1939a, 1939b), and Kroeber’s student Lila O’Neale (1932) who studied the creativity of potters and weavers (Berlo 1992).
In this chapter, Boas directs his attention to the artist, granting him his deserved status; “only in the case of slovenly work have we referred to the artisan” (p. 155). Raising a point made earlier in his Alaskan needlecase article (1908b), Boas suggests that one of the most important means of understanding art is to penetrate the “attitudes and actions of the artist.” Acknowledging the difficulty of this, Boas goes on to insist that the primitive artist, even the individual bound to a particular traditional style, has within himself “creative genius” (p. 156). It is worth pointing out that in these pages, Boas uses the male pronoun, even when he is referring to female artists. We must assume that his language does not imply the superiority of male over female artists, but, instead, is in keeping with the literary conventions of the day.
Why do so many stylistic variations on simple techniques exist? There is no simple answer to this question, for the psychological and historical components of art history are so complex as to render impossible any satisfactory explanation of the origin of a style. All that can be done is “to unravel some of the threads that are woven into the present fabric and determine some of the lines of behavior that may help us to realize what is happening in the minds of the people” (p. 155). To understand the art style of a group, it is necessary to compare it with that of contiguous areas, for no art style can be fully understood as the result of an internal development within a culture, nor as only an expression of the group’s “cultural life.” Rather, historical influences and diffusion of technical processes, formal elements and systems of arrangements of motifs contribute to the art style of any one group (p. 176). The chapters on formal art, representational art, symbolism, and style together cover the various elements in this immensely complex process of artistic development.
After dealing with general concepts touching primitive art, Boas applies his general principles to the art of a specific geographic area, the Northwest Coast. This, the longest chapter of the book, is a revised version of his 1897 monograph, with considerable new information and analysis, much of it drawn from his other Northwest Coast publications discussed in this essay. Boas begins by identifying two very different styles of art found among the North Pacific people: the symbolic and referential art made by men and the formal and nonobjective art made by women. In this chapter, he devotes a fair amount of space to the women’s art of basketry and mat weaving (pp. 289–94). In his introduction to men’s art, he repeats the points he made in 1897, that representational art comes in both naturalistic and conventionalized modes, and the form of the decorated object plays a major role in determining the manner by which one of these symbols is represented, as in the simultaneous image. Drawing on his analysis of the Chilkat blanket (1907), he points out how conventional composition of the artwork determines placement of design (p. 257), and explains that symbols of animals are usually understood by the entire group but are sometimes unique and understood only by the artwork’s owner (pp. 212–16). He also comments that sometimes artists display considerable freedom in their creation of animal images, diverging from rigid norms.36
In “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Boas analyzed the representational art of the Northwest Coast, but dealt little with the formal treatment of the decorative field in that art. Although in his earlier work Boas had suggested that the “eye” design signified a joint mark and was thus consistently meaningful (1897a: 175), here he says the motif is sometimes simply a decorative element. Then he proceeds to enumerate those seemingly completely abstract, geometric elements of Northwest Coast art such as chevrons and zigzags, as well as the various curvilinear motifs we now call constricted eyelids, ovoids, ⋃ forms, and the like, pointing out that some of these are decorative fillers devoid of meaning, while others have deep significance for the artist and his audience (pp. 251–57).37 That some fully abstract designs have symbolic significance and others are purely decorative contradict neat and simplistic schemes on the relationships of imagery and meaning.
Boas also points out that although Northwest Coast art is primarily representational (with the exception of women’s art), geometric elements are not entirely absent, because short parallel lines, cross-hatchings, and circle-and-line patterns appear on some artworks. This brings him to several conclusions: that geometric design “may be recognized even in this highly developed symbolic art,” that some motifs have no meaning at all but are used for “purely ornamental purposes,” and that the exuberant and baroque symbolic style was developed only relatively recently, pushing out these geometric designs that were probably more widely used in the past (p. 279). With this, Boas begins his proposed reconstruction of Northwest Coast art history.
Although in much of Boas’s art history he does not venture too deeply into the broader sociological significance of art, he does touch upon the relationship between Northwest Coast art and social structure. Refining a point he made in 1896, Boas points to the overwhelming importance these Indians ascribe to display of rank, especially by means of artistic renderings of totemic emblems. This, he suggests, demonstrates a dialectical relationship between the development of the use of totemic emblems to symbolize social standing and the development of an exuberant artistic spirit in the region. Totemism provided the incentive for artistic development of a symbolic style which gradually subsumed the earlier, more geometric style by introducing greater numbers of animals and limiting the geometric designs. However, he also suggests that the importance of artistic representation in this culture doubtless stimulated and enhanced the social significance of heraldry (pp. 280–81).
As early as 1888 in “The Development of Culture in Northwest America,” and one year later in “Tattooing of the Haida,” Boas had attempted to reconstruct the history of the development of a regional style, such as the supposed Kwakiutl origin of the totem pole. Now in 1927 he is suggesting that the center of the Northwest Coast symbolic decorative style, which will be referred to here, following Holm’s terminology, as the formline style, originated in northern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. By comparing the art of the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and northern Northwest Coast Indians with that of the Coast Salish, Interior Salish, and the Eskimo, pointing out similarities and differences, Boas presented a historical reconstruction of Northwest Coast style, based on his theory that the geometric style is older and that the formline style developed in response to social factors. The people of Vancouver Island, he proposed, maintain the older geometric style in their trays, boxes, and baskets. Illustrating a series of Nootka clubs made of whalebone described in his 1908 essay, Boas pointed to the “fixed art style” characteristic of the more ancient Northwest Coast regional style also found among the Salish (1927: 283–86). During the nineteenth century, the Indians of northern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska invented a more complex formline style. As a result, among the Tsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit one finds far less use of geometrical ornamentation than among the Nootka and the Coast Salish, and far richer ornamentation with motifs such as the eye design, double curve, and slit design. All the tribes have vestiges of the antique style in the women’s arts of basketry and matting.
Between those northern Northwest Coast groups and the southern Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbian peoples are the Kwakiutl, who use a version of the formline style for heraldic purposes, but use geometric ornamentation for objects of everyday use. Boas asserts that the formline art was indeed a recent introduction to the Kwakiutl, for old informants claim that before 1860 the houses and their decorations resembled those of the Coast Salish (p. 289). Boas characterizes Kwakiutl art as having “distortions in painting [that] are, if anything, more daring than those of the Haida,” but little of the interlocking of animal images typical of the northern region (p. 288).
To complete his historical survey, Boas compares Northwest Coast art with the art of the neighboring peoples. Wood carving from the Columbia River area and northern California, although different in style, displays similarities in terms of woodworking techniques, while north of the Tlingit, among the Alaskan Eskimo, an abundance of masks suggests a Northwest Coast influence. But that influence is reciprocal, for the Tlingit may have adopted from the Eskimo the idea of attaching little animals to the features of the
