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Franz Boas, Primitive Art, and the Anthropology of Art

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CHRISTIAN F. FEEST
The appearance of a French edition of
Franz Boas’s Primitive Art seventy-six
years after its first publication is the
occasion for the present reflection on
the past and present of the anthropol-
ogy of art, on the place of the book in
the history of this field, and on its au-
thor.
Franz Boas is widely regarded as
the founding father of American an-
thropology and has undoubtedly been
the greatest single influence on the
development of American anthropolo-
gy in the twentieth century. It thus may
(or may not) come as a surprise to
learn that this is the first time that a
book-length text by Boas has been
published in French. If nothing else,
this seems to be an indication for the
ongoing importance of the boundaries
of languages and nation states on the
parochial development of a discipline
which prides itself to be studying cul-
tural differences.1 The only other text
by Boas that appears to have been
published as an independent publica-
tion in French is a small sixteen-page
treatise entitled Hérédité et milieu,
published in the series “Races et
Racisme” in Paris in 1940, virtually on
the eve of German occupation—a
sad, but most appropriate date in view
of the importance of the Jewish Ger-
man emigrant of the late nineteenth-
century for the scientific struggle
against racism.
With three English editions and
translations into Spanish, Italian, and
Christan Feest is director of the Museum
für Völkerkunde in Vienna and the author
of, i.a., Native Arts of North America
(21993).
Author’s address: Museum für Völkerkunde,
Neue Burg, A-1010 Wien, Austria.
E-mail: christian.feest@ethno-museum.ac.at
An earlier version of this paper was read at
the Journée d'études "L'Art Primitif de Franz
Boas" at the Collège de France, Paris, 16
January 2004, held on the occasion of the
French translation of Primitive Art.
1
This is not to suggest that French an-
thropologists (especially Americanists)
did not read Boas, yet when compared
to other languages, the absence of
translations in nevertheless significant.
NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 18:1 2004
FRANZ BOAS, PRIMITIVE ART,
AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY
OF ART
now French. Primitive Art has become
Franz Boas’s second most successful
book worldwide, only to be surpassed
by The Mind of Primitive Man with
about twenty English, three German,
three Italian, a Spanish, and a Catalan
edition printed between 1911 and
1995. Among the more than 10,000
pages of texts published by Boas,
these two books are certainly the most
accessible to a non-specialized read-
ership. But whereas The Mind of Prim-
itive Man enjoyed instantaneous suc-
cess, the reception of Primitive Art
was initially rather muted and gained
ground only after its author’s death in
1942. It may have to do with the fact
that Primitive Art had first been pub-
lished in 1927 in an obscure series of
scholarly publications in Norway, with
Harvard University Press serving mere-
ly as its American distributor. But it
certainly also was due to the fact that
this was not a book to make exciting
reading for an audience that for what-
ever mistaken reasons was beginning
to take an interest in “primitive art” in
the wake of its “discovery” by Picasso
and other modernist painters. Boas
does not even mention this issue, be-
cause it must have seemed to him
very far away from the questions that
he felt were important.
The Spanish edition of Primitive Art
was issued in 1947, and the second
American edition in 1951, followed in
1955 by the Dover Publications re-
print, which was essentially kept on
the market until today (the latest print-
ing, made in 2000, is currently out of
stock). Since the late1940s/early 1950s
were not a period of either a revitaliza-
tion of Native arts or of a strong surge
in public interest in “primitive art” (but
cp. Weltfish 1953), I suppose the book
was reprinted either simply as a “clas-
sic” or because little else of a similar
broad scope on the subject was avail-
able before 1962.
Primitive Art is and was therefore
never a fashionable text, but in a typi-
cally Boasian manner a meticulous,
careful, and sometimes tedious at-
tempt to illustrate two very broad as-
sumptions: Firstly, the psychic unity of
mankind, and the historical constitu-
tion (and thus relativity) of cultural
phenomena within the bounds set by
psychic unity; and secondly to dis-
pute all the unwarranted generaliza-
tions and grand schemes based on
monocausal explanations that had
been offered since the mid-nineteenth
century. Along the way, Boas estab-
lishes some procedures for the study
of visual forms of expression (some of
them still more valid than others), and
shows that the principles underlying
visual arts may be the same as those
informing literature, music, and dance.
