A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
he had used in his 1916 essay of narrative paintings that represent a span of time and the Dutch still lifes with their unnatural clarity of each individual element, Boas demonstrates that not all western art slavishly follows the principles of perspective. He identifies examples of perspective drawing in Eskimo engravings, Bushman rock paintings, and paleolithic cave paintings to show that this representational technique is not the final product of an evolutionary process, but is instead the manifestation of one of several possible visual renderings.
Boas then turns to the relationship between stylized or symbolic art and realistic art (p. 80). Instead of accepting a developmental scheme from abstraction to naturalism, or vice versa, Boas suggests that stylistic differences can derive from the presence or absence of certain technical constraints. He argues that in some cases technique has greater significance than the representation itself, producing a more stylized art in which formal elements become more meaningful and imbued with more emotional value (p. 82). Where, in contrast, the artist’s creativity is not restricted by culturally determined requirements to use a particular technique for all his artworks, a more naturalistic art might develop. In addition, since carving and sculpture are relatively less limiting and restricting techniques than graphic representation, the three-dimensional work of a people is sometimes more naturalistic than their two-dimensional art, as is the case on the Northwest Coast (p. 85).
Boas’s next topic is “Symbolism,” the study of those artistic elements that at first might seem abstract and without meaning but which have considerable significance to the people upon whose art they appear. Here he draws on the work of his students Kroeber, Dixon, Wissler, St. Clair, and Bunzel, and repeats the notion of historical influences discussed in his 1903 “The Decorative Art of the North American Indians,” as well as the conclusions from his Chilkat blanket work, in order to analyze the meaning of geometric or seemingly nonobjective art. Some cultures assign to certain designs a profound meaning universally understood, while other cultures offer extremely divergent explanations of similar or identical images. Sometimes, two or more different cultures interpret identical images quite differently. Moving from inconsistent explanations of abstract images to the impossibility of reconstructing a verifiable sequence, Boas insists that some art can develop from realistic to stylized, and other art from stylized to naturalistic. Without historical proof of such a development, a sequence can be interpreted either way. The only method to reconstruct the development of an art style is by the geographic method, which analyzes the distribution of art styles and their variations in an area. If the same form with the same interpretation occurs over a large area, with those in the center being realistic and those in the outlying regions being stylized, then it can be assumed that the development progressed from realistic to conventionalized. If, in contrast, the realistic and conventional forms with inconsistent meanings are distributed randomly throughout the area, then either a conventional form became assigned a representational meaning or a realistic form became unrecognizable and stylized. Somewhat modifying his analysis of Alaskan needlecases (1908b), Boas suggests that due to the widespread distribution and great frequency of geometric designs, “the earliest form is geometric,” but that “the habit of carving animal forms has induced the artist to produce the variants described here” (p. 126). In his conclusion to this chapter, Boas describes how among those peoples whose art “wavers between the symbolic and representative modes of delineation, opportunity arises for the occurrence of realistic and abbreviated forms, side by side” (p. 143).
In his fourth chapter, “Style,” Boas identifies that which determines the formal treatment of both symbols and geometric motifs, and asks how deeply one can understand “the historical and psychological conditions under which art styles grow up and flourish” (p. 144). Boas demonstrates how the profound conservatism of a people, their resistance to change, ensures the art style’s relative permanence and stability over time. So strong is adherence to tradition that style can restrict the inventiveness of a potentially original artist (pp. 156, 158). This conservatism can result in the application of a style that originated in one medium to another medium, as for example in the case of a pot imitating basketry. The technician, a weaver, for example, can play with technique and thus “discover” simple ornamental decorations. In this chapter, Boas brings the reader’s attention to the creativity of women artists and the influences they may have, as basketmakers and weavers, on the development of their group’s art style: “the most highly developed art is liable to impose its style upon other industries, and that mat weaving and basketry have been particularly influential in developing new forms and powerful in imposing them upon other fields” (p. 182). This brief statement about female creativity hints at Boas’s acceptance of the equality of male and female art, and goes along with his supporting the research by women like his students Ruth Bunzel (1929) and Gladys Reichard (1934, 1936, 1939a, 1939b), and Kroeber’s student Lila O’Neale (1932) who studied the creativity of potters and weavers (Berlo 1992).
In this chapter, Boas directs his attention to the artist, granting him his deserved status; “only in the case of slovenly work have we referred to the artisan” (p. 155). Raising a point made earlier in his Alaskan needlecase article (1908b), Boas suggests that one of the most important means of understanding art is to penetrate the “attitudes and actions of the artist.” Acknowledging the difficulty of this, Boas goes on to insist that the primitive artist, even the individual bound to a particular traditional style, has within himself “creative genius” (p. 156). It is worth pointing out that in these pages, Boas uses the male pronoun, even when he is referring to female artists. We must assume that his language does not imply the superiority of male over female artists, but, instead, is in keeping with the literary conventions of the day.
Why do so many stylistic variations on simple techniques exist? There is no simple answer to this question, for the psychological and historical components of art history are so complex as to render impossible any satisfactory explanation of the origin of a style. All that can be done is “to unravel some of the threads that are woven into the present fabric and determine some of the lines of behavior that may help us to realize what is happening in the minds of the people” (p. 155). To understand the art style of a group, it is necessary to compare it with that of contiguous areas, for no art style can be fully understood as the result of an internal development within a culture, nor as only an expression of the group’s “cultural life.” Rather, historical influences and diffusion of technical processes, formal elements and systems of arrangements of motifs contribute to the art style of any one group (p. 176). The chapters on formal art, representational art, symbolism, and style together cover the various elements in this immensely complex process of artistic development.
After dealing with general concepts touching primitive art, Boas applies his general principles to the art of a specific geographic area, the Northwest Coast. This, the longest chapter of the book, is a revised version of his 1897 monograph, with considerable new information and analysis, much of it drawn from his other Northwest Coast publications discussed in this essay. Boas begins by identifying two very different styles of art found among the North Pacific people: the symbolic and referential art made by men and the formal and nonobjective art made by women. In this chapter, he devotes a fair amount of space to the women’s art of basketry and mat weaving (pp. 289–94). In his introduction to men’s art, he repeats the points he made in 1897, that representational art comes in both naturalistic and conventionalized modes, and the form of the decorated object plays a major role in determining the manner by which one of these symbols is represented, as in the simultaneous image. Drawing on his analysis of the Chilkat blanket (1907), he points out how conventional composition of the artwork determines placement of design (p. 257), and explains that symbols of animals are usually understood by the entire group but are sometimes unique and understood only by the artwork’s owner (pp. 212–16). He also comments that sometimes artists display considerable freedom in their creation of animal images, diverging from rigid norms.36
In “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Boas analyzed the representational art of the Northwest Coast, but dealt little with the formal treatment of the decorative field in that art. Although in his earlier work Boas had suggested that the “eye” design signified a joint mark and was thus consistently meaningful (1897a: 175), here he says the motif is sometimes simply a decorative element. Then he proceeds to enumerate those seemingly completely abstract, geometric elements of Northwest