Works of art have been thought of in two very different ways. According to the modern view the artist 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. These are regarded as a spectacle for the eyes or a gratification for the ear; they can only be enjoyed by those who are called lovers of art and these are understood to be 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, if they are able, only in their spare time.
In ideal art, the artist tries to improve upon nature. For the rest, the truth of the work of art is held to be its truth to an external world which we call nature, and expect the artist to observe. In this kind of art there is always a demand for novelty. The artist is an individual, expressing himself, and so it has become necessary to have books written about every artist individually, for, since each makes use of an individual language, each requires an explanation. Very often a biography is substituted for the explanation. Great importance is attached to what we call genius, and less to training. Art history is chiefly a matter of finding out the names of artists and considering their relation to one another. The work of art itself is an arrangement of colours or sounds, adjudged good or bad according to whether these arrangements are pleasing or otherwise. The meaning of the work of art is of no significance; those who are interested in such merely human matters are called philistines.
This point of view belongs only to the last few centuries in Europe, and to the decadence of classical civilisation in the Mediterranean. It has not been endorsed by humanity at large, and may be quite a false view. According to another and quite different assumption, which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages in Europe and is in fact proper to the Christian as well as to the Hindu philosophy of life, 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 are 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. Everything made by man or done skilfully is a work of art, a thing made by art, artificial.
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 wood or stone or in the sounds which are the artist´s material. He has always the view to make some definite thing, not merely something beautiful, no matter what; what he loves is the particular thing he is making; he knows that anything well and truly made will be beautiful. Just what is to be made is a matter for the patron to decide; the artist himself, if he is building his own house, or another person who needs a house, or in the broadest sense, the patron, is the artist´s whole human environment, for example when he is building a temple or laying out a city. 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 thing to be made, then, 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; the image gives sensual, or as some prefer to call it, aesthetic pleasure and at the same time that it provides a support for contemplation. There is no caste division of the artist from the workman such as we are inured to in industrial societies where, as Ruskin so well expressed it, “industry without art is brutality.”
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 originality, or vitality. What we mean by “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 take 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. The highest purpose of Christian and Eastern art alike is to reveal the one and the same principle of life that is manifested in all variety. Only modern art, reflecting modern interests, pursues variety for its own sake and ignores the sameness on which it depends.
Finally, the Indian artist, although a person, is not a personality; his personal idiosyncracy 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.
Let us now consider for a short time the history of Indian art. Our knowledge of it begins about 3000 b.c. with what is known as the Indus Valley culture. Extensive cities with well built houses and an elaborate drainage system have been excavated and studied. The highest degree of artistic ability can be recognised in the engraved seals, sculptured figures in the round, finely wrought jewellery, silver and bronze vessels and painted pottery. From the Rigveda, the Bible of India, datable in its present form to about 1000 b.c., we learn a good deal about the arts of the carpenter, weaver and jeweller.
The more familiar Indian art of the historical period has been preserved abundantly from the third century b.c. onwards. The greater part of what has survived consists of religious architecture and sculpture, together with some paintings, coins, and engraved seals. The sculptures have been executed in the hardest stone with steel tools. From the sculptures and paintings themselves we can gather a more detailed knowledge of the other arts. The temples are often as large as European cathedrals. Almost peculiar to India has been the practice of carving out such churches in the living rock, the monolithic forms repeating those of the structural buildings. Amongst notable principles developed early in India which have had a marked influence on the development of architecture in the world at large are those of the horse shoe arch and transverse vault.
(Extract from Introduction to Indian Art, published by Munshiram Manoharlal, 10-B, Subhash Marg, Delhi-110 006.)
(To be concluded).
