Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl)
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)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
62%
Dzunukwa Mask. c1870. Wood, pigment, human hair, bear fur, seal skin, raffia, cloth, and metal nails
At risk of making groundless colonial comparisons, I'll point out that Northwestern Native American masks tend to feel somewhat deader, as art, than their analogues from, say, the Yoruba people or Melanesia. This isn't because they're any less culturally significant, of course, but rather because they neither hold up as "sculpture," nor propose some alternative experiential mode by which we might consider them: they are masks that aren't being worn. The Northwest Coasters, historically, seem to have approached the design of such ritual objects from a predominantly functional standpoint; ornamented, structurally inventive masterpieces are fewer and further between than the somewhat pedestrian (if still powerful) examples such as this. (The best modern traditionalists, such as Beau Dick, recognized the humble nature of the mask tradition and leaned on its subtle graphic virtues.) Aesthetically, what this Dzunukwa mask does offer up has mostly to do with the deceptive vagaries of its design. At first glance (like much Northwest Coast carving) it appears perfectly symmetrical, but then you notice that the nose is crooked, the beard is askew, the pursed lips are shifted to the left, and the formline rectangles that describe the cheeks are ever so slightly mismatched. It's as if the artist was in dogged pursuit of formal regularity but then, when he carved himself into a corner, saw no reason to correct his "mistakes." (TFS, 2026)