Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Kwakwaka’wakw
19th-century
Paris, France: Louvre Museum
68%
House Post. Late 19th-century. Carved cedar
This post stood in the Arizona backyard of Max Ernst for many years. It lacks a bit for the scant decoration on its surface — traditional Northwest Coast art makes its profoundest statements through dense, elegant, systematic surface patterning, and specifically in the brief moments where that systematicity ruptures and gives way to artful flourish — but then again, there's something productive about the post's few incised elements (eyebrows, chin) and the way they accent its monumentality. Its shapes seem in a certain sense to be derivative of the ovoids, S's, and swooping lines that characterize Northwest Coast formline design, further indicating the primacy of the plane which this 3D object answers to. Indeed, the flattened knees, the cramming of the figure into the "box" of the wood support behind it, and the shallowness of the relief, all indicate the essential planarity of Northwest Coast art. It's interesting to see a planar art push itself into dimensionality — the woman's twisted right arm is an extraordinary instance of invention begotten by limitation — but ultimately, this post lacks the constrained exuberance and songful quality of the best Northwest Coast carving. (TFS, 2026)