Radicals And Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-garde Rejection of Modernism

Professor Tom Havens is the author of Radicals And Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-garde Rejection of Modernism (University of Hawaii Press, 2006). Professor Havens’ work is the first book in any language to discuss Japan’s avant-garde artists, their work, and the historical environment in which they produced it during the two most creative decades of the twentieth century, the 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on the nonverbal genres of painting, sculpture, dance choreography, and music composition, this work shows that generational and political differences, not artistic doctrines, largely account for the divergent stances artists took vis-a-vis modernism, the international arts community, Japan’s ties to the United States, and the alliance of corporate and bureaucratic interests that solidified in Japan during the 1960s