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Episode 2 references

The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, the most industrialized country in the world at that time. Anxieties about industrial life fueled a positive revaluation of handcraftsmanship and precapitalist forms of culture and society. Arts and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization, and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed. The Arts and Crafts movement did not promote a particular style, but it did advocate reform as part of its philosophy and instigated a critique of industrial labor; as modern machines replaced workers, Arts and Crafts proponents called for an end to the division of labor and advanced the designer as craftsman.

South Asian historical carving

Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy

Carving of Shiva the Hindu God

From the outset Coomaraswamy’s interest in art was controlled by much more than either antiquarian or “aesthetic” considerations. For him the most humble folk art and the loftiest religious creations alike were an outward expression not only of the sensibilities of those who created them but of the whole civilization in which they were nurtured.

There was nothing of the art nouveau slogan of “art for art’s sake” in Coomaraswamy’s outlook. His interest in traditional arts and crafts, from a humble pot to a Hindu temple, was always governed by the conviction that something immeasurably precious and vitally important was disappearing under the onslaught of modernism in its many different guises.

Coomaraswamy’s achievement as an art historian can perhaps best be understood in respect of three of the major tasks which he undertook: the “rehabilitation” of Asian art in the eyes of Europeans and Asians alike; the massive work of scholarship which he pursued as curator of the Indian Section of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the penetration and explanation of traditional views of art and their relationship to philosophy, religion, and metaphysics.

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