46 Facts About Saburo Hasegawa

Saburo Hasegawa was a Japanese calligrapher, painter, art writer, curator, and teacher.

Saburo Hasegawa was an early advocate of abstract art in Japan and an equally vocal supporter of the Japanese traditional arts and Zen Buddhism.

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

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

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

Saburo Hasegawa graduated in 1929 with a thesis discussing the famous ink painter of the Muromachi period, Sesshu Toyo.

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

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

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

Saburo Hasegawa married his second wife, Kiyoko in October 1936.

Saburo Hasegawa helped reorganize a prominent oil painting exhibition society as the Jiyu Bijutsuka Kyokai in 1937.

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

Saburo Hasegawa exhibited his documentary photography with the Jiyu Bijutsuka Kyokai.

In 1937, Saburo Hasegawa published the first book on abstraction in Japan, titled Abusutorakuto ato.

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

Saburo Hasegawa was arrested in 1940 for refusing to participate in war drills.

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

Saburo Hasegawa studied the tea ceremony of the Mushanokoji school.

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

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

Saburo Hasegawa felt that this enthusiasm for Japanese tradition displayed by Noguchi, a modern artist, helped legitimize his own belief in the convergence of Japanese tradition and modern art.

Saburo Hasegawa was invited by the American Abstract Artists group to curate an exhibition of Asian abstract art in New York City.

Saburo Hasegawa travelled to New York in 1954, where he helped install the exhibition at the Riverside Museum in Manhattan.

The exhibition included the work of ten artists, of which Saburo Hasegawa was one, and was the first of its kind to be held in the United States.

Saburo Hasegawa helped select artists for the 1954 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Japanese Calligraphy.

Saburo Hasegawa had two solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, which drew prominent New York art world figures.

Saburo Hasegawa was had several new essays published in American publications such as ARTnews.

Saburo Hasegawa moved to San Francisco in September 1955, where he taught drawing and Asian art history at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and lectured at the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Saburo Hasegawa played an important role in spreading the teachings of Zen to the artistic community in San Francisco, notably to the Beat poets.

Saburo Hasegawa had several exhibitions in the Bay area, including at CCAC, the department store Gump's, the Oakland Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Saburo Hasegawa curated an exhibition of Japanese art for the Oakland Art Museum.

Saburo Hasegawa died of oral cancer in San Francisco in 1957.

Saburo Hasegawa's work was featured in several memorial and group exhibitions in the United States.

Around 1951, Saburo Hasegawa stopped working in oil painting and instead devoted himself to creating prints and ink paintings, and to exploring photography through photograms.

Saburo Hasegawa's prints were monotypes in watercolor, gouache, or ink, made with kamaboko-ita and funaita as the printing blocks.

Saburo Hasegawa created ink rubbings, and mixed media pieces that combined any of the above techniques.

Saburo Hasegawa first encountered experimental photography and photograms through European and American magazines reproducing works by artists such as Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Saburo Hasegawa later produced a series of documentary photographs in 1939, entitled Kyodoshi, in which he explored local village life through images with a distinctly modernist framing.

Saburo Hasegawa exhibited several of these photographs with the Jiyu Bijutsuka Kyokai in 1940.

Saburo Hasegawa arranged a collage which was photographed by Otsuji, resulting in a mixed media photographic work.

Saburo Hasegawa wrote extensively on European modernism, introducing Japanese artists to Surrealism and Abstract expressionism.

Saburo Hasegawa published articles on European modern artists including Henri Rousseau, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandsinky, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Saburo Hasegawa selected and reviewed works of abstract calligraphy in the column.

The parallels Saburo Hasegawa discussed between Western abstract art and Japanese calligraphy deeply inspired the calligraphers of Bokujinkai and contributed to their early theoretical foundations.

Saburo Hasegawa's work is held in several permanent collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka.

In 2019, Saburo Hasegawa's work was included in the exhibition "Changing and Unchanging things: Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa in Postwar Japan" organized by the Noguchi Museum.