Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today

by Jacquelynn Baas

Published by University of California Press, 2005.

With a foreword by Robert A. F. Thurman and text by Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha explores the influences of Asian worldviews and particularly Buddhism on the art of Europe and America in the modern era. In an informative and perceptive introduction and essays on twenty key artists, Baas analyzes how the teachings of the Buddha offered alternatives to Western intellectual conceptions of art, tracing various ways this inspiration materialized in artworks.

The influence of Buddhism on art from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the present was greater than historians and critics generally have recognized. Baas’s insights and the images she presents give the reader new understandings and appreciation of artists Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe, Isamu Noguchi, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Robert Irwin, Vija Celmins, and Richard Tuttle.

Considering essential questions about the relationship of art and life, Smile of the Buddha expands our perspective on how spirituality and creativity inspire and inform one another.