Franz Boas’s “Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast” is a short scholarly study, published in 1897 in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, that examines how the carvers and painters of the Northwest Coast transformed animal forms into ornament. It is an expository work: an argument built from close looking, in which dozens of numbered figures—helmets, masks, hats, spoons, clubs, poles, dishes, bracelets—serve as evidence for a theory of how design bends to the object it decorates.
From Realistic Animal to Symbol
Boas opens with a familiar story: among many peoples, decorative motives begin as realistic animal representations and gradually grow sketchy and distorted until they end as pure geometry. The North Pacific Coast Indians share the animal subject matter but break the pattern. Their conventionalization never dissolves into geometric design; the parts of the animal body stay recognizable, even though the body’s arrangement and proportions are radically changed. Boas sets out to describe those changes and to reconstruct the artist’s mental attitude behind them.
A crucial constraint frames everything. Almost all the plastic art of these peoples is decorative—unlike the Eskimo, who carve purely for art’s sake, the Indian artist works on objects made for use. The object’s form is given in advance, and the subject must be subordinated to it. Only single totemic figures enjoy real freedom, and even they are limited by the cylindrical tree trunk. The media are carving in wood, stone, and horn (in the round, in bas-relief, rarely in high relief) and painting, including tattooing and weaving; there is no pottery. The technical skill is high, which matters to the argument: it proves the artists could represent nature faithfully if they chose. A helmet bearing the portrait head of an old man with partial paralysis, a mask of a dying warrior with faithful Indian features and the marks of death agony, a dancing hat with a seal, a float with a swimming puffin, a rattle shaped like a swimming goose—these show realistic representation well within their powers.
Yet the given form of the object generally forces the artist to indicate only main characteristics. Since distortion could make an animal unrecognizable, the artist seizes on characteristic features and elevates them into symbols, while allowing himself great latitude everywhere else. The beaver carries a human-like face, animal ears over the forehead, large incisors, a cross-hatched tail turned up in front, and a stick held in its forepaws—any one of these suffices as its symbol; one figure shows only the incisors. The sculpin is marked by two spines over the mouth and joined dorsal fins; the hawk by an enormous hooked beak curved back to touch the chin; the eagle by a beak ending in a sharp downward point; the killer-whale by a large head, toothed mouth, blow-hole, and large dorsal fin; the shark by a heterocerc tail, depressed mouth corners, curved cheek lines, and a high tapering forehead. A fabulous sea-monster combines a bear’s head and paws with a killer-whale’s body bearing several dorsal fins. These symbols are not confined to animal bodies: applied to human faces, they turn masks and facial paintings into declarations of identity, worn by dancers personifying animals or spirits at festivals that dramatize myths.
Bending the Animal to the Object
The second movement of the argument shows the artist at work on particular objects, and it is here that Boas’s analysis becomes most absorbing. Once a feature has become a symbol, it can be detached from the whole animal and still be read—a killer-whale’s dorsal fin worn on the back of a blanket, most extensively among the Kwakiutl tribes, stands for the whale itself. But wherever possible the artist tries to represent the whole animal on the object decorated, and the object’s demands produce the distortions Boas catalogues.
A seal- and halibut-killing club carved as a killer-whale cannot carry an upright dorsal fin without becoming awkward, so the fin is bent downward along the side, covering the flipper; the tail, which would interfere with the handle, is turned forward over the back. A spoon handle representing the same animal twists the body backward until the tail almost touches the mouth, the two projections below the mouth being the split tail tips, while the dorsal fin projects upward from the head between the legs of the man who forms the handle’s tip. A small totem pole representing a shark puts the tail tip at the top and the face at the lower end; because most of the shark’s symbols sit on its face, the head is twisted entirely around to show the back, and the flippers are pushed backward. On a speaker’s staff the shark’s head turns completely to face the back, with pectoral fins below the chin; on a berry spoon the lower jaw is omitted and the bowl is formed by the palate; on a pole the shark’s head becomes a human face with symbols, the body turned upward and shortened to nothing but the tail above the face. A wooden dancing hat attaches the killer-whale’s symbols directly to the head: the dorsal fin rises over the eyes, the flippers sit behind the eyebrows. On a halibut hook carved with a beaver, the two incisors are shifted to the right side so both remain visible. The principle throughout: take great liberty with the body so the symbols stay clear, represent the whole animal or all its essential parts, and omit the insignificant.
Hats, dishes, and boxes each impose their own geometry. Dancing hats are truncated cones topped with basketry rings that mark social rank; since the top lies outside the decorative field, a sculpin carved on a hat is shown as though lying on its lower side, its back split and distended so the hat’s top fits the opening. A dish shaped as a seal flattens the belly, hollows the back into a bowl, and distends that back into a wider rim, with flippers in proper position and hind flippers turned back to join the tail. Small boxes carry the front, sides, and back of the animal on their respective faces, the bottom as stomach and the top as back; only the sides bent from a single piece of wood are decorated, and unbent, the decoration forms a long band of two symmetrical halves—front view at the centre, side views flanking it, half a hind view at each end, with the hind view occupying the sewn corner.
The silver bracelet extends the same logic to a round surface. A square box divides naturally at its four edges; the round bracelet has no sharp division, and two profiles raise no difficulty. When the tail ends of each profile are placed where the bracelet’s ends join, only one junction remains, in the median line of the head. The animal is cut in two from head to tail, the halves cohering only at nose tip and tail tip; the hand passes through this hole, and the animal surrounds the wrist. The method is identical with the hat, except that the central opening is larger and the surface cylindrical rather than conical. In the bear’s head on a bracelet, a deep depression between the eyes running to the nose proves the head is not a front view but two profiles adjoining at mouth and nose, not in contact at eye and forehead level; the ornament over the nose with three rings represents a hat whose rings designate the bearer’s rank. Such representations, Boas insists, are not perspective views but complete animals, more or less distorted and split.
