the image is viewed from the rear its departure from the traditional Northern pattern becomes still more apparent. One is reminded of the dancing girl of Mohenjo-daro, with her delicate, exceedingly slender, nearly sticklike legs. This ideal of a delicate slimness. even verging on the bony and fleshless, inspired by the particular charm of the actual South Indian type of feminine beauty, was carried by the intractable boldness of the Hindu genius to a limit that borders on the grotesque in the daring masterpiece of Plate 422,1 which is among the treasures of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City. In its rigid attitude, stiffness and daring, the figure reminds one, at first sight, of a primitive idol; as though an archaic pattern had been rendered with the developed skill of a later period. But actually, this piece is one of the most sophisticated that India has produced. From an agelong, fundamentally pre-Aryan inheritance the artists of the South derived a sophistication that keeps many of their most skillful and complex masterworks from being appreciated by the comparatively simple eyes of Occidental art criticism. Indeed, without that broadening of our Western aesthetic standards and ability to understand that was effected by the rise of Expressionism at the end of the nineteenth century and the parallel awakening of our appreciation for the highly stylized and abstract forms of the various primitive and Oriental arts, we should not have found it possible to recognize the boldness of this amazing image. A wholehearted departure on our part from the classical ideals and conventions that restricted our aesthetic history and understanding until the beginning of the present century was required before pieces of this kind could be exhibited in public museums-or even in private collections. A symbolic date for this spiritual crisis in modern Europe was the period around 1912, when Pablo Picasso began showing African figures along with his own abstract and daring works. In the South Indian bronze of Plate 422 a radical departure from every suggestion of the Northern pattern, as well as from the neolithic tradition, has been achieved. Or perhaps one should say that this is not a departure, since the Northern models seem never to have exercised any influence on the local ideology from which this curious and precious piece derives. In Hindu poetry, and in the sacred writings, we find feminine beauty celebrated with tiring monotony and in endless repetitions, but never with any hint of such an ideal as this. The usual Indian description of a beautiful woman is about like the following, chosen at random from a religious text celebrating the charms of Rādhā, Kṛṣṇa's chief mistress when he ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 The plates referred are to the original volumes. |