A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
this same article, Boas notes the coexistence of realistic and geometric imagery on the Plains, where relatively realistic designs often decorated sacred, ceremonial objects while more geometric images appeared on secular pieces used every day. He ascribed to this the culturally determined differences in the purpose of the art: “In ceremonial objects the ideas represented are more important than the decorative effect, and it is intelligible that the resistance to conventionalism may be strong” (although he acknowledged that in other cases, the need for secrecy may result in obscure representations) (1903:485).
In addition to becoming both more assertive and more universal in his objections to evolutionist art history, Boas became more sensitive to the subtleties and complexities of the artistic process.
We conclude from all this that the explanation of designs is secondary almost throughout and due to a late association of ideas and forms, and that as a rule a gradual transition from realistic motives to geometric forms did not take place. The two groups of phenomena—interpretation and style—appear to be independent.… the history of the artistic development of a people, and the style that they have developed at any given time, predetermine the method by which they express their ideas in decorative art; and … the type of ideas that a people is accustomed to express by means of decorative art predetermines the explanation that will be given to a new design.… The idea which a design expresses at the present time is not necessarily a clew to its history. It seems probable that idea and style exist independently, and influence each other constantly (1903:497).
Whereas a style can result from historical factors in which imagery and design diffuse into a group from the outside, the meaning the accepting culture ascribes to the new style must resonate with the concepts that constitute that group’s culture. Thus, a people’s culture, which influences everything they do or say, affects their art as well. In this essay, Boas noted the occurrence of an artistic phenomenon both in the primitive and civilized worlds, a theme to which he returned several times in subsequent essays. He gave the following example. As is the case in the Plains where conventionalized and stylized images appear simultaneously, in modern architecture, domestic stained glass tends to be geometric, while in churches it is usually representational; wallpaper in the home tends to be abstract, whereas wallpaper in public settings has more symbolic representations.
After this 1903 article, Boas continued analyzing Native American art, posing questions on style, symbolism, and history, trying to test prevalent art historical theories. In a guide booklet to the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibitions of primitive art (1904), Boas took the opportunity to communicate his ideas on art and culture to the public by leading the visitor through displays of Northwest Coast, Plains, Eastern Woodlands, California, and Mexican Indians. Here he repeated his point that certain groups borrowed motifs from others and, in the process, ascribed different, culturally specific meanings to the same artistic image.
In 1907 Boas made substantial contributions to George T. Emmons’s Chilkat blanket monograph in the Jesup series. Most bibliographies list “The Chilkat Blanket,” volume three of the Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, as being written by George T. Emmons; some but not all give the complete title of the volume, “The Chilkat Blanket; with Notes on the Blanket Designs by Franz Boas.” In this monograph, Emmons wrote twenty-one pages, mostly on techniques and usage of these textiles (Emmons 1907:329–50), while Boas analyzed their imagery in his forty-nine-page “Notes on the Blanket Designs” (Boas 1907:351–400). Boas used these highly abstract textiles to compare and contrast imagery and meaning, once again concluding that form and meaning are not always connected, and that culturally imposed rules limit the freedom with which an artist can represent a particular image. Although in 1897 Boas had carefully listed the identifying features of Northwest Coast imagery, here he pointed out that sometimes the nature of the abstraction characteristic of Chilkat blankets obscures those features so thoroughly that even the Natives themselves disagree on what they represent.
The basic composition of most Chilkat blankets is tripartite, with the central field being the largest. That central field contains the principal representation of the animal or animals depicted, while the two symmetrical flanking fields illustrate the sides and back of the central animal (split down the middle), its den, or smaller animals. Boas compared this composition to that on boxes and dancing aprons. One interesting phenomenon Boas noted is that Emmons and Swanton interpreted the same blanket in very different ways; this, he suggests, is because “no fixed time of conventionalization exists” (1907:386–87) within the parameters of this particular kind of art. Because the weaver must depict the subject matter in a consistent fashion determined by the culturally imposed formal rules of Chilkat blanket manufacture, regardless of the animal intended to be represented, images sometimes become extremely abstract. Not only are the principal subjects of these blankets sometimes difficult to identify definitely, some of the decorative elements on them are obscure. The various abstract motifs found on these textiles fluctuate in meaning; the so-called red-winged flicker motif, for example—which never depicts any part of a bird—sometimes represents bones and limbs, and sometimes is simply a formal, meaningless element in a design. Boas also makes a brief excursion into the history of the Chilkat blanket, noting two older blankets unlike the others under discussion. These (numbers 35 and 36a) could have been the original type that the Chilkat Tlingit altered when they acquired this kind of textile from the Tsimshian. He then briefly mentioned a few modern blankets but dismissed them with the comment that in them, “the old conventionalism is breaking down entirely” (1907:391). This is an example of Boas’s bias that history worth recording and analyzing occurred before the influences of white culture brought about a disassembling of Native culture.
In 1908, Boas published a brief survey of “Clubs Made of Bone of Whale” from Washington and British Columbia (1908a), turning his attention to the art of the Nootka.30 In that same year he published what is arguably his most important art historical article, “Decorative Designs of Alaskan Needlecases: A Study in the History of Conventional Designs, Based on Materials in the U.S. National Museum” (Boas: 1908b).31 This essay on Eskimo art is an elegant refutation of both the realist/degenerationists and the technical/materialists, as well as a major statement of the significance of artistic creativity. He begins by contrasting the realist/degenerationists to the technical/materialists, but now notes that there is a third distinctive theory of the development of decorative forms—promoted by Boas, his student Alfred Kroeber (1901), and Clark Wissler (1904)32—in which interpretation and style are independent.33
The form of the needlecase itself is ancient, Boas argued, and contains various parts which “excite the imagination of the artist.” The geometric decorative field develops, according to the nature of Eskimo art, into animals or parts of animals (1908b:337). After presenting an exhaustive and extremely detailed analysis of the wide variety of Alaskan needlecases, which range in style from realistic to conventional, Boas made the bold statement that no proof exists that the decorative designs on these cases evolved either from realistic motifs (his “motives”) or from influence of technique; instead, “the only satisfactory explanation lies in the assumption that the multifarious forms are due to the play of the imagination with a fixed old conventional form, the origin of which remains entirely obscure” (p. 337).
Boas asserted that one could easily arrange these objects in a series, placing the naturalistic pieces at one end and the stylized ones at the other end, and then interpret the series as progressing either from naturalistic to stylized or from stylized to naturalistic.34 Neither one nor the other of these series provided any proof of historical sequence, and thus could not be accepted as a verifiable reconstruction of the art historical process. Classification does not imply a genetic series. There exists simultaneously within the human mind a tendency toward abstraction and a tendency toward realism, with each manifesting itself in different ways. Repeating a point made earlier in “Decorative Art,” Boas also commented that the diversity of explanations of the same motif implies that once a group borrows a form, they interpret it according to their cultural values.
The role of the artist’s psychology in art creation became a central focus in this essay. Boas pointed out that while the primitive artist worked within a cultural system that posed certain restrictions on what he could and could not do, the artist could, within those limits, be creative.