Franz Boas
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 400
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Case studies from his own fieldwork on the Northwest Coast of North America demonstrated different tenets: the variety of history, the influence of diffusion, the symbolic and stylistic variations in art styles found among groups and sometimes within one group, and the role of imagination and creativity on the part of the artist. Aldona Jonaitis has chosen fourteen articles, written during the period from 1889 to 1916, to reveal Boas's intellectual development as an art historian. The subjects of his first analyses were the paintings and carvings of Northwest Coast Indians, primarily the Kwakwaka'wakw, the people he called the Kwakiutl.