This article reconstructs the physical and intellectual content of Stella Kramrisch’s 1968 exhibition Unknown India. Ritual Art in Tribe and Village, organized for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. By probing Kramrisch’s curatorial practice from conception to realization, it opens questions about her impact on canons and categories we continue to utilize today. In Unknown India, Kramrisch synthesized a vision rooted in the global Arts and Crafts movement and in India’s movement for cultural independence. But here she explicitly struggled with taxonomy, moving South Asia to the forefront of global dialogues on terms including folk, tribal, tradition, authenticity, craft, design, and even art. As contemporary scholars debate the dynamism of authenticity, the intersectionality of the spiritual and practical, and the fluidity of hierarchies, Unknown India remains a touchstone.

In her 1937 publication, A Survey of Indian Painting in the Deccan, Stella Kramrisch offered a transcultural analysis of the early Buddhist wall paintings at the caves of Ajanta. Kramrisch described a unique technique of “reversed” or “forthcoming” perspective in the paintings. This article proposes that her work can be seen as an oblique critique of Erwin Panofsky’s influential Perspective as Symbolic Form (1924/1927). Kramrisch also connected her analysis of perspective to the avant-garde of early 20th-century art and the work of cubist painters. This article concludes by situating Kramrisch’s claims about the Ajanta paintings within the context of more recent scholarship on Buddhist painting and the environment in South Asia.

Stella Kramrisch’s 1924 English translation of the first printed Sanskrit text of the Citrasūtra (from Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa, 5th–9th century CE) made its mark on the nascent stage of art history and high nationalism in India. While translating this ancient treatise on Indian painting, she laid open a possibility of theorizing around Indic naturalism. Her ethics of listening to the text and its mimetic terminology is heroic at a time when her contemporary art historian, A. K. Coomaraswamy, had taken pains to expungenaturalism from Indian art history as an alien framework. Revisiting Kramrisch’s translation today from the lens of transculturalism reveals her model of comparativism between western and Indian naturalism. It is particularly legible where Kramrisch confronted the most corrupt part of the text. My essay examines Kramrisch’s ‘cultural unconscious’ via these ‘mistranslations’ while exploring how her keen ethics of listening complicate the recent move towards decolonizing Indian art history.

By 1956, the Philadelphia Museum of Art had acquired a major collection of Indian sculpture from Stella Kramrisch and appointed her as the Curator for Indian art. In postwar United States the institutional emplacement of Kramrisch and her collection represented (as Ananda Coomaraswamy was for a preceding generation) a deepening engagement with Indian art at museums at a time of widening interest in Asian cultures, including through university Area Studies Programs. This article examines the significance of Kramrisch and her collection, tracing the intertwining of her collecting and research activities during her early fieldwork, which contributed to the elevation of medieval sculpture within the field of Indian art history, and the way the acquisition and appointment relied on the alignment of multiple priorities and collective efforts.