A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
group; and ultimately the role of imagination and creativity on the part of the artist.15 Where the evolutionists claimed a rigid sequence of art forms, Boas described specific cases in which those sequences did not apply. Where any writer imposed a simplifying or universalizing theory, Boas demonstrated how the complexity of the artistic process, exemplified by data he and his colleagues had obtained, disproved that theory. In reading through Boas’s works on art, it becomes clear that he intentionally and systematically disputed these evolutionist concepts, and each discussion of form, style, and meaning was meant to disprove a previously accepted idea about art. As he did this, he continually suggested different ways to interpret art and understand the artistic process. His motivation to dispute evolutionism resulted in numerous new approaches to art history.
The articles included in this volume, written over several decades starting in the late 1880s, reveal Boas’s intellectual development as an art historian. Initially tentative in his opposition to art historical evolutionism, Boas became increasingly assertive as he matured intellectually. The subjects of his first analyses of art were the paintings and carvings of the Northwest Coast Indians. His earliest writings, done between 1888 and 1895, are largely descriptive, as this was the period during which he was familiarizing himself with Northwest Coast art. As his knowledge of this exceptional regional style deepened, it became clear to him that Northwest Coast art presented interesting artistic problems that could not be solved by then prevalent theories, so between 1896 and 1900, Boas systematically analyzed Northwest Coast art to demonstrate the inadequacies of evolutionist interpretations. His writings on art become very confident after 1900, as, with new information provided by colleagues and students, he went beyond the Northwest Coast to include other Native American artworks in his analyses and in his direct attacks on the evolutionists. It was at this point that he began to investigate the influence of psychology on art. Boas ultimately consolidated these endeavors in his book-length study Primitive Art, published in 1927.16
The Earliest Writings, 1888–95 Most of Boas’s earliest writings on art were descriptions of the artistic elements of Northwest Coast Indian culture, many based on his fieldwork during which he showed consultants photographs and drawings of artworks in museum collections and asked them to interpret their iconography and explain their use (Boas 1890a:7, 12).17 For example, one of the products of his 1886 trip to northern Vancouver Island was “The Houses of the Kwakiutl Indians, British Columbia” (1888b), in which he described the structure, design, and interior decoration of Kwakiutl architecture and explained the connections between carvings found in these houses and family legends.18 In the 1890 and 1891 reports to meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Boas described Salish house posts, Nootka carving and painting, and Kwakiutl and Bella Coola masquerades (1890b, 1891a). In these descriptive writings, he approached artworks as components of a larger cultural picture.19
During this period, Boas was beginning to speculate on the history of artistic forms, hypothesizing on the origins of a type of art among one of the Northwest Coast groups and then reconstructing its diffusion to other groups. In a report to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1889, Boas commented that “certain designs originated among the Kwakiutl, but reached their highest stage of development among the Haidas” (Boas 1889:116).20 In “The Development of Culture in Northwest America” (1888a), Boas continued along this path, suggesting that the Kwakiutl invented not only winter dances but also the totem pole:21
I am inclined to believe that another custom of the North West Americans besides their dances originated among the Kwakiutl. I mean the use of heraldic columns. This view may seem unjustified, considering the fact that such columns are made nowhere with greater care than in the northern regions, among the Tsimshian and Haida, and farther north and south they are less frequent and less elaborately carved. The Haida, however, frequently took up foreign ideas with great energy, and developed them independently.… It appears that the tribe has a remarkable faculty of adaptation (1888a: 195).
He goes on to explain that it is only among the Kwakiutl that mythological tales refer frequently to totem poles, thus apparently justifying his assertion that the Kwakiutl originated the art form.22 Then, observing some similarities between Eskimo and Tlingit masks, both of which have small carved faces attached to the larger face of the mask itself, he proposed “that a mutual influence existed here” (1888a: 196). In “The Use of Masks and Head-ornaments on the Northwest Coast of America” (1890a), Boas reiterated his theory of the innovativeness of the Kwakiutl, whom he credited with inventing the masks worn during winter ceremonies. He also commented that groups borrow ideas and copy artistic forms which “strike their fancy”; examples of this are the Tsimshian raven rattle among the Kwakiutl, the Chilkat blanket among groups as far south as Comox, and the Tsimshian ermine headdress among people as distant as Victoria (Boas 1890a:8). Boas was to become increasingly interested in reconstructing the origin and distribution among ethnic groups of artistic styles and motifs. This would later become a particularly useful means of discrediting evolutionist art history.
Boas on Northwest Coast Art Style, 1896–1900 In 1896, as he intensified his studies of style and symbolism, Boas began to tackle the complexities of the artistic process. In his two-page “Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast,” published in Science (1896), Boas challenged the notion that all Northwest Coast art was totemic by identifying certain objects whose animal form did not derive from social meaning. Although a large proportion of Northwest Coast animal images depict crests associated with family histories, Boas noted that some animal representations on hunting implements and food bowls related to certain natural attributes of the animals themselves. Granting that totemism was a significant incentive in the development of Northwest Coast art, he suggests that once the use of conventionalized animal imagery to decorate objects had been established, artists began applying similar designs to objects unrelated to totemism. Thus a halibut club assumed the shape of the sea lion or killer whale because these are successful fishers, while the grease dish represented a blubber-rich seal. Disputing restrictive and limiting unicausal theories, Boas asserted that his analysis of animal imagery in Northwest Coast art was “one of the numerous ethnological phenomena which, although apparently simple, cannot be explained psychologically from a single cause but are due to several factors” (1896:102–3).23
In 1897, Boas wrote his most elaborate and important work on art thus far, “The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast,” published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.24 This was to become his first systematic argument against an evolutionary explanation of the development of conventionalized imagery. In his introductory comments, Boas seemed to accept as true in some instances the realist/degenerationist theory of Frederic Ward Putnam:25
It has been shown that the motives of the decorative art of many peoples developed largely from representations of animals. In course of time, forms that were originally realistic became more and more sketchy, and more and more distorted. Details, even large portions, of the subject so represented, were omitted, until finally the design attained a purely geometric character (1897a: 123).
Boas then pointed out that this did not occur in one region, the Northwest Coast:
The decorative art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast agrees with this oft-observed phenomenon in that its subjects are almost exclusively animals. It differs from other arts in that the process of conventionalizing has not led to the development of geometric designs, but that the parts of the animal body may still be recognized as such (1897a: 123).
The Northwest Coast artist adhered to an iconographic canon that determined certain identifying characteristics of animals, such as the beaver’s large incisors and crosshatched tail, the killer whale’s large dorsal fin, and the eagle’s large, downward-curving beak.26 According to Boas, the artistic requirement that any animal image had to include all identifying elements of the animal led to highly conventionalized depictions when that animal decorated certain surfaces. On a three-dimensional sculpture, the artist could represent his subject, with all its characteristic features, in a fully naturalistic fashion (and the Northwest Coast artist was capable of very naturalistic representations); this became more problematic when he was presented with a two-dimensional