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Dr. Coomaraswamy on Art
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
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An age which applauds the specialist and the genius will not acknowledge the master. Applause, we might say, costs nothing whereas the master is there to enforce a responsibility. And if modern man pays with a handclap all the debt he acknowledges to genius, from the master he must submit to learn a truth.
Dr. Coomaraswamy is a master in the philosophy of art, as his great pupil, Eric Gill, was a master in stone carving and letter cutting. As a master he embodies in his work the whole positive weight of traditional truth, and in acknowledging him we affirm the spiritual foundations of our civilization.
If this were a tribute merely to the man, to the person, Ananda Coomaraswamy, it would be no more than flattery; but Dr. Coomaraswamy’s position is clearly indicated in an incisive answer to critics printed among the present collection of essays : ‘If I assert . . ., etc., ... I am not necessarily wrong merely because this position was “earlier” maintained by Plato and in the Bhagavad Gita . . . The sooner mv critics realise .... that I am not out to express any views, opinion or philosophy of my “ own,” the sooner will they find out what I am talking about.’ For if the principles he argues and explains are common to Europe and the East, to Aquinas and (implicitly) to all save the essentially commercial eras of human civilisation : to Maori portraiture and the Neolithic cave drawings no less than to Chartres : it is precisely because Dr. Coomaraswamy has not invented them. Neither is the basis of such agreement sought in any type of common-denominator doctrine, humanist or modernist.
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- Copyright © 1943 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
1
Why Exhibit Works of Art? Collected Essays on the Traditional or ‘Normal’ View of Art. By Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. (Luzac; 6/-).
References
2 ‘All traditions agree in seeing in the warp of tissues made by hand an image of the fontal‐raying of the dawn‐light of creation’ (p. 80).
3 ‘… from a Christian point of view, the work of art is always a means, and never an end in itself. Being a means, it is ordained to a given end, without which it has no raison d'être, and can only be treated as bric‐a‐brac. The current approach may be compared to that of a traveller who, when he finds a signpost, proceeds to admire its elegance, to ask who made it, and finally cuts it down and decides to use it as a mantelpiece ornament’ (p. 108).
4 One can in fact only be said to have understood the work, or to have any more than a dilettante knowledge of it, to the extent that he can identify himself with the mentality of the original artist and patron. The man can only be said to have understood Romanesque or Indian art who comes very near to forgetting that be has not made it himself for his own use’ (p. 75).
5 ‘… we may say that the life we call civilized is more nearly an animal and mechanical life than a human life; pnd that in all these respects it contrasts unfavourably with the life of savages, of American Indians for example, to whom it has never occurred that manufacture, the activity of making things for use, could ever be made an artless activity’ (p. 66).
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