THE CAVE PAINTINGS OF AJANTA

An Almost Unique Type of Classic Indian Art Which Appeals Strongly to Modernists

ANANDA COOMARASWAMY

THE beauty or moving quality of any art is independent alike of theme and convention. All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it.

Did you think it was in the white or grey stone, or the lines of the arches and cornices?

All music is what awakes in you when you are reminded by the instruments;

It is not the violins and the cornets, nor the score of the baritone singer;.

It is nearer and farther than they—"

SO says Walt Whitman, your great American poet. It is because beauty is a state, a spiritual activity of man himself—not objectively and physically tangible, or ponderable, in the visible work of art—that we are able to appreciate so profoundly the art of other ages, and other races, side by side with that of our own.

But we do this as critics. As creative artists there can exist but one art for us—the art of our own time. This may be a traditional art, so long as a tradition is still vital.. But in ages of final decadence and incipient reconstruction, like our own, it must often assume the likeness of revolt. In any case we cannot honestly maintain, with pen or paint-brush, any view of life we have not personally experienced. The greatest art is always "Modernist"—or to put it more colloquially, always "topical."

THE paintings at Ajanta consist of frescoes which were executed between the Fourth .and the Seventh Century of the present era. They are to be found on the walls of Buddhist temples and monasteries, cut out of the cliff face of a picturesque ravine, near the little town and fort of Ajanta, which lies on the northern edge of the Central India tableland, forty miles from the nearest railway. They are drawn on the fine white plaster which covers the surface of the living rock. The main technical character of the compositions is as follows: A free and sweeping brush outline was laid on, first in red. This was covered with a white priming, afterwards in brown or black, with a rich coloring of the general surface.

How the caves were lighted originally is a mystery. Copies and photographs have been made in recent years by the aid of powerful lamps. One fine series of the reproductions has been published by the India Society of London. The frescoes form, not only the most important monument of ancient painting in Asia, but it is one of the exceedingly few classic representations of the work" of the artists of any dark race. A smaller set of paintings in a similar style is preserved in a rock-pocket at Sigin in Ceylon.

THE painting of Ajanta is a learned art.

It is "primitive," indeed, in its poignancy and swiftness, but fin-de-siècle in accomplishment. All of it is based on literary motifs, familiar to the Buddhist. Stories of the Buddha's incarnations and last existence form the connecting subject matter. But if this art is "religious," it is not so because of any dogmatic quality, but because the spiritual life is revealed clearly in the very texture of a sensuous environment, and in the milieu of aristocratic manners. It is as if we should represent a spiritual savior of men as moving with elegance and grace, not exciting any comment, only awakening love, as an acknowledged leader of society in the butterfly purlieus of Palm Beach and Fifth Avenue; and this, not as a tour de force, but as the most natural thing on earth. For where else should such a one attempt to walk, unless amongst ourselves?

NOT the least interesting feature of the Ajanta paintings is their extraordinary "modernity" of spirit and execution, which causes them to appeal strongly to the student of recent developments in the arts. The draughtsmanship is amazing, and the knowledge of pose and gesture very wide. Ajanta art is a direct survival of "Early Asiatic." It represents precisely that phase of Indian art which had such a profound influence on the painting of the Far East and of India proper. Compare the Chinese Buddhist "Mandala," of the Eighth Century, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. This was long supposed to be of Indian origin. The spirit and technique of Ajanta work survive unmistakably, with but inevitable modifications, in the Rejput paintings of a thousand years later.

Continued on page 98

Continued from page 67

HE Bodhisattva (Buddha-designate) or Superman is always a king, whether of animals or men, and he exhibits the kingly virtues, so like those of a saint, of supernatural generosity and romantic, even quixotic heroism. The abstract always outweighs the concrete, the ideal, the practical. And all this without effort, for no stress is laid upon asceticism. Here are intimate love scenes such as the early Buddhist canon law expressly condemns; the beauty of women is praised as joyfully as if by Kalidasa himself, whose plays depict the same society in terms of poetry. "Do what thou wilt" is here the law; for those who, in the words of Nietzsche, are such as can will. The Bodhisattva is all virtue, because he acts upon impulse, rather than by rule—he does not give the heart's action as a duty. Alike in religion and aesthetic a point has been reached beyond good and evil.

HOW may Ajanta art affect the Modernist? His work will not be "influenced" in the accidental and external sense in which the romantic music, vaudeville, dancing and book-illustration of to-day have become pseudo-oriental. The real likeness of Gaugin's pictures to Ajanta art does not arise from imitation. The Modernist is, indeed, stimulated and excited by the abundant life of another age and race depicted and expressed in art, but he has his own quest to achieve, and he will not be turned aside from it. Where the modem artist may be helped is through the education of the public. The public does not love shams. The more clearly it begins to understand the art of another age, the more it will come to realize that the true artistic adventure lies in the patronage of contemporary artists, not yet signed and sealed by the approval of the dealer, or the activities of the museum. It is not to imitation, but to a more intelligent and more courageous patronage of the arts that the discovery of early works should inspire us. For this educational purpose nothing could be better than an art so unfamiliar as that of Ajanta, nothing could be more inspiring, nothing more likely to stimulate the creative faculties, since here the inquirer cannot avoid the necessity of thinking for himself and cannot be helped by familiar formulae.