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 than the other and each of which sometimes contains elements of the other. Repeating examples 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
