Ananda Coomaraswamy

Coomaraswamy was born in Colombo in 1877 to Muthu Coomaraswamy, a Tamil lawyer and legislator, and to an English mother. His father died when he was very small and he was brought up in England. He took a doctorate in geology at the University of London and returned to Ceylon in 1903 to direct its mineralogical survey, in the course of which he identified the mineral thorianite.

The survey took him around the island, and what he saw of village craft changed the direction of his life. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, printed in 1908 on his own press in the manner of William Morris, is an argument as much as a description: that the crafts he was recording were the surviving practice of a society in which making things had not been separated from religion, and that colonial rule and industrial production were ending it. He was active in the Ceylon national movement in the same years.

He moved to Indian art proper, publishing on Rajput painting and on the iconography of the dance of Shiva, and in 1917 he became the first keeper of Indian art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, largely by giving it his own collection. He built the department over thirty years and remained there until he died in 1947.

The later work is philosophy rather than art history, though it is usually conducted through images. Coomaraswamy argued that Vedanta, Platonism, the scholastic Christianity of Aquinas and Eckhart, and Islamic metaphysics are not similar systems but one doctrine stated in different languages, and he wrote by setting Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Arabic terms alongside one another to show that they translate the same distinctions. He called it the philosophia perennis, and the position is close enough to that of Rene Guenon for the two to be treated together as the founders of the Traditionalist current, though they worked separately and corresponded rather than collaborated.

The application he pressed hardest is to art. A traditional image is made to a canon, by a craftsman who is not expressing anything, in order to be used for contemplation. The originality of the maker is beside the point, and the modern category of aesthetics, the study of how a work makes one feel, obscures what the object is for. Why Exhibit Works of Art and The Transformation of Nature in Art set this out. It is a hostile account of the museum, written by a museum keeper.

The scholarship is uneven in the way of the perennialists generally: the philological detail is often excellent, and the overall claim is not the kind of thing evidence can settle. His work is read in art history, in Indology and in the Traditionalist current, and the three sets of readers rarely agree about which parts matter.