Abstract
Almost non-existent until then, alien to the Japonism of the second half of the 19th century, reference to Zen became insistent and polymorphous in the arts, literature and thought, and even in certain broader sectors of the social body (martial arts, macrobiotics), in the West, from the immediate post-war period to the early 1970s.
We'll begin by sketching the broad outlines of the tortuous, transnational path (between Japan, the United States and Europe) that suddenly brought to light, as soon as hostilities ended, the work of the "Zen smugglers", those pre-war "dark precursors" (Suzuki Daisetsu, Eugen Herrigel, Reginald Blyth, Ruth Fuller, Alan Watts, Jean Herbert, Nancy Wilson Ross, Elizabeth Moresby, Loraine Kuck, Karl Dürckheim, Hugo Lassalle), making them, for some twenty years, the major vectors of this widespread conversion.
We will then describe some of the basic features of this reference, which was more than just a fashion, such as emptiness (space, white, zero, nothingness), gesture (line, writing, calligraphy), humor (paradox, eccentricity, nonsense), the moment (shooting, satori), the master (and the disciple), by analyzing the role they played in the work of personalities as diverse as musician John Cage, sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, painters Yves Klein and Pierre Soulages, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, poet Philippe Jaccottet, and writers Jack Kerouac, André Malraux, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes, to name but a few (not definitive or exhaustive).
Emphasizing the important role played by certain institutions (UNESCO, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the French Ministry of Culture), we conclude by highlighting some of the deep-rooted causes behind the unexpected and dazzling success of this specifically neo-Japanese reference: they have a lot to do with Japan's new place in the world, in a post-war period of ruins and reconstruction, at the heart of the Cold War, decolonization and the restructuring of the world economic order.
But history is sometimes cumulative: wasn't it in the same movement, at this time, that Ryōan-ji's "Zen Garden" and Hokusai's "Great Wave" became global icons?
