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. This he had already demonstrated in terms of the Chilkat blanket, where regardless 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