While wishing to address here both
the historical-intellectual context of
Primitive Art and its significance for
present work in the anthropology of
art, the reader should be referred to
the extensive treatment of some of the
questions recently offered by Aldona
Jonaitis (1995a, b, 2001) and in Marie
Mauzé’s preface to the translation
(Boas 2003). I will attempt not to re-
peat too much of they have written,
but add a few thoughts of my own to
their accounts. I would like to place
Primitive Art into the context of Boas’s
biography, into the context of history
of the Western discourse on “primitive
art,” and to dip into aspects of the
book’s reception and legacy.
Let me begin with the biographical
context. Primitive Art is not a book
written by a hot-headed youngster try-
ing to achieve instant fame. In 1927 its
author was sixty-nine years old and
could look back upon a distinguished
career of more than forty years as a
museum curator and university teach-
er, including several years of field-
work, especially in the Arctic and on
the Canadian Northwest Coast. Origi-
nally trained in the natural sciences,
Boas stressed the importance of an
empirical basis for the anthropological
disciplines, including cultural an-
thropology. Not only did he teach at
Columbia University a generally
dreaded class on statistics, but the
very methodology that he propagated
for the study of cultures was based
upon the collection of “facts” or data
which as much as possible should be
5
free from the contamination caused
by the interpretation of their collector.
Although in his own first venture into
ethnographic data collecting on Baffin
Island in the early 1880s Boas had pi-
oneered fieldwork based on partici-
pant observation—living as “an Eski-
mo among Eskimos”—he later pre-
ferred the gathering of Native texts as
well as artifacts by Native consultants
without too much interference by the
anthropologist, who would only be
called upon to make sense of the pri-
mary data.
After his return from the Arctic, Boas
had first been introduced to museum
work by Adolf Bastian, the founder of
the Ethnological Museum in Berlin,
where he was faced by the problem of
interpreting the huge collection as-
sembled on the American Northwest
Coast by the Norwegian ship’s cap-
tain Johan Adrian Jacobsen. Buying
everything that could be moved and
had not been already bought by his
competitors from American museums,
Jacobsen had not devoted sufficient
time to gather information on the cul-
tural context from which the speci-
mens had been taken. Although the
artifacts’ function was generally more
or less apparent, the meaning of their
often elaborate forms was largely un-
known. One of Boas’s assignments on
his first trip to British Columbia in 1886
was to look for information to unravel
the meaning of the highly stylized
carved and painted forms, and he
succeeded in the formulation of some
basic recognition rules, which would
allow the viewer to “read” more or less
correctly the conventionalized forms.
In due course, however, Boas discov-
ered that such interpretations were
not always possible, partly because
stylizations were no longer active, but
had been fossilized, partly because
forms were purposefully ambiguous.
This was especially true on the North-
west Coast, where part-time or full-
time specialists carved and painted
forms representing hereditary privi-
leges of a class of noble patrons.
Around 1900 when Boas began to
send his early students, like Alfred
Kroeber and Clark Wissler, to do field-
work and collect for the American Mu-
seum of Natural History in New York
among the tribes of the North Amer-
ican Plains, they returned with addi-
tional evidence for the tenuous rela-
tionship between form and meaning.
The observation that the names given
to abstract design elements used by
women in beadwork were merely
terms of reference without necessary
regard to meaning and that the inter-
6 EUROPEAN REVIEW OF
pretation of these forms differed be-
tween men and women, was later also
found to be true for Californian bas-
ketry and other design traditions.
The essential point to be made here
is that Boas’s perspective on indige-
nous arts was very much shaped by
his own exposure to the highly spe-
cialized tradition of Northwest Coast
painting and carving, which existed
there alongside much less specialized
forms of visual expression; and by his
museum work, which favored the
analysis of a body of collected forms
over observational field data about
what later would become known as the
“social life of things”—the interaction
between humans and things that sup-
plied changing meanings and values
to visual forms. His active interest in
indigenous arts dramatically de-
creased after 1905, when he left his
position at the American Museum and
exclusively retreated to his position as
professor at Columbia University.
Most of the material from which his
book Primitive Art was compiled had
basically been researched and written
up by about 1905. When he was of-
fered the opportunity to publish the
book, he added material from the liter-
ature especially relating to other re-
gions of the world. In his “Introduc-
tion” he hardly more than refers to a
few publications from the 1920s, but
only as they relate to his much older
questions.
