NEW YORK –

Last summer, the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara passed away at age 81. Having lived in New York since 1965, it is unsurprising that the Guggenheim honors Kawara with the first comprehensive retrospective of his work — an exhibition that Kawara himself helped organize.

"On Kawara — Silence," which runs at the Guggenheim until May 3, unfolds like an obsessive pictorial ledger of his day-to-day life: painting after painting of calendar dates, each accompanied by a box containing a corresponding newspaper clipping; lists of the names of people he met each day; and telegram reminders of his existence. Like a celebrity Twitter-bot gone rogue, Kawara's prolific outpouring initially seems drained of all meaning, a repetitive reminder of the inevitable passage of time.

Yet, while listed as "the first full representation" of the artist's work, "On Kawara — Silence" leaves out one important phase of the artist's oeuvre. Creating works that were radically different from his pieces made in New York, which have since been canonized as part of the first generation of conceptual art, Kawara first rose to fame among the art circles of postwar Tokyo for a series of expressive drawings.

In the 1950s, Kawara joined the Avant-Garde Art Association, a leftist organization interested in art as a form of social critique, and he became a member of a vocal generation concerned with documenting the dark reality of postwar life in Japan. Speaking at Seisakusha-Kondankai, a creators round-table conference in 1955, he described the sense of alienation felt during this period as a strained silence that overlaid the quotidian mulling of the day to day.

"The menace of matter and all kinds of anxieties are felt clearly in every moment of daily life," he began. "The politics and economic anxieties permeate and overwhelm not only the painterly condition, but also the reality in which we live our individual lives."

It was during this time, characterized by the American Occupation of Japan and the onset of the Korean War, that Kawara emerged as an unexpected star of the art world. At the 1953 Nippon Exhibition, he exhibited what would become known as his "Bathroom" series — a number of pencil drawings of fragmented bodies: heads staring past one another, torsos without appendages, the upper half of a pregnant woman gazing out at the viewer.

It is a disturbing set of images in which the body parts seem both lifeless and alive, their heads staring fixedly ahead as if unaware that their arms and legs are missing. While many of his peers were fixated on depicting the horrors of the war, Kawara's drawings referenced a society distinctly in the aftershock.

While he and his peers spoke collectively of their duty to testify to the realities of postwar life, Kawara's "Bathroom" series took the Nippon Exhibition's theme of "Artists Witness Japan" further by revealing the tension between the utter profundity of what was happening in Japan and the inability of the nation's artists to adequately depict it. Through its unnerving ambivalence, Kawara's work spoke of the troubling limitations of conventional painting when challenged by an artist's urgency to express.

Kawara left Japan for Mexico in 1959, but was still hesitant of making art while overseas. After seeing images of the Paleolithic paintings in the Cave of Altamira in Spain, however, he had a resurgence of faith. He described the early paintings as preceding history, symbolic of life and beyond language. Although done through a machine-like guise, Kawara's later presentation of factual information similarly uses simplicity to attest to the profundity of not only his own existence, but also that of life itself.

In the "Today" series of date paintings at the Guggenheim, for example, dates are painted in simple white lettering against a solid background. Kawara created almost 3,000 such canvases in more than 112 cities. By displaying the date of days he has lived through, the series conjures a presence of considerable devotion, or at least duration. Although he never conveys how he felt on those days, his persistence in telling us they happened regardless begins to gain a life of its own through the sheer volume of production.

The Guggenheim also atypically exhibits the date paintings with their custom boxes, each with a newspaper clipping from the same day. Occupying the rotunda's first two rotations of the museum, the result is an unexpectedly nuanced history told in fragments of President Richard Nixon's foreign policy, advertisements, and excerpts from the New York Stock Exchange.

What cannot fit in the display space spills over into tables of binders, allowing visitors to leisurely flip through the immensity of Kawara's project. And if this isn't enough, the recitation of his work "One Million Years" (a list of dates that stretch 1 million years into the past and 1 million years into the future), daunts listeners with the absurdity and incomprehensibility of time.

Kawara doesn't merely present information. Through his date paintings, or through his maps that diagrammatically chart his day's movement in a city, Kawara makes conventional art's inability to convey the magnitude of human experience feel self evident.

The "silence" of On Kawara is the silence of painting. Having escaped the oppressive conditions of postwar Japan, he continued to grapple with art's silence on reality. It is this that his conceptual work attempted to throw light on, paradoxically using language to draw attention to the unrepresentable nature of our daily existence.

Kawara's work was an incredible performance of both passion and endurance, one that even extends after death with his daily automated "I am still alive" tweets. Like the presence of those ancient humans, felt when viewing the paintings in the Cave of Altamira, Kawara's presence is palpable at the Guggenheim's show.