Page:Hindu Art - its Humanism and Modernism.djvu/44

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HINDU ART


could not and must not, be the type of the future. Any thing rather than that! Even black men and women were better than that—cannibals, idolators, savages, anything!" (Ludovici's introduction to The Letters, p. xii)

Such being their article of faith, contemporary artists have been seized by Wanderlust. To-day they draw their inspiration from the Mexicans, Mayans, and other American-Indians, from the Negro art of the Congo regions, from Karnak and Nineveh, from the Tanagras of Greece and the "primitives" of Italy. And they roll their eyes from "China to Peru." Consequently the Buddhist, Shaiva, Vaishnava, Moghul, and Rajput art of the Hindus could not but have been requisitioned to enlarge the list of the new Ossians and Percy's Reliques as whet-

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