Ananda Coomaraswamy and the formation of the Sri Lanka collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Among the most important figures in the formation of South Asian art collections at American museums in the early twentieth century was the renowned scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1948), who served as the nation’s first curator of Indian art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston ( mfa) from 1917 to 1930. Though known primarily for his work on Indian art, Coomaraswamy spent his formative years in his native Sri Lanka, and established himself as an art historian in 1906 through his critically acclaimed study, Mediæval Sinhalese Art . This article considers Coomaraswamy’s early career leading up to his appointment at themfa, with particular attention to his writings on Sri Lankan art. Coomaraswamy’s subsequent impact on American museums in the post-World Wariiera is then viewed through the formation of the Sri Lankan art collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ( lacma ).