There are very short and incomplete literatures on the topic ‗Zen and Taoism influence on 20th century abstract painting‘. Most of the literatures are on Zen and Tao since ancient time to present time. Till recent period, most of the painters have been incorporating only Zen and Taoism philosophy in their paintings. Many several modern painters from East and West have deeply influenced by this philosophy but there is very less information available about painting and philosophy connection.
However, I have searched on number of articles, magazines, books, novels, pictures on Zen, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Western art, Eastern art, philosophy, psychology, painting ‘isms from ancient period to present. Most of them are examined
21 Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Kandinsky, Taschen, Koln. 2007,P. 58
22 Roger Lipsey, An art of our Own: The Spiritual in 20th Century Art, Shambhala Publications, Boston, Mass.,1988, P. 1
23 Maurice Tuchman, Ed., The spiritual in art: Abstract painting, 1890-1985, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Abbeville Press, N.Y., 1986, P. 133
24 Shimomura, ―D.T. Suzuki‘s Place,‖ in A Zen Life, ed., Abe, 66.
partially on this chapter and tried to combine the literature review Zen and Taoism and painting.
In various spiritual traditions, Zen and Taoism philosophy may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction in their paintings.
Jacquelynn Baas, ‗Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today‘ is a concise, crisply written overview of the influence of Buddhist philosophy, doctrine, and visual arts on European and American painting, drawing, and sculpture from the late-nineteenth century to the present.
Bass begins the book with a very useful explanation of Buddhism and its fundamental differences from Christianity, Islam and Judaism. She emphasizes that Buddhism is a religion of personal, introspective contemplation rather than preached and taught revelation of the Divine. The book consists of twenty chapters that are case studies of major artists from Impressionism to the present. The chapters are grouped mostly chronologically according to five broadly defined themes of Buddhist ideas and artistic influences and development. The artists given individual chapters include Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Odilon Redon, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, Georgia O‗Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, Isamu Noguchi, Jasper Johns, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono and Richard Tuttle. All of them, and many more who were not discussed, were influenced and inspired by various aspects of Buddhism to greater and lesser degrees. For some, Buddhism was essential. For others, it was useful and significant but not as vital. For still others, it was rather circumstantial and incidental, but subtle affinities are apparent. In some cases, Buddhism provided the artist with a sense of purpose. In other cases, Buddhist art had greater visual influence on artworks; it provided stylistic direction and visual motifs for artworks.
In discussing Kandinsky, Bass dwells on the Siberian and Mongolian, and hence Buddhist, aspects of his genealogy, and she draws parallels between Kandinsky‗s writings and Buddhist writings. Although enlightening, this chapter feels complete.
Bass described Kandinsky might have been influenced by Buddhist aspects of Theosophy or what aspects of Theosophy is particularly Buddhist. She clarified that how Buddhism influenced aspects of turn-of-the-century spirituality and mysticism that were important to many pioneers of abstraction.
Bass interprets many of Van Gogh‗s ideas on his art as spiritual enlightenment and messianic salvation originating as a Christian mentality with parallels to Buddhism.
She discusses a few of van Gogh‗s lesser-known paintings, among them a painting of a tree and a self-portrait where the artist appears vaguely as a Buddhist monk, as indicative of the importance of Buddhism for him.
The quirkiness of the author‗s choices of artists and the limitations of the book‗s predetermined structure become very obvious in the last two sections of the book, which are devoted to artists of the past forty years. The choices are sometimes very logical, particularly with Nam June Paik, Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle.
For example, Conceptual Art and Earth Art are virtually absent. It seems that for recent art, Buddhism has become much more implicit and indirect in its influence, and Baas noticed this trend and explained it carefully. Major writings on Zen and Tantric Buddhism from the past 75 years were important for some of these more recent artists, and Baas often mentions the details of published and references of Buddhist concepts in artist‘s statement. She offers perfect observations concerning the Buddhist visual references in several of Duchamp‗s early paintings and readymade, such as the indirect suggestions of the Wheel of the Law and the mandala in Bicycle Wheel (a spinning wheel for contemplation), which contradicts interpretations of Dada as
aesthetically vacuous icons of the failure or non-existence of art in modern life.
Furthermore, she probes the Buddhist aspects of Duchamp‗s play with words and phrases. Furthermore it is useful and interesting reading and the first of its kind as a book-length study of the impact of Buddhism on modern art, The Smile of the Buddha is in very important in this research and in depth.
