Excerpt from Sculpture, Painting and Drawings of Ancient India

HE art of India has been the last of the great Asiatic arts to attract the attention of western students and to obtain a recognized place in the col lections of the great museums. And yet, for the student of Far Eastern art - and particularly of Chinese Buddhist art, it possesses, apart from its intrinsic importance, all the significance of an art of origins. Unfortunately but little of the monu mental sculpture of India is to be found outside the limits of India itself Buddhist and even Hindu sculptures are rarely seen, while the great paintings of Aj anta, almost unique in India, being preserved on the rock walls of the elevated temples will always demand the pil grimage of the connoisseur who would become acquainted with them. All the more important, for these reasons, are the collections of Indian works of art which the great museums - Indian departments have lately been established in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and in Philadelphia - are now be ginning to bring together, and the exhibitions of collections, such as Mr. Kevorkian's. It is now perhaps for the first time that an exhibi tion of purely Indian art has been attempted in New York; and it is fortunate that this should include not merely a series of Mughal paintings, but also more than one unusually important example of religious sculpture, and a number of those paintings, called Rajput, in which the older tradition of Aj anta survives with surprising vitality. The recent developments of Western art have made possible a far more serious appreciation of these works than could have been ao corded twenty years ago. We have come to understand that art is an expression of the inner life of a race - that beauty is something more than taste and something higher than prettiness - and that the repre sentative element, the mere power of illustration, informing us of the appearance of things in a scientific manner, where it is present in great art is present only incidentally, and not essentially. Truth in art is truth of feeling, psychological truth, and not a truth of veri similitude. Behind a great traditional art are the ideas which con stitute its true necessity: beauty is revealed in the co-extension of form and content, and it matters not to the lover of beauty what those ideas may have been. And so, as we said, the way has been made easy for an appreciation of an intellectual and lyrical art - the sculp tured figure with its many arms, representing a synthetic and sym phonic personality, and the paintiglg that depends for its expressionon linear rhythms and essential symbols, to the exclusion of preoccu pation with the cast shadow and the modelling of masses. It is true that to fully understand the art of India, or any other art, we must place ourselves at the point of view of the artist, and this demands of the modern industrialist, whose sense of the immediacy of the spirit is all too faint, a considerable efiort: but it is also true that those that approach the unfamiliar art, even without an intellectual knowledge of its themes, if they will permit themselves to feel its moods, to yield to it as one yields to the moods of nature and of human and spiritual emotion, will find themselves at home.

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