Art
Mr. Stowitts' Pictures of India Tx it brief foreword to the catalogue of the Stowitts exhibi- tion at the Imperial Institute Sir William Itothenstein refers to the curious indifference shown by Western artists towards the pictorial wealth of India. The fact is indisputable. Princes and elephants, the Taj Mahal, and such scenes as the Benares river-front, the palins and temples of the South have been enormously overdone. But it is noteworthy, and re- grettable, that no European painter should have been tho- roughly stirred by the challenge of the Indian folk—their endless physical variety, the beauty and interest of their handicrafts. That challenge has at last been taken up, and not by an Englishman. Mr. Hubert Stowitts, to whose aston- ishing skill and concentration we owe these pictures, 150 in number, is a Californian. He was a dancer and choreo- grapher, for five years a leading member of Pavlova's com- pany. He is now a painter, whose primary motive comes less front his sense of colour and design, though that is very re- markable, than from an overmastering impulse to make an enduring record of the workers who have upheld an ancient Civilization which, with ever-increasing rapidity, is going down before the machine.
Stowitts paints in tempera, not in oih. He uses a method which is a combination of the Oriental process with that of the Italians. He chooses it for the obvious reason that it suits his purpose exactly, giving him all that he needs in colour while pro- mising greater permanence. It is not snore to the purpose that he is a trained aesthetic athlete than that his student years at the University of California were given to the study Of economics. He has an intense interest in the folk-life of Asia. In Java as in India he has observed its swift disap- pearance; and in the range and intensity of his work there is the defiant resolve of a gifted Westerner to do all that one man can do to achieve a record of something which in the expe- rience of mankind can never conic again.
. The exhibition is a feast of colour. Mr. Stowitts was not attracted by the relative sameness of brown-and-white India— as, for instance, over the Ganges plain. Ile preferred, naturally enough, the colour of the Native States, finding even in those sophisticated regions that it was occasionally necessary to adopt special measures for the resurrection of a craft already gone. He was fortunate in winning the co-operation of the ruling Princes. Everywhere the people were frightened of the artist, until a command from the Maharaja conferred upon them the pride of humble creatures chosen by their Prince. And Mr. Stowitts has gone all out for the colour of India—in the brilliance of costume and turban as of material in the hands of the craftsman, and in the infinite shades of the Indian skin from the pale wheat tint of northern elders to the deep browns of toilers and traders, athletes and vagrants in the tropic zone.
A bare list of the crafts put on record by Mr. Stowitts would till a column. A full half of the 150 pictures consist of craftsmen at work—in wood and fabrics, jewels, leather, pottery, ivory, precious metals, steel. The artist is concerned first with the exactness of his record. In every instance the process itself is shown, in every instance the tool is so drawn that without difficulty it could be copied. Here are some crafts which may outlast all machinery, and others that are practised only by a few survivors or already cherished as the secret of a single family. All 'alike are vanishing, for even though in some crafts the workers may still be fairly numerous, there is in • India to-day no public that can buy their wares.
To the Western eye these Indian types have an arresting beauty. It would be difficult to imagine anything more lovely in profile and attitude than the Meta, as he sits, grave and absorbed by the side of the workman, or the Indian
man engaged ngaged in any one of the tasks at which Mr. Stowitts has caught her. Or turn from the record of the crafts to the types of priest, ascetic and guru, musician, huntsman, astrologer, or modern intellectual. In beauty and strength, -as we should expect, the award must go to the specimens
• of snore primitive manhood. There are a few splendid male
nudes, life-size— particularly wrestlers or other athletes, which, as one notes with special interest, display the waist and the slim hips—the loins like ii lion's, of the old heroic stories—which Westerners have carelessly supposed to he nothing more than abstract convention of Indian painting and sculpture. And one other revelation made by the artist. Not a few of his chosen types belong to the outcaste grades.
to untouchables upon wl the stigma has been placed since the dawn of Hindu civilization. The brush of Mr. Stowitts brings out a truth, significant alike to teacher and statesman, that in qualities not limited to physique alone they cannot be said to be shamed by comparison with their more fortunate
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