A Wealth of Thought. Boas Franz
of the animal depicted, the artist was constrained by one of two fundamental compositions within which the animal had to be fitted. The Eskimo, Boas argued, tended to decorate their carving with zoomorphic imagery; thus, the knob on a needlecase became a perfect field for transformation into a seal head. While tradition and convention imposed some restrictions on the artist decorating the needlecase with seal imagery, he could draw on both his imagination and his creativity in his carving. Boas proposed that a significant factor in the creation of new art forms was the sheer enjoyment felt by the artist while producing art: “one of the most important sources in the development of primitive decorative art is analogous to the pleasure that is given the achievements of the virtuoso” (p. 340). Indeed, Boas suggested that certain stylistic variations might have been the result of an artist’s imaginative play, which functions in the context of the traditional constraints that determine artistic conventions.
Once again insisting on the complexity of the question of decorative art, Boas asserted that its development “can not be simply interpreted by the assumption of a general tendency toward conventionalism or by the theory of an evolution of technical motives into realistic motives by a process of reading in, but that a considerable number of other psychic processes must be taken into consideration if we desire to obtain a clear insight into the history of art” (p. 341). So convinced was Boas about the significance of such mental processes that he encouraged several of his students, including Ruth Bunzel, to pursue studies along these lines. He himself organized a project with James Teit, H. K. Haeberlin, and Helen Roberts, who investigated the “attitude of the individual artist toward his work” among the Interior Salish of British Columbia (Haeberlin et al. 1928:131). The resulting monograph, “Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding Region,” for which Boas wrote a two-page introduction and a short conclusion, came out one year after Primitive Art (Jacknis 1992).
In his 1916 article, “Representative Art of Primitive Peoples,” Boas described the intimate relationship between an artist’s technical skill and the aesthetic effect of his art. Reiterating points made in the Alaskan needlecase article, he suggested that an artist’s enjoyment of the creative process and technical experiments could lead to new artistic designs, and that representational decorative art and geometrical decorative art were two different types of artistic activity, neither of which could be proved to be older than the other. Boas then addressed a problem posed earlier in his 1897 monograph on Northwest Coast art—the rendering of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface—but with a considerably different objective, for here he compared perspective in European and nonwestern art.
According to Boas, the primitive artist attempts to represent all or most of the features essential for the recognition of a subject, whereas the European artist uses a perspective technique to show the object as it appears at any given moment. Although accepting this essential difference between most European and primitive art, Boas identifies a variety of European artworks that depict their subjects in a fashion that Boas feels is similar to that of primitive art. Narrative painting, such as a depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden followed by the Expulsion, does not illustrate a single moment in time, but instead shows a sequence of events. Dutch painting details with great clarity every element within a broad visual range, instead of blurring all but a small portion of the field of vision, as is the case when one actually observes a scene. Boas described how most artists depict objects with what he refers to as their “permanent” colors (i.e., a flesh-colored face, a red rose); this convention, so much a part of western art tradition, makes it difficult for viewers to understand paintings by modern artists who attempted to render passing color effects, such as a face made green by a tree’s shadow or made red by the reflection of a red wall or curtain.
Boas concluded this short essay with the brief but significant statement that the “absence of realistic forms in the representative art of primitive tribes is not due to lack of skill” (p. 23), citing the example of the Northwest Coast artist who can at will create exceptionally naturalistic sculptures. Instead, he proposed, one “must rather seek for the condition of their art in the depth of the feeling which demands the representation of the permanent characteristics of the object in the representative design” (p. 23). Thus art styles of a primitive society and a literate one were different not because the primitive artist was inferior or was unable to create a naturalistic representation, but because of the constraints imposed by each culture to create a certain kind of art.
PRIMITIVE ART (1927)
In the 1920s, the Oslo Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture invited Boas, who was by that time the most distinguished anthropologist in the United States, to present a series of lectures on primitive art. Here was an opportunity for Boas to consolidate the ideas he had been developing since Northwest Coast art first captured his fancy and present them in a unified form, first in these lectures and then in the Oslo Institute’s 1927 publication Primitive Art (Herskovits 1953:97).35
Primitive Art is far more than the compilation of Boas’s various antievolutionist critiques, for in it he offers a general perspective on the problems of primitive art, a sensitive appreciation of the creative process, and a more mature statement of his aesthetic ideas. He also expands his range of examples to include not only Native America, but Africa, the Pacific, and Siberia as well. In the preface, Boas presents his objective: “to determine the dynamic conditions under which art styles grow up” (p. 7). He then describes the universality of the aesthetic experience and the twofold source of artistic effect—form and meaning—neither of which can be proved to be older than the other. He stresses the importance of “highly developed and perfectly controlled technique” that becomes the fixed form which determines the measure of aesthetic excellence; “without a formal basis the will to create something that appeals to the sense of beauty can hardly exist” (pp. 11–12). The body of the text consists of individual chapters on formal elements, representational art, symbolism, style, Northwest Coast art, and the nonvisual arts. The various points he makes derive in large measure from his previous writings, which in several cases he elaborates and focuses more sharply. Drawing together his ideas on art, Boas discusses the complexity of the artistic process in a relatively coherent fashion. That coherence, I must stress, is indeed relative; because of his unwillingness to come to premature theoretical closure, his definitive statements concerning art are not as frequent as his discussions of its complexities. As I pointed out in my introductory essay, this now can be evaluated as a positive rather than negative feature of the book.
The chapter “Graphic and Plastic Arts: The Formal Element in Art” examines the great significance of technical virtuosity in the creation of art. Indicating that in many cases the aesthetic appeal of primitive art lies in its formal qualities rather than in its iconographic significance or emotional expressions, Boas highlights the mechanical skills and the technical virtuosity of primitive artists, which, as he pointed out in his Alaskan needlecase piece, provide the creator with pleasure. Here Boas does identify certain features that appear to be universal in art: symmetry, a kind of rhythmic repetition that could be the result of the physical actions of the artist creating the work, and emphasis on form, meaning that the artist uses decoration to emphasize the form of the object being decorated. Not all art, he asserts, especially decorative art, conveys meaning or emotion; even art that does represent something includes a formal element “directly due to the impression derived by form” (p. 63).
In the section “Representative Art” (which I will term representational), Boas discusses content that provides an artwork with emotional value quite distinct from its formal aesthetic effect. According to Boas, meaning alone does not make a representation an artwork, for, to create art, the artist must be a technical master; crudely drawn images such as Plains pictographs are not art but simply depictions of animals, humans, and tents. He then identifies two modes in which representational art can depict its subject in three dimensions: one, by depicting its outline simply and forcefully, perhaps filling that outline with decorative elements; the other, giving all the components of the figure with little concern for the whole (p. 69). This leads to a discussion of two dimensional images, those that depict all the characteristics of the subject and those that depict only those parts that are seen at any one moment. Here are the two basic means by which the primitive artist portrays reality: symbolic drawing and its opposite, perspective drawing, neither of which can be proved older