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The Gupta period marked the zenith
of Indian art (Part II of II)
Author: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Publication: Organiser
Date: July 4, 2004
URL: http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=29&page=33
An increasing use is made of sculpture. As in other countries, there is a stylistic sequence of primitive, classical, and baroque types. The primitive style of Bharhut and Sanchi can hardly be surpassed in significance and may well be preferred for the very reason that it restricts itself to the statement of absolute essentials and is content to point out a direction which the spectator must follow for himself. Nevertheless, in many ways, the Gupta period, from the fourth to the sixth centuries a.d., may be said to represent the zenith of Indian art. By this time the artist is in full and facile command of all his resources.
The paintings of Ajanta, approximately comparable to those of the very early Renaissance in Europe, depict with irresistible enchantment a civilisation in which the conflict of spirit and matter has been resolved in an accord such as has hardly been realised anywhere else, unless perhaps in the Far East and in Egypt. Spirituality and sensuality are inseparably linked here and seem to be merely the inner and outer aspects of one and the same expanding life. The art of this age is classical, not merely within the geographical limits of India proper, but for the whole of the Far East, where all types of Buddhist art are of Indian origin.
There follows a mediaeval period which was essentially an age of devotion, learning and chivalry; the patronage of art and literature moving together as a matter of course.
From the twelfth century onwards, the situation was so profoundly modified so far as the north of India is concerned by the impact of Muhammadan invasions of Persian and Central Asian origin. But while the effects of these invasions were to an appalling extent destructive, the Islamic art added something real and valuable to that of India; and finally, though only for a short time, under the Great Mughals in the 16th and 17th centuries, there developed in India a new kind of life which found expression in a magnificent architecture and a great school of painting. Just because of its more humanistic and worldly preoccupations, this art is better known to and better appreciated by Europeans at the present day than is the more profound art of Hindu India.
Everyone has heard of the Taj Mahal, a wonder of inlaid marble built by Shah Jahan to be the tomb of a beloved wife; everyone can easily understand and therefore admire the Mughal paintings that provide us with a faithful portrait gallery of all the great men of northern India during a period of two centuries. This is a kind of art that really corresponds to that of the later Renaissance, with all its personal, historic and romantic interests.
In the meantime, Hindu culture persisted almost unchanged in the south. In the great temple-cities of the south, both the reality and the outward aspects of the ancient world have survived until now and the world has no more a wonderful spectacle to offer than can be seen here. In the north, Hindu culture survived too in Rajputana and the Punjab Himalayas and here, in direct continuity with ancient tradition, there developed the two schools of Rajput painting that are the last great expressions of the Indian spirit in painting or sculpture. Modern developments in Bengal and Bombay represent attempts either to recover a lost tradition or for the development of an eclectic style, neither wholly Indian nor wholly European. At the present day, the Indian genius is finding expression rather in the field of conduct than in art.
European influence on Indian art has been almost purely destructive; in the first palce, by undermining the bases of patronage, removing by default the traditional responsibilities of wealth to learning. Secondly, the impact of industrialism similarly undermining the status of the responsible craftsman, has left the consumer at the mercy of the profiteer and no better off than he is in Europe. Thirdly, 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 influences is taking place at the present day, but can never replace what has been lost; India has been profoundly impoverished, intellectually as well as economically, within the last hundred years.
Even in India, an understan-ding of the art of India has to be re-won; and for this, just as in Europe where the modern man is as far from understanding the art of the Middle Ages as he is from that of the East, a veritable intellectual rectification is required. What is needed in either case is to place oneself in the position of the artist by whom the unfamiliar work was actually made and in the position of the patron for whom the work was made: to think their thoughts and to see with their eyes. For, so long as the work of art appears to us in any way 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.
As regards India, it has been said that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” This is a counsel of despair that can only have been born of the most profound disillusion and the deepest conviction of impotence. I say on the contrary that human nature is an unchanging and everlasting principle; and that whoever possesses such a nature-and not merely the outward form and habits of the human animal-is endowed with the power of understanding all that belongs to that nature, without respect to time or place.
(Extract from Introduction to Indian
Art, published by Munshiram Manoharlal, 10-B, Subhash Marg, Delhi-110 006.)