Abstract
Zen stands in a similar relationship to late modernism as Theosophy to early modernism. Like its European counterpart, Art Informel, American Abstract Expressionism was a mutation from Surrealism, itself an esoteric movement with Decadent/Symbolist roots.1 Their syncretism more Jungian and Theosophical than that of their source, Americans adapted Surrealism to their own needs. New England Transcendentalism, Melville, Frazer, Campbell, ‘Oriental thought’, cosmogenesis (a Blavatskyite, not a ‘Buddhist’ category), Amerindian primitivism, ‘early man’: frequently encouraged by Mellon/Bollingen patronage, all figure in the Abstract Expressionist Mythos.2 The artists involved, John Cage apart, were alienated from modernity, politically anarchist ‘modern men in search of a soul’, inclined to set ‘myth’ to impossible redemptive tasks.
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Notes
Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 2.
Helen Westgeest, Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art between East and West (Amstelveen: Wanders, 1996), 44–5.
Bert Winther in Alexandra Munroe, ed., Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: Abrams, 1994), 61.
Ellen Pearlman, Nothing and Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-Garde, 1942–1962 (Berkeley: Evolver, 2012).
Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
Beongcheon Yu, The Great Circle: American Writers and the Orient (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1983), ch. 4
Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York and London: Norton, 1998)
William Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature, 1800–1925 (Paris: Champion, 1927).
D.J. Clarke, The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture (New York and London: Garland, 1988), ch. 2.
Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), noting ‘thefts’ from Taoism, Zen and Kyoto School philosophy.
Doris in Ken Friedman, ed., A Fluxus Reader (Chichester: Academy Editions, 1998), 91ff.
Jacqueline Decter, Nicholas Roerich: The Life and Art of a Russian Master (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 136.
William McGuire, Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past (Princeton University Press, 1982), 208ff.
Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), chs 3–6.
Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
For context, Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold-War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2013).
Serge Guibault, How America Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Sulagna Sengupta, Jung in India (New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2013), 82ff.
J.W. de Gruchy, Orienting Arthur Waley: Japonism, Orientalism and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 164.
James Monte and Anne Glusker, The Transcendental Painting Group: New Mexico 1938–1941 (New Mexico: Albuquerque Museum, 1982).
For music, John Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester University Press, 1995), 138ff.
Dore Ashton, Noguchi: East and West (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
Robert Weinberg, Spinning the Clay into Stars: Bernard Leach and the Baha’i Faith (Oxford: George Ronald, 1999), 14–15.
Stephen Schwartz, From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (New York: Free Press, 1998).
Perle Epstein, The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano and Cabbala (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969)
Duncan, Timothy Materer, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 107ff.
David Nicholls, ed., The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1997), 76ff.
James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36ff.
K.F. Rosenblatt, Rene Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999).
Rupert Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 2010), 117.
Michael Tucker, Alan Davie: The Quest for the Miraculous (London: Lund Humphries, 1993.)
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© 2015 John Bramble
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Bramble, J. (2015). ‘Zen’ in the Second Abstraction. In: Modernism and the Occult. Modernism and…. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465788_5
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