Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Ananda K Coomaraswamy grew up in late Victorian England and was there in the splendid pre-war days of the arts and crafts idealists, Blakean dreamers and flourishing literary movements. As a young man, Coomaraswamy was a pioneer and authority in the field of Indian art, a spokesman for Indian nationalism and a careful, but popular writer on Hinduism and Buddhism. During the First World War, he went to America and, as curator of Asiatic Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, built the first large collection of Indian art in America. In his later writings, which are represented in this collection, he turned his attention to metaphysics, tradition and sacred art. However, unlike many who write about traditional cultures, he was a radical and controversial critic of modern 'civilisation'. This volume, edited by his son, provides the reader with a comprehensive introduction to the work of this important 20th century philosopher and art historian. These selections of Coomaraswamy's vast body of writing offer the new reader a clear and definitive point of entry into the mind of this great and early spokesman for the Perennial Philosophy.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) was a pioneer in Indian art history and in the cultural confrontation of East and West. A scholar in the tradition of the great Indian grammarians and philosophers, an art historian convinced that the ultimate value of art transcends history, and a social thinker influenced by William Morris, Coomaraswamy was a unique figure whose works provide virtually a complete education in themselves. Finding a universal tradition in past cultures ranging from the Hellenic and Christian to the Indian, Islamic, and Chinese, he collated his ideas and symbols of ancient wisdom into the sometimes complex, always rewarding pattern of essays. The Door in the Sky is a collection of the author's writings on myth drawn from his Metaphysics and Traditional Art and Symbolism, both originally published in Bollingen Series. These essays were written while Coomaraswamy was curator in the department of Asiatic Art of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he built the first large collection of Indian art in the United States.