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Paper short abstract:

While Suzuki’s influence on avant-garde art through his friendship with John Cage in the early post-WWII period is well-known, this presentation explores untold aspects of the impact which his framing of “Zen art” had on abstract artists in Europe and on Inshō Domoto in Kyoto.

Paper long abstract:

Suzuki Daisetsu’s aesthetic influence over avant-garde art in the early post-WWII period has been well-known through his friendship with John Cage, the American experimental music composer and visual artist; their friendship was forged in New York City in the 1950s. This presentation will explore unstudied areas of Suzuki’s impact on avant-garde art beyond the circle of his immediate contacts. The key here was his framing of the aesthetics of calligraphic ink media as (the ahistorical religio-artistic entity of) "Zen art." I propose that Suzuki’s conceptualization of Zen art travelled far beyond the scope of his direct influences during the same period, since his publications, such as Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture (1938) and its revised version, Zen and Japanese Culture (1959), were translated into several languages including Japanese, and they were widely read, and discussed among artists across national borders.

Suzuki’s framework of Zen art exercised special appeal for avant-garde artists due to its implied adaptation of his conceptualization of Zen’s spiritualism as transcending formalism, conventionalism, ritualism, and the East-West divide. These characterizations presented strong affinities with the quest of globally-minded abstract artists to break away from the traditional mode of representational art. Suzuki’s idea of Zen art impacted first on a group of European abstract artists, called Informel. Subsequently, through contact with the innovative Kyoto-bred artist Inshō Domoto, Suzuki’s religio-aesthetics inspired Inshō’s production of abstract Japanese Buddhist temple art. Informel’s leader and art critic, Michel Tapié, and Inshō together developed their own visions of Zen art, which were interpreted as a new-age abstract art saturated with the type of cross-cultural metaphysical spirit inherent in Suzuki’s Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957). Suzuki’s extensive impact on the international landscape of avant-garde art produced unique conceptual contexts for new abstract art that freely mixed Zen with Christian mysticism and existentialism, among other discourses popular among early postwar intellectuals.