The Split Animal and the Flat Surface
The transition to flat surfaces follows without a break. The same principle holds: animals split in two with profiles joined in the middle, or a front view of the head with two adjoining body profiles. Imagine the bracelet opened and flattened, and you have a section of the animal from mouth to tail, cohering only at the mouth, the two halves spread across a flat plane—the natural development of the method. Changing the cut allows modifications: a long animal’s body, fish or standing quadruped, yields a long narrow strip suited to long bands; in a more nearly square field, quadrupeds sitting on their haunches are cut the same way and unfolded so the halves remain in contact at nose and mouth while the median line of the back falls at the extreme right and left.
The carvings themselves confirm the reading. On a pole carved with a sea-monster, forepaws raised before the chest appear under the mouth, fins flank the tail, and a fish-tail and a hand protrude from the mouth—the animal is swallowing another being. An inverted bird fills the space between forepaws and tail, its beaked head resting between the feet, its wings stretching from the fins of the forearm to the dorsal fin. The point, as elsewhere, is that the two edges of the carved pole must be understood as the extended median line of the animal’s back; likewise, in paintings on hats and flat figures, the outer rim is the distended sides of a cut made along the animal’s lower side. These distortions and sections answer to the artist’s need to show all the animal’s symbols. Since symbols read clearly in profile, an artist representing profiles has not troubled to show both sides of the body.
A run of examples follows. The top of a box carved with the sea-monster Wasku—wolf’s head and body, large dorsal fin, able to hunt in the sea as well as on land—shows a profile with one foreleg and one hind leg, the tail curled over the back, and the dorsal fin, usually vertical, laid along the back to fit the field. A tattooing of the sea-monster Tsem’aks joins a raven’s body to a whale’s body attached at its head, with a fin on the raven’s back, shown in profile with one leg, the dorsal fin, and the tails of raven and whale twisted to be seen from the side. A tattooing of the moon shows the crescent below and, in the dark portion, a semi-human figure in profile with one leg, one arm extended downward and one backward, as though lifting a heavy weight. A circular slate dish carries a killer-whale whose two dorsal fins bend around the rim until the head touches the tail, the fins laid flat along the back while the large flipper occupies the dish’s centre.
A drum-head painting combines front and side views—a system familiar from ancient Egyptian art—with the head turned sideways while the body, outstretched wings, and feet appear frontally; this is very rare on the coast, almost exclusively reserved for eagles. On its outer ring the eagle’s tail occupies the lower centre; above sits a front view of a human figure with diminutive arms near the lower corners of the face and very large hands, and two sitting figures below the hands probably represent the back of the man on top, though their connection with the fin-like figures below remains unclear.
The Full-Face Problem and the Canoe Dish
Few designs can be read as full-face views of animals. The shark’s face is always shown this way because its symbols appear best in that position. The only other animal painted or carved frontally on flat surfaces is the hawk or thunder-bird, whose symbol is the long beak descending to the chin. Full-face thunder-birds are frequent on dishes, the beak indicated by a long wedge separating the mouth into two halves. Whether the artists always intend a true front view is uncertain, because a depression between the eyes often appears, matching the depression seen where profiles join; it may be that the long central wedge is the two halves of the descending beak meeting in the middle. But Boas has never observed a specimen carrying the beak outward to right and left below the chin, so he leans toward reading these carvings as full front views.
He then offers an origin for the motif. Many grease and food dishes take the form of canoes, the canoe symbolizing a canoe-load of food presented to the guests—a meaning echoed in hosts’ speeches referring to the canoe filled with food they give. The canoe form is often modified, and a series of types bridges canoe dishes and ordinary trays. Such dishes always bear a conventionalized face at each short end, the middle undecorated, analogous to canoe decoration, which is on the whole totemistic. Perhaps only the peculiar manner of drawing the hawk’s beak gave this decoration its prevalence: the upper beak always reaches the lower jaw and turns back into the mouth, so in front view it becomes a narrow wedge-shaped strip in the middle of the face, its point touching the lower margin of the chin. The sharp bow and stern of a canoe, with a profile face on each side, represented on a level or slightly rounded surface, would assume exactly that shape. The middle line, then, may originally have been not the hawk’s beak but the foreshortened bow or stern of the canoe—an explanation Boas finds very probable given how uniform the decoration is. A painting of a full front view of the thunder-bird shows the beak as a long line descending from the nose over the mouth; whether the body should be considered split along the back is doubtful, but since the face is certainly frontal, the analysis points toward a different reading of the body than the split profiles used elsewhere.
What the Argument Means
The study’s central concept is the symbol: a characteristic feature promoted into a sign that can stand for the whole animal even when detached from it. Around that concept Boas builds a grammar of distortion—splitting, unfolding, bending, turning, distending—every rule of which is dictated by the object’s given shape. The artist is neither free nor capricious; he is solving a problem, and the solutions are remarkably consistent across hats, dishes, boxes, bracelets, and poles. Boas’s method is equally notable: he reasons from the geometry of surfaces, imagining a bracelet opened flat or a pole’s edges as a median line, and he treats the carvings as evidence to be explained rather than curiosities to be admired. His suggestion that the canoe dish gave rise to the thunder-bird face is a rare venture into historical origin, offered with measured confidence rather than certainty.
The essay’s significance lies in that method. Written in 1897, it treats Northwest Coast design as a coherent visual system with intelligible rules, recoverable by careful attention to how form and surface interact—an approach that helped establish the study of decorative art as a serious analytical subject rather than a catalogue of exotica. Boas ends not with a verdict but with a question still open: whether the thunder-bird’s body is split along the back, and how the frontal face and the profile body are meant to fit together.
