By Uditha Devapriya In November last year, the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) organised a joint lecture on Ananda Coomaraswamy at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES). Dr Janice Leoshko, of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Austin, Texas, and Dr Laura Weinstein, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, spoke of the man, his life, and his work. They also reflected on the many paradoxes and contradictions underlying his views on the art, culture, and society of India and Sri Lanka.
I must confess I know too little about art history to comment with any kind of authority. Yet I know it is not an exact science. Coomaraswamy is perhaps the best example of this: he was at once an empiricist working within a scientific framework – as his work as a minerologist in early 20th century Sri Lanka demonstrates – and an indefatigable utopian – as his writings on Asian art and philosophy show.
As Senake Bandaranayake correctly puts it, he was this country’s first real art historian; his magnum opus, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908), remains as authoritative as ever for scholars in the field. If art history is not exact, then it follows that art historians are not infallible. Coomaraswamy certainly was not.
This is what Dr Leoshko has tried to address in her book on the man, Making a Canon: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Sri Lanka, and the Place of Buddhist Art (University of Chicago Press). The point Dr Leoshko emphasised in her speech at.
