 The focus of Maritain’s writing is not aesthetic theory or even aesthetic experience, but art and the nature of beauty. Maritain sought to engage the world of the contemporary arts, but he was also critical of much of the aesthetics that was implied by it; he proposed to uncover principles of art at a time at which talk of such principles had already become somewhat suspect. His familiarity with the arts made his work relevant and accessible to those who engaged in them, and although his early work drew from his knowledge of western art, in his later work he also wrote about that found in Asian and Indian cultures.