This post has adopted Ananda Coomaraswamy’s essay of the same title. I vaguely recall writing in this post, that Coomaraswamy typically wrote “for the professional.” The present essay however, is one of those rare introductory pieces he wrote several decades ago.

It provides broad outlines of the conception of Indian art, and contrasts the Western view of art among others.

This post will almost entirely, contain verbatim reproductions from the original essay for I can neither say anything that he hasn’t said, nor throw new light upon it.

Coomaraswamy sets forth the understanding of modern art (in his time) at the very beginning and defines an artist, from this view, as somebody who

… is a special or even abnormal kind of man, endowed with a peculiar emotional sensibility which enables him to see what we call beauty; moved by a mysterious aesthetic urge he produces paintings, sculpture, poetry or music… they can only be enjoyed by those who are called lovers of art…[who are] temperamentally related to the artist but without his technical ability. Other men are called workmen and make things which everyone needs for use; these workmen are expected to enjoy art…only in their spare time.

In ideal art, the artist tries to improve upon nature… In this kind of art there is always a demand for novelty. The artist is an individual, expressing himself . so it has become necessary to have books written about every artist .. since each makes use of an individual language, each requires explanation. Very often the biography is substituted for the explanation… Art history is… finding out the names of artists and . their relation to one another. The work of art . is an arrangement of colours or sounds, adjudged good or bad according to weather these arrangements are pleasing or otherwise. The meaning of the work of art is of no significance…

This then, was the view of modern art some seventy years ago: not much has changed since then. The breed of art experts has multiplied thousandfold. According an exaggerated status to these experts has further thickened the opacity in our ability to question the fundamentals of what constitutes art. In simpler words, we rely on the crutch-support of these folks who “interpret” art for us. We have therby limited our own choice of appreciating what constitutes art. In Coomaraswamy’s words

… art is primarily an intellectual act; it is the conception of form, corresponding to an idea in the mind of the artist. It is not when he observes nature with curiosity, but when the intellect is self-poised, that the forms of art conceived. The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist or else is something less than a man. The engineer and the cook, the mathematician and the surgeon are also artists.

Elaborating this, he says

The things to be made by art in imitation of the imagined forms in the mind of the artist are called true when these imagined forms are really embodied and reproduced in the wood or stone… He has always in view to make some definite thing, not merely something beautiful… what he loves is the particular thing he is making; he knows that anything well and truly made will be beautiful… In unanimous societies, as in India, there is general agreement as to what is most needed; the artist’s work is therefore generally understood; where everyone makes daily use of works of art there is little occasion for museums, books or lectures on the appreciation of art.

The last sentence is significant and reminds me of my visit to an antique shop. What I experienced there tallies neatly with the said last sentence. Items of daily use: jugs, mugs, pans, spoons, spittoons, tables, chairs… were up for sale at atrocious prices. We still use all these items. Why don’t they now appeal to us as works of art? That antique-shop visit tragically reminded me of what we have lost. Forever. In both matter and spirit. Here’s the why and the how of that:

The thing to be made . is always something humanly useful. No rational being works for indefinite ends. If the artist makes a table, it is to put things on; if he makes an image, it is as a support for contemplation. There is no division of fine or useless from decorative and useful arts; the table is made to give intellectual pleasure as well as to support a weight… There is no caste division of the artist from the workman such as we are inured to in industrial societies where, as Ruskin…expressed it, “Industry without art is brutality.”

That is also the answer to a problem that nagged me for a long time: what is the end of a piece of painting that contains just a coloured line/brush stroke, which art experts variously expound as “deep” “mysterious,” and “melancholic”: the lack of a definite end.

Coomaraswamy then defines art in light of the above.

In this kind of art, there is no demand for novelty, because the fundamental needs of humanity are always and everywhere the same. What is required is orginality, or vitality… “original” is “coming from its source within,” like water from a spring. The artist can only express what is in him, what he is. It makes no difference whether or not the same thing has been expressed a thousand times before. There can be no property in ideas. The individual does not make them, but finds them; let him only see to it that he really takes possession of them, and his work will be original in the same sense that the recurrent seasons, sunrise and sunset are ever new although in name the same.

In a different article, Coomaraswamy talks about authorship. It is common to find the artist’s name signed on every painting he/she produces. In stark contrast, it is an impossible task to trace the names of the individual artists behind the unmatched beauty of ancient Indian temples. They operated on the same principle Coomaraswamy talks about: there can be no property in ideas. Jayanta Bhatta, a Sanskrit medieval logician, says the same thing in:

Kuto vaa nutanam vastu vayam utprekshitum kshamaah|

Vaakya vinyaasa vaichitriya maatramatra vicharayataam||
(What is new that I can give the world?
The most I can do, perhaps, is provide some delight using word play.)

On modern art, he says in this context,

Only modern art, reflecting modern interests, pursues variety for its own sake and ignores the sameness on which it depends.

And so, the modern artist is held as some kind of a demigod whose every perversity we have to tolerate–and in some cases, praise as virtue–because his artistic skill is greater than his perversity. However,

.the Indian artist, although a person, is not a personality; his personal idiosyncrasy is at the most a part of his equipment, and never the occasion of his art. All of the greatest Indian works are anonymous, and all that we know of the lives of Indian artists in any field could be printed in a tract of a dozen pages.

Coomaraswamy winds up his essay with a few remarks about the destructive influence of Western art. It makes for some tragic reading.

European influence on Indian art has been almost purely destructive… by undermining the bases of patronage, removing by default the traditional responsibilities of wealth to learning . the impact of industrialism, similarly undermining the status of the responsible craftsman, has left the consumer at the mercy of the profiteer… by the introduction of new styles and fashions, imposed by the prestige of power, which the Indian people have not been in a position to resist. A reaction against these is taking place… but can never replace what has been lost; India has been profoundly impoverished, intellectually [and] economically, within the last hundred years.

And gives us a few parting clues how we can attempt to understand Indian art.

. as long as the work of art appears to us …exotic, bizarre, quaint or arbitrary, we cannot pretend to have understood it. It is not to enlarge our collection of bric-a-brac that we ought to study ancient or foreign arts, but to enlarge our own consciousness of being.

Cross-posted on Desicritics.