Where the Heart Beats may not just be the best book written yet about John Cage; it‘s probably also one of the most substantive-yet-readable entryways into the nexus of 20th-century American art and the immortal qualities of Zen Buddhism and Eastern thought. It sounds like a parody of a Buddhistically deep koan to suggest that the book about Cage most likely to entrance newcomers is the same one that will most startle the class of so-called experts on the subject—but that‘s the trick Larson has managed here.
In the book of well know Ellen Pearlman, ‗Nothing & Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-Garde 1942 – 1962‘. The early chapter on D.T.
Suzuki himself may be the gem of the entire book - it is an intimate portrait of a man often seen as basically an academic more than a practitioner of Zen. Here the whole person emerges, and we see how special (and brilliant) he was, and the depth of his actual practice, which includes a description of his Enso or flash of enlightenment.
Furthermore author gets into considerably denser material with Suzuki‘s influence beyond and through Cage, it is hard not to sense a need to hurry things up in the limited time she has left. Descriptions of the Fluxus group that came out of Cage, and the influence of Zen on Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock becomes increasingly a laundry list and brief catalog sketch.
Kandinsky‘s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, taught us to see how my art can exist in both the spiritual world and the world of form and color at the same time; one
world can give meaning to the other. In the book, Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel, a German philosophy professor, tells the story of how he tried to understand Zen by spending five years just learning to draw the bow and release it without conscious Weiss published Kandinsky and Old Russia: Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman.
27This work seems to have been written and researched quite independently of Tucker‘s authoritative analysis of shamanism in 20th century arts and culture. 1995 also saw the hosting of a panel session, The Subjugation of the Spiritual in Art, by the College Art Association in Texas, leading to the publication of essays edited by Dawn Perlmutter and Debra Koppman entitled Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art in 1999 (containing Susan Shantz‘s paper). 28
In 1999 the Tate Britain presented The Spiritual in 20th C Art, a lecture series by art historian Sarah O‘Brien Twohig, and in 2000 John Golding published Paths to the Absolute, which explicitly recognizes the spiritual influences on Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still, while avoiding overtly spiritual language29. According to Lao-Tzu Tao is a path, the way of absolute; so that, the
25 Ringbom, Sixten, The Sounding Cosmos; a Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting, Abo (Finland): Acta Academiae Aboensis, 1970
26Tuchman, Maurice (Ed.), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, New York, London, Paris: Abbeville Press Publishers (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 1986, p.13
27 Weiss, Peg, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995
28 Perlmutter and Koppman, P. 61, 72
29 Golding, John, Paths to the Absolute – Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock,Newman, Rothko, Still, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000.
research arrived in the links of Taoism and these artists. In 2001 the group Poeisis presented The S Word discussion forum at the ICA, bringing art, science and the spiritual together, through thinkers like Don Cupitt (Sea of Faith) Satish Kumar (editor of the nature and spirituality journal Resurgence), Margaret Boden (writer on AI and creativity) and Rupert Sheldrake (radical biologist). In 2002 Lynn Gamwell published Exploring the Invisible - Art, Science and the Spiritual, which brings out the important third strand, science, and its relation to art and the esoteric30.
Viola‘s exhibition called ‗The Passions‘ at the National Gallery London in 2004 was accompanied by a catalogue and an exhibition guide (leaflet). The catalogue is edited by John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and in his introduction we approach Viola‘s work through a criticism-as-spiritual literacy, alluded to above.
Furthermore Walsh investigate: ‗The shift resulted in part from Viola‘s study of ancient Hindu scriptures and its ideal of perfecting the self, which transmitted through Buddhism, had become the focus of the Zen thought and personal experience that has informed his work. 31 Biggs and Iain in Journal of Visual Art Practice hints at how the transcendent spiritual impulse informs the abstraction of the mature works of the American Abstract Expressionists, and at the same time it demonstrates the limits of shamanism for theorizing abstraction. While Miro and Alan Davie, and perhaps also Kandinsky, pursue imagery throughout their mature period that contains within it shamanic purpose and iconography, Pollock, Rothko and Newman leave it behind in their later work. Their visual language is no longer bound to the world of earth, spirit and animals, but has begun a process of erasure, with many parallels and often
30Gamwell, Lynn, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science and the Spiritual, Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002
31Walsh John, (Ed.), Bill Viola - the Passions, Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum in association with The National Gallery, London, 2003, p. 25
explicit reference to the via negativa. 32 While this term in Christianity means a route to ‗God‘ through the negation of attributes, related non-theistic concepts are found in many other traditions: ‗sunyatta‘ or emptiness in Buddhism. In its positive aspect however it becomes ironically the via negativa and in modern art perhaps its greatest expression was with Barnett Newman.