There is another early biographical
influence on Boas’s views of art that
so far appears to have gone unno-
ticed. His Ph.D. dissertation of 1881
on the color of water was essentially
dealing with a problem of psycho-
physics, the groundwork of which had
been laid out by Gustav Theodor
Fechner in 1860. Fechner had been
trained as a medical doctor, later
turned to physics, retired as professor
at the age of thirty-eight due to dam-
age to his vision incurred as the result
of self-experiments, and finally turned
to esthetic studies based on the as-
sumption that physical processes
were matching psychic processes,
which could therefore be measured on
a physical basis. As George Kubler
(1991: 110–113) has pointed out, Fech-
ner’s work paved the way for a shift in
esthetics from idealist speculations
from above, i.e., from universals down
to particulars, to an empirical esthet-
ics built from below, i.e. from observa-
tions. For Fechner, the main precon-
ception underlying esthetics is the op-
position between pleasure and dis-
pleasure. Boas (1927: 13) cites Fech-
ner’s Vorschule der Ästhetik [“pre-
school of esthetics”] (1876) with ap-
proval; and some of Fechner’s ideas
are clearly reflected in Boas’s book,
such as in his assumption that art is
basically the expression and enjoy-
ment of esthetic pleasure. Ironically,
Fechner also exerted an influence on
Herbert Spencer and more recently
on Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’in-
formation et perception esthétique
(1972).
In terms of the history of European
studies of non-Western as “primitive”
art, Franz Theodor Kugler is often
hailed as the first scholar treating “the
arts of the world on an egalitarian
basis” in the wake of Johann Gottfried
Herder’s ideas and Alexander von
Humboldt’s plates illustrating pre-
Columbian art from the Americas
(Kubler 1991: 130–131). In his Hand-
buch der Kunstgeschichte [“Hand-
book of art history”] (1841–1842) Ku-
gler proposed a stage of “early art”
which was said to include the “child-
hood” of human culture. This set the
stage for competing developmental
models of the history of visual forms of
expressions, a competition invigorat-
ed by the discovery of paleolithic rock
art in 1859. For the rest of the nine-
teenth century the discussion raged
between those who like Gottfried Sem-
per or William Holmes thought that the
development had gone from abstract
forms derived from the result of tech-
nical processes of manufacture to
representational art, and those who
like Alois Riegel, Frederick Ward Put-
nam, or Hjalmar Stolpe saw abstract
designs as the degeneration of repre-
sentational images. In his paper on
Alaska needlecases of 1908 Boas had
already attempted to show that neither
theory could claim universal validity,
and that both processes could occur
as part of the historical development
of art forms. Anthropologists had
joined the art historians in the debate,
not in the least because the discovery
of paleolithic art was closely followed
by an exponential growth of ethno-
graphic collection in the newly estab-
lished museums and the renewed rise
of paradigms interpreting the cultures
of exotic peoples as representative of
earlier stages of human cultural devel-
opment.
As many hybrid disciplines, the an-
thropology of art suffered (and to
some extent still suffers) from the lack
of agreement on basic concepts and
terminology, with terms like “art” being
controlled by art history just as “cul-
ture” was by anthropologists. The cre-
ation of new concepts, such as “prim-
itive art,” often represented an unsat-
isfactory compromise, implying the
recognition of non-Western modes of
visual expression as some kind of
“art,” but with “primitive” somehow
signifying certain limitations to the idea
of equality and more importantly cre-
ating nothing more than a residual
category opposed to Western or “real”
art, without properly noting the mas-
sive differences within this category.
The word “primitive” itself has, of
course, undergone major shifts of
meaning and connotation, notably
from meaning “original” or “belonging
to early times” to “of having the quali-
ty of what is ancient” or “rude” and
“old-fashioned.” As far as I can tell the
term “primitive art” was first used in
the first sense, such as in the state-
ment by Sir G. G. Scott in his Lectures
on Architecture (1870): “The great val-
leys of Egypt and Mesopotamia …
were the cradles of primitive art.” I do
not claim to be able to date the first
use of the term “primitive art” for “trib-
al” arts, but should point out that the
earliest title of a publication containing
the phrase seems to have been Primi-
tive Art. A Guide Leaflet to Collections
in the American Museum of Natural
History, published in 1904 at a time
when Franz Boas was in charge of the
ethnographic collections there.
