101; Walk of Samsa, 98-100,103. See also ceramics; kiln-fired objet Yamaguchi Yoshiko, 131-132,136,141, i9on. 98 Yashiro Yukio, 15,29,31-32 Yellow Peril, 51 yoga, 12,13,27,30,32, 67-69,72,73,107, 112,139 Yokoyama Taikan, 15 Yoshida Shigeru, 27 Yoshihara Jirö, 82-83, 85, 89,107 Yoshikawa Eiji, 89-91,104 Yoshino Kosaku, 103 yugenism. See Okada Kenzö Zen Buddhism, 10, 22,33,35,40,42, 43, 47,49, 50,51, 52,58, 60,77, 81, 82,100, 118,153

About the Author

B

ert Winther-Tamaki was a member of the curatorial staff of the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo from 1982 to 1985 and received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New

York University in 1992. Currently assistant professor in the Department of Art History

at the University of California, Irvine, Winther-Tamaki has published articles in Amerasia Journal, Art Journal, Journal of Design History, Monumenta Nipponica, and Word and Image. He is working on a retrospective exhibition of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's painting to be held at the Japan Society in New York and a survey of the ceramic work of Isamu Noguchi to be held at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. Art in the Encounter of Nations is his first book.