A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
and distort the animal-subject in order to make it fit on the surface being decorated. Often, when a three-dimensional animal was depicted on a two-dimensional surface, the artist resorted to what is termed “split representation,” in which the animal’s body is split down the middle, flattened out, and shown in both profiles connected at the center. Sometimes, it was not possible for the artist to portray every feature of the entire animal, so he resorted to representing its characteristic motifs, in which case the rendering became truly symbolic. Here on the Northwest Coast, therefore, the relative realism or abstraction of an image depended on the shape of the surface upon which the artist depicted different animals and their culturally dictated identifying characteristics.
Boas once again discussed this relationship between animal imagery and the shape of the surface on which it appeared in his “Facial Paintings of the Indians of Northern British Columbia,” published in 1898 as part of volume 1 of the Jesup Expedition Publications.27 Repeating the introductory comments of his 1897 monograph, Boas began his text by accepting the realist/degenerationist theory that among “most primitive people we find a tendency to the development of geometric designs.” He then asserted that this did not occur in Northwest Coast art (1898b: 13). To test his theory that in this region the form of the object being decorated with all the necessary animal symbols influenced the relative naturalism of the representation, Boas analyzed the painting applied to the most complex possible surface, the human face. After describing a wide range of Northwest Coast facial paintings, Boas concluded that geometric designs in these paintings did not necessarily evolve from naturalistic ones but were artistic responses to the problems posed by the shape of the face.
To investigate this question, Boas collected face paintings from Charles Edenshaw, “one of the most famous artists” of the Haida, and arranged them in a sequence from the most realistic to the most abstract. As it turned out, the fullest and most realistic representations appeared on the faces of the highest-ranking people, while those of lower rank had more conventionalized face paintings. In some cases, the facial features became part of the design, while in others, they were ignored, with the face serving as a flat surface. While sometimes the depicted animal was readily identified, it could be so abstract that identification was virtually impossible without an explanation by the informant. In this study, Boas noted the appearance of what he claims to be unique in the Northwest Coast: animal symbols in the form of pure geometric designs. Some of these abstract motifs, moreover, could represent different animals, requiring identification by the owner of the image. Boas would periodically return to the point that at times iconographic identification could be obscure; this supported his recurrent theme that uncomplicated answers to questions of meaning simply did not exist.
In his concluding comments, Boas (1898b:24) asserts that “the collection is of theoretical interest mainly because it shows that the difficulty of adapting the subject of decoration to the decorative field has been a most powerful element in substituting geometrical forms for less conventional designs, and in showing a series of important transitional forms.” It should be pointed out that this case is less convincing than that presented the year before in “The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast.” The variety of imagery on these facial paintings suggests less that the artist was trying to solve formal problems (as he seems to have been doing in the split representation) and more that he could choose from a range of styles depending upon factors that at least in some cases had to do with the rank of the individual being painted (as he himself noted early in the essay). Although he would repeat the idea that a primitive artist at times freely chose from a range of artistic possibilities when socially dictated conventions did not completely restrict his choice, Boas did not return in later publications to this topic of facial paintings.
In addition to questioning the relationship between naturalistic and stylized images, Boas studied the relationship between art style and linguistic families. In British Columbia, the Coast Salish have a distinctly different art style from their linguistic relatives, the Salish-speaking Thompson people of the interior of the province. During the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Boas had a British Columbia resident, James Teit, collect examples of Thompson Indian art. The pieces Teit collected resembled Plains Indian art far more than they did Northwest Coast art. In his contribution to Teit’s monograph in the Jesup series on the Thompson Indians, Boas (1900b) compared Coast and Interior Salish art, pointing to the absence of plastic art among the latter, so different from the highly three-dimensional art of the Northwest Coast. Unlike the Northwest Coast artists, Thompson painters decorated their implements with designs not prompted by the shape of the surface. The iconography of the two types of artworks created by linguistically related peoples differed as well. Unlike the universally understood imagery of most Northwest Coast representations (although, of course, not all, as he demonstrated in the facial painting article), Thompson decorative designs, often abstract and ambiguous, could be interpreted differently and sometimes apparently arbitrarily by different people. Designs on implements, which related to their use, differed from those on ceremonial pieces, which depicted owners’ dreams. These comparisons implicitly demonstrated the inadequacy of any theory positing a direct connection between language and art style. In his “Conclusion” to the Thompson monograph, Boas attempted to reconstruct the history of Salish speakers, some of whom he suggested had migrated to the Northwest Coast where they borrowed certain art forms from their neighbors, others of whom lived on the plateau and were influenced by Plains Indians.28
Boas on Native American Art, from 1901 By the first decade of the twentieth century, Boas had at his disposal more materials with which he could dispute grand universalizing theories. These included Northwest Coast materials acquired during the Jesup Expedition by Teit, Livingston Farrand (1900), and John Swanton (1905); Siberian pieces collected during that same fieldwork by Berthold Laufer (1902), Waldemar Jochelson (1908, 1926), and Waldemar Bogoras (1904) in Siberia; northern Mexican art by Carl Lumholtz (1904); and Plains and California art described by Boas’s students, including A. L. Kroeber (1900a, 1901), Clark Wissler (1904), and Roland B. Dixon (1902). Confident in his grasp of the Northwest Coast, Boas could now expand beyond that culture area in his efforts to dismantle the false grand narrative of evolutionism. He also turned greater attention to the creative process, and to the psychological and cultural factors that influenced art production. His articles published between 1901 and 1916 thus represent his mature statements on art history as well as his final contributions to that discipline prior to the publication of Primitive Art in 1927.
In 1903, Boas expanded his study of primitive art beyond the Northwest Coast in “The Decorative Art of the North American Indians,” published in Popular Science Monthly.29 In this essay that analyzes the significance of a culture in determining meaning in art, Boas proposed history as a substitute for evolutionism. He begins by dismissing the realist/degenerationism of Haddon (1895) and then appears to accept the theory of Semper (1861–63), Cushing (1886), and Holmes (1888, 1890) that the origin of decorative forms can probably be found in technique. In particular, he favors the work of Schurtz (1900) and Hamlin (1898) who note that once a design is created, the group using it on its art “read in” meaning appropriate to their culture. In this case Boas tacitly positions himself in opposition to the number of scholars like Grosse (1897) and Hirn (1900) for whom the expressive and communicative aspects of art are primary. He qualifies this by adding that this origin has little relevance to the meaning ascribed to the image by the people who use it for decorative purposes.
Then, directing his words to those who preferred evolutionist to historical explanations, Boas asserted that if one group’s art style really arose in isolation from another group’s, as a result of either a technical/materialist or a realist/degenerationist process, the art of each group would be different. On the Plains, where art produced by many different ethnic groups is remarkably uniform, this was clearly not the case. According to Boas, history, not evolution, explained the presence of certain images in art. As an example of the diffusion of a motif, Boas charted the appearance of a rather complex geometric design found both on ancient Pueblo art and among many different Plains people. This motif, Boas proposed, originated on Pueblo pottery and spread northwards. Interestingly, what the image meant to various Plains groups differed considerably. Stressing the significance of culture in these historical processes, Boas explained that when new motifs enter into the artistic vocabulary of a people, they ascribe meaning to them appropriate