Saburo Hasegawa

Saburō Hasegawa (長谷川 三郎) was a Japanese calligrapher, painter, art writer, curator, and teacher.

He was an early advocate of abstract art in Japan and an equally vocal supporter of the Japanese traditional arts (Japanese calligraphy, ikebana, tea ceremony, ink painting) and Zen Buddhism.

Throughout his career he argued for the connection between East Asian classical arts and Western abstract painting.

Saburō Hasegawa was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1906, the fifth of eleven children.

His father was an executive for Mitsui & Co. who had worked in London and Hong Kong.

In 1910, when his father was transferred to Kobe for work, the family relocated to nearby Ashiya and lived in a European-style home.

Hasegawa learned English during his school years, and together with three friends, formed an art club known as the Hakuzōkai (White Elephant Group).

He married his second wife, Kiyoko (1913-2006) in October 1936.

In 1924, Hasegawa began to study under the post-impressionist painter Narashige Koide in Osaka.

In 1926, against his father's wishes, Hasegawa entered the art history department of Tokyo Imperial University (today University of Tokyo).

He graduated in 1929 with a thesis discussing the famous ink painter of the Muromachi period, Sesshū Tōyō.

From 1929 to 1932, Hasegawa traveled to San Francisco, New York, Boston, England, France, Spain, and Italy.

His work Still Life (Vegetable) (1930) was accepted for exhibition at the 1931 Salon d'Automne in Paris.

Hasegawa lived in Paris for 19 months, where he was able to witness and study the new developments in modern art.

While in Paris, he married a Dutch woman named Viola de Boer (dates unknown).

In the late 1930s, Hasegawa began to explore media besides painting, including photography.

Beginning in the 1930s, Hasegawa's activities showed a dual interest in European modern art and in Japanese art history.

And throughout the 1930s, he published articles on recent developments in European art, and articles on the classical art of East Asia, including "On Sesshū" (1934) and "Avant-Garde Art and Eastern Classics" (1937).

Hasegawa found inherent connections between these two fields.

His theory of "Old Japan and New West" was conceived around this time.

It identified parallels between contemporary Western art and traditional classical arts from Japan and China, arguing that modern artists in Euroamerica and in Japan found these influences equally inspirational.

In Abusutorakuto āto, for example, he linked abstract painting to classical Japanese calligraphy.

He continued to explore these themes for the rest of his career.

Hasegawa continued to produce photographs during World War II.

He returned to Japan in 1932 following the unexpected death of his father.

Hasegawa and de Boers divorced in 1936 after having one daughter, Sumire (1934-1996).

Hasegawa helped reorganize a prominent oil painting exhibition society as the Jiyū Bijutsuka Kyōkai ("Free Artists Association") in 1937.

The society became a champion of abstraction in the Japanese art world.

In 1937, Hasegawa published the first book on abstraction in Japan, titled Abusutorakuto āto (Abstract Art).

In 1938, Hasegawa traveled to China to visit his brother who was stationed there for military service.

The trip inspired him to take up photography, and the scenery, in particular the ancient Buddhist cave temples, inspired him to work in modernist photographic modes.

He exhibited his documentary photography with the Jiyū Bijutsuka Kyōkai.

Together they had one son, Shōbu (1940-2015), and one daughter, Michiko (b. 1943).

He was arrested in 1940 for refusing to participate in war drills.

After his short jail sentence, Hasegawa moved his family to Nagahama, north of Kyoto, where they spent the rest of the war in extreme poverty.

During this time, Hasegawa began subsistence farming and all but stopped creating artwork or writing art essays.

He began to study Daoism and Zen Buddhism in more depth and visited and corresponded with Zen priests and Buddhist scholars.

He also studied the tea ceremony of the Mushanokōji school.

In 1948, Hasegawa again began publishing essays on art and creating modernist oil paintings.

He continued to be fascinated by Japanese historical culture, but also revived his interest in European modernism.