Throughout his career, Coomaraswamy published frequently for the Museum of Fine Arts and in The Art Bulletin; he wrote more than thirty books on a broad range of subjects. His work on art was unique for encompassing multiple cultural traditions and periods from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present. His wrote on museology and against industrialization and colonialism, and advocated for craft traditions. This breadth of knowledge, concern, and engagement may be best known from his book Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, but is also very much in evidence in the article featured here, “Ornament,” in which he draws upon a range of terms in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and English in a discussion meant to engage art historians in academia, teachers of art appreciation, and designers of ornament. Coomaraswamy remains well known as a philosopher and public intellectual, and his legacy remains strong in a surprising number of fields, as attested, for example, by continuing republication and ongoing study of his work. In 2010, two sessions of the CAA Annual Conference were devoted to Coomaraswamy's legacy and influence on twentieth-century art. His papers are held by Princeton University, in the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Papers 1903–1970, which include the Stella Bloch Papers relating to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy 1890–1930. (Bloch, a dancer, artist, and ethnographer, worked and published with Coomaraswamy, and was married to him from 1922 to 1930.)

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