Contemporary Arts
The Art of Iudia
THE Winter Exhibition of Indian art at the Royal Academy in 1948 was one of the most valuable and exciting shows to have been held in London since the war, but it was also,
" I believe, one of the least suc- cessful in the matter of public response. Cer- tain reasons for this were obvious enough—the lack of historical and iconographical guidance in the catalogue, the British aversion to sculpture (the art which dominated the exhibition), and for some, perhaps, the particular eroticism of Indian art. Other possible reasons I want to suggest in the course of this article, prompted by the opening at the V & A of two galleries of Indian art, the first stage in the Museum's re-establishment of their Indian section now that its old premises have been destroyed. These galleries, which have, for the first time, incidentally, brought the art of India into direct association with that of other cultures, have been most admirably arranged, with tact and taste; the labels, notices, maps and photographs offer unobtrusively a great deal of useful information. If it must be as hazardous to generalise about this work without having visited such a huge and distant region, without having seen the temples, or Ajanta, or experienced Indian life, as it would be to pronounce upon Italian art simply from an acquaintance with the National Gallery, even this small body of evidence and some knowledge of reproductions does provoke certain firm impressions.
I have been struck first of all by the generous suavity of Indian art, whether in sculpture, paint- ing or the applied arts and by the meticulous yet spontaneous control which seems to inform every gesture. The surface of a carving such as the splendid fragment of the Sanchi Bodhisattva is both exquisitely subtle and refined and at the same time warm and vibrant with physical life; but the force which animates its surface seems to be seated only just below the skin. Compare it with a European work of like tenderness and sensi- bility, the Michelangelo Pieta in St. Peter's, and one will realise that this sculpture is less materially physical, less muscular and less expressive of a three-dimensional plasticity. Would it be reason- able to suggest that Indian sculpture is an art of profiles, of linear sensibility, rather than of volume? The bronze dancing Sivas offer more immediate evidence of this; from every angle it is the profiles, rhythmical and seductive in their sinuous vitality, which command attention. Stand- ing immediately in front of the Bodhisattva one is aware of an absolutely controlled and confident line defining the bodily forms from the neck to the groin, and this linear rules not odly in the figure but in the construction of the drapery and ornaments, the necklet and belt. This kind of precious yet exact, expressive yet self-effacing, craftsmanship can perhaps only be found in Europe in the finest architectural ornament, in some capital or frieze. Only the art of the Rococo, so different in every other respect, offers the same unity of ornamental and figurative line. In a period when European sculpture has been devoted either to simple and assertive masses or more recently to broken, abrupt and inelegant surfaces, the comparative neglect of Indian sculp- ture is the more easy to understand. This linear discipline also characterises the kind of miniature painting in which the V & A is so rich. In the more complex and energetic Moghul pictures, for example, it is the intricacy of the arabesque and the artist's virtuosity in articulating a mass of figures which is remarkable. But the word 'arabesque,' implying as it does an ornamental line, is inappropriate because if the contour is not, as in a Raphael or an Ingres, suggestive of physical tensions and rhythms, it is also not ornamental. It seems instead to describe with a studied and consistent accuracy a vast vocabulary of gesture and expression which are precisely meaningful in the manner of Indian dance movements. These paintings, immediately attractive as they are, require nevertheless to be read, interpreted and understood in ways which European art has not invited for several centuries. It is natural that the great student of Indian art, Ananda Coomara- swamy, should have found his European ideal in the Middle Ages. I wonder, in fact, whether the art of India is not more difficult for us to appreciate than that of any other foreign culture, in spite of our modern historical and geographical •
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