this combinatory tendency was explored in works by other individuals such as the Abstract Expressionist "yugenism" which Okada Kenzo developed in New York and Tange Kenzo's Peace Museum in Hiroshima. Surely the impulse to facili-tate new cohabitations of Japanese culture of the East and West in works of art would indicate an epistemological convergence. Rather than dictate the bifur-catory features of an East/West spectrum in contemporary art like the North/ South view through which Heinrich W oelfflin classified European art, surely these syncretic works would indicate the irrelevance of such a model. This would seem to be corroborated by the careers of almost all of the Japanese individuals mentioned in this study. For while each was intensively concerned with the role of Japanese tradition in contemporary culture, they also absorbed formative influences from the West: Shirai Sei'ichi (European philosophy and architecture), Tange Kenzo (Le Corbusier and the work of other contemporary European architects), Hasegawa Saburo (painting of the Ecole de Paris), Taniguchi Y oshiro (German modern and neoclassical architecture), Takiguchi Shuzo (Surrealism). By the same token, many of their colleagues in the United States has serious interests in the rich potential of Japanese or Asian tradition as an inspiring source for their art and design. Given the scale of Japanism in the United States and the thirst for Euro-American culture in Japan, it would be fair to conclude that the exposure of these two communities to each other's culture was of a massive scale in the 1950s. It might even be surmised that these contacts and transfers constituted a passage in a larger development wherein two cultures were in the process of pulling away from their respective civilizations toward a new single converging civilization. A reading of Noguchi's oeuvre in conjunction with the record of his activities suggests that he be regarded as a cardinal and epitomizing figure in this crossing of cultures during the 1950s. For he brought perhaps an unparalleled intensity to the widespread East/West combinatory practice which called for Euro-Amer-ican modernism and Asian, especially Japanese, tradition. Is there any way that such systematic East/West synthesis by Noguchi but also many others in his -59 -
元のページ ../index.html#83