What is notable in Boas’s book is
the lack of any attempt to qualify the
use of the term “primitive,” as was
later done, for example, by Leonard
Adam, who in his book Primitive Art,
published in 1940, went out of his way
to explain that it was, of course, not
the art the was “primitive,” but merely
its makers. The recurrence of the word
“primitive” in the title of Boas’s other
famous book, The Mind of Primitive
Man, suggests that he did not feel that
it was a disparaging term. Nor did
Boas explicitly define the term art, al-
though suggesting by implication that
it had to do with the “esthetic pleasure
… felt by all members of mankind”
(Boas 1927: 9), and that there was a
relationship between “artistic virtuosity
and the fullness of artistic develop-
ment” (Boas 1927: 17). If later com-
mentators chided him for a reliance in
his stylistic analysis on “such nonartis-
tic ideals as perfection of form or virtu-
osity in technique” (Chipp [1960] in
Jopling 1971: 148), it merely shows
how significantly the definition of “art”
in the West had changed under the in-
fluence of modernism. Sixty-nine year
old Franz Boas should, of course,
hardly be expected to adopt such
new and untested concepts.
We do not really know what prompt-
ed the publication of Primitive Art in
NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 18:1 2004
1927. It seems that Boas had been in-
vited by the Institute for Comparative
Research on Human Cultures in Oslo
to give a series of lectures, but
whether the suggestion of the subject
matter came from them or from Boas
is not clear. It may, however, have been
the subject of the day. In the mid-
1920s a significant number of books
were published dealing with “primitive
art” in general and with specific art
forms, which clearly relate to the pub-
lic recognition (not shared by Boas) of
the wave of primitivism in modern art.
Of the specific titles, Primitive Negro
Sculpture by Paul Guillaume and
Thomas Munro was published more or
less under Boas’s eyes in New York in
1926 and contained a formal stylistic
analysis of African sculptural forms
without the fashionable recourse to
their mostly religious meaning.
The vast majority of primitive art
books of those days, however, were
published in Germany, including a
book by Leonard Adam (1923) of the
Northwest Coast collection of the
Berlin Museum which had brought
Boas first into contact with this region;
Adam later emigrated to Australia
where he published, as we have al-
ready noted, in 1940 a widely read
book also called Primitive Art. Adam
returned to Germany after World War
II to become the coeditor of the lead-
ing anthropology textbook of the time,
for which he also wrote a chapter on
art. The pre-war version of this chap-
ter had been authored by Eckart von
Sydow, an art historian who published
no less than three books on “primitive
art” in Germany in the 1920s. One was
a standard survey of the arts of tribal
peoples and of prehistoric times
(1923), a second one dealt with primi-
tive art and religion (1926), while a
third one entitled Primitive Kunst und
Psychoanalyse [“primitive art and psy-
choanalysis”] and published in the
same year as Boas’s book embraced
the suggestion made by Sigmund
Freud in his Totem and Taboo of a re-
lationship between the mental condi-
tion of primitive peoples not only with
the childhood of modern civilized
man, but also with that of neurotics.
In 1923 Herbert Kühn’s Die Kunst
der Primitiven [“The art of the primi-
tives”] opens with a quotation by Paul
Gauguin, praising the ignorant sav-
ages as the true teachers of civilized
man, and tries to overcome the stale
controversies of the nineteenth centu-
ry on primitive art by citing Marx on
economic conditions as the base from
which the superstructure of society
has to be explained. Kühn boldly ar-
gues that “the art of the primitives is
no more or less art than in the Renais-
sance or among the Impressionists”
and then reduces the whole of art his-
tory to a dialectic relationship be-
tween “imaginative” and “sensoric” or
“transcendent” and “immanent” styles,
which he further identifies, i.a., with Ni-
etzsche’s “Apollinian” and “Dionys-
ian”—an opposition which shortly
thereafter was to be become central
to Boas’s assistant Ruth Benedict in
her stylized culture-and-personality
sketches in Patterns of Culture (1932).
Kühn, a prehistoric archaeologist, is
also notable as the founder in 1925 of
IPEK, an acronym for Journal of Pre-
historic and Ethnographic Art, the ear-
liest scholarly “primitive art” journal
ever published. Its contributors in-
cluded Ernst Wilhelm Vatter, who
wrote an outstanding comparative ar-
ticle of Plains pictographic painting
(1927) as well as a still significant book
on religious tribal sculpture (1926).
