Art Beat – Zen and the Asian Influence on American Art

– By Mary Brennan Gerster –

As a result of the opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, Western society was flooded with Japanese art and culture. Literature, music, photography and painting all fell under the Asian spell. The Guggenheim Museum has mounted a colossal exhibition which explores this influence in depth: “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia 1860-1989”.

This undertaking covers the literature of the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg) discovering Buddhism, the music of John Cage, the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a video by Bill Viola and the choreography of Martha Graham. There is an installation that drops from the top tier of the museum’s curving ramps to the atrium in the entrance. There is too much to take in on a single visit, so I focused on the paintings, of which there are many outstanding entries.

Painter John La Farge, whose wife was the grandniece of Commodore Perry, collected Japanese decorative and religious art. Three of his works here are devoted to floral paintings which were so often the subject in Asian art. Two are water lilies depicted in great simplicity. The flowers are surrounded by an almost abstract background and will bring to mind the water lilies of Monet, another artist impacted by Japanese style.

The moody canvases of James McNeil Whistler draw you into the haunting evenings of Nocturne: Blue and Gold (1872/75) and Nocturne, with emerging abstraction in the blues and grays lit from within by slivers of yellow lamplight. Whistler, an American expatriate, never traveled to Asia, but he employs the subtlety of the prints of Hiroshige.

Mary Cassatt is another ex-pat who was clearly influenced by Japanese woodcut prints, primarily those of women and children. Arthur Wesley Dow actually worked as an assistant curator of Japanese art for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His woodcuts hang here beside the Hiroshige prints. Dow’s August Moon (1905) is poetically elegant in its paring down of the landscape. The Asian philosophy treats the landscape as spiritual and changing rather than as a stationary monument.
Edward Steichen’s The Pond-Moonrise (1904) captures on camera a bank of thin, delicate trees duplicated in their reflection in the pond. Mark Tobey goes to the calligraphy of Asia and reinvents them on canvas.

Philip Guston, Robert Matthews, Sam Francis, Brice Marden and Franz Kline each have superb examples of their work included. There is a six-part piece by Jackson Pollock that is unlike any other work of his that I am familiar with. Less frenetic, with loose strokes of faded red paint, the canvases read like calligraphy telling an undecipherable story.

Georgia O’Keefe’s Sky Above Flat Wide Cloud 11 (1960/64) is Minimalism at its best. It is as Zen as a Haiku verse. An artist I did not know, Lee Mullikan, produced Evening Raga (1962), a hot red canvas. It is truly beautiful. There is a Color Field painting by Natvar Bhavsar who was influenced by Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clifford Still. These works are created with layer after layer of painted strokes.

With an overwhelming amount of verbal and visual information in this exhibition, focus on an aspect that appeals to you and head up the ramp for the circuitous trip to the dome of this Frank Lloyd Wright building.

The exhibition is at the Guggenheim, Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, through April 19. The museum is closed on Thursday. Pay What You Wish on Friday evenings. For more information, call 212-423-3500 or www.guggenheim.com.