Boas refers to von Sydow and Kühn,
but pointedly only to their bibliogra-
phies and to what he thinks was a
one-sided selection of illustrations of
Northwest Coast art. Problematic as
the Freudian and Marxist approaches
of von Sydow and Kühn may have
been, they were certainly more up to
the questions widely discussed at the
time than Boas’s old-fashioned dis-
play of careful erudition. If further
proof for the anachronistic nature of
Boas’s book is needed, we might refer
to the recognition, at the time of its
publication, not only of traditional trib-
al arts as art by American museums
(as exemplified by the creation of spe-
cific American Indian Art departments
both at the Denver Art Museum in
1925 and at the Brooklyn Museum be-
tween 1925 and 1928), but also in-
creasingly of contemporary Native
American painting in galleries in New
York. Rather than dealing with the
questions posed by these develop-
ments of “primitive art,” its commodifi-
cation and integration into the esthetic
consciousness and connoisseurship
of the Western world, which was hap-
pening under his very eyes, Boas de-
voted himself to questions that he had
largely answered already a quarter of
a century ago. The irony of the story is,
of course, that Boas’s Primitive Art is
still an important book, whereas Kühn,
Sydow, or Vatter have been at least
sidelined, if not completely forgotten.
After the works by Boas and Adam
two new books also entitled Primitive
Art were published in 1962, both writ-
ten by art historians who were mining
the ethnographic materials that had
7
gone largely unstudied as art (and all
to often also as ethnography) in Amer-
ica’s museums of anthropology—or
more commonly, of natural history. Paul
Wingert was professor of art history
and archaeology at Columbia Univer-
sity, and thus in a sense stood in the
line of descent from Boas. Prior to his
Primitive Art, Wingert had done work
on arts of the Pacific as well as African
and Northwest Coast sculpture, and
like Boas was much interested in the
analysis of style. Douglas Fraser also
taught art history at Columbia, but—
while paying lip service to Boas’s
achievements—was much more critical
of Boas’s work. In an earlier essay on
“The Discovery of Primitive Art” he con-
trasts the appreciation of the modern-
ist artists with the anthropologists,
whom he saw as “confusing matters
with their sallies into the field of art in-
terpretation,” citing Boas alongside
Leo Frobenius as prime suspects in
this regard.
Three years later Bill Holm’s North-
west Coast Indian Art (1965) illustrat-
ed the lasting importance of Boas for
studies of the art of the region with
which his work is primarily associated
as well as for the analysis of style. This
limited focus on form and the reluc-
tance to tackle the issue of meaning,
however, continued to dominate the
criticism of Boas’s Primitive Art, not
only by art historians, but by also by
anthropologists, who had studied in-
digenous forms of visual expression in
the field. This criticism is well-taken, but
nevertheless misses the mark, once
we recognize that it merely points to
the difference between studying pres-
ent processes and past products.
Undoubtedly one of Boas’s major
achievements is his recognition of the
historicity also of indigenous traditions
of art. At that time, however, there was
hardly enough time depth in the data
available for study to allow a historical
approach in the strict sense of the
word. Boas’s obvious disdain for the
crude culture-historical and diffusion-
ist schools which engaged in a “con-
jectural history” easily competing with
that offered by the evolutionists of the
nineteenth century limited him to the
careful use of narrowly circumscribed
distribution studies and of internal ev-
idence to suggest local historical de-
velopments. The majority of the mate-
rial in museum collections at the time
was the fruit of recent concerted col-
lecting activities and thus reflected a
very shallow historical data base. In
the three quarters of a century since
Primitive Art, however, this time depth
has been substantially expanded,
8 EUROPEAN REVIEW OF
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both by a better grasp on historical
collections and by archaeology (as
well as, of course, by the changes of
art traditions over the past seventy-
seven years). On the Northwest Coast
of North America, for example, this new
evidence clearly proves Boas right as
far as his assertions about changing
styles are concerned, but it also illus-
trates a remarkable continuity in cer-
tain formal aspects over long periods
of time.
At the same time, Boas’s wariness
regarding any inherent relationship
between form and meaning has not
only been borne out by further empiri-
cal evidence, but also explained on a
theoretical level. Even if we accept Al-
fred Gell’s suggestion that ultimately
anything that can be interpreted is art
(Gell 1996), our interpretation of his-
torical arts will merely be echoes of
our own voices in the absence of solid
evidence relating to the interpretation
of such works in their own place and
time. Thus, while contextual studies of
contemporary arts are badly needed
to provide better insights into the
processes of attribution and negotia-
tion of meaning, studies of historical
works will continue to derive substan-
tial benefits from the insights gained
by Franz Boas.
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