HEILTSUK, COAST TSIMSHIAN OR HAISLA CHEST PANELS

Robert Campbell, Portland

George Terasaki, New York, acquired from the above in the 1960s

Steven C. Brown, Native Visions: Evolution in Northwest Coast Art from the Eighteenth through the Twentieth Century, Seattle and London, 1998, p. 110, figs. 5.9 a and 5.9 b

Alberto Costa Romero de Tejada and Paz Cabello Carro, eds., Espíritus del Agua. Arte de Alaska y la Columbia Británica, Barcelona, 1999, p. 198, cat. no. 185

Steven C. Brown, ed., Spirits of the Water: Native Art Collected on Expeditions to Alaska and British Columbia, 1774-1910, Seattle and Vancouver, 2000, p. 191, cat. nos. 166 a and 166 b

Steven C. Brown, Transfigurations: North Pacific Coast Art. George Terasaki, Collector, Seattle, 2006, n.p., pl. 46 (two views) and endpapers

By the mid-nineteenth century, the evolutionary development of northern-style Northwest Coast art had accelerated far beyond the conservative pace of earlier generations. Progressive alterations in the arts were brought about by enormous changes in cultural traditions and values. These resulted in part from interaction with Euro-American society, the loss of many master tradition-bearers to the smallpox epidemics of the 1860s, and the surviving artists' responses to wider and less conservatively bound communities and peer groups. Innovation was practiced in a manner that had been previously unknown. The older flat design styles diverged quite rapidly through the first half of the nineteenth century. producing new compositions that emphasized much thinner formlines and larger carved-out or negative spaces.

By the time this chest with its very unusual designs was painted, the old traditions had been stretched and improvised upon in a myriad of ways, through the essential principles and structural foundations had remained indelibly in place. Some of the most challenging innovations in design were undertaken on the British Columbia mainland coast, home of the Coast Tsimshian, Haisla, and Heiltsuk First Nations. Extremes of design development were explored more intensely in this area than any other. The painting of this chest illustrates the kind of conceptual freedom and outright play that the old traditions had been able to incorporate with no evident loss of integrity.

In this chest, two historically opposite extremes of design have been employed in concert with one another. Here the primary black formlines have been laid down in a proportion nearly as broad as any that the older traditions had ever produced. The secondary red formlines, in contrast, are as proportionately thin as have ever been painted, leaving a lot of unpainted ground area within each black-enclosed design space. This type of thin, red formline is a mid-nineteenth century development that was unknown in the circa 1800 period. With so little red color in the overall pattern, the artist was inclined to add red elements where they had never appeared before. The inner edge of almost every black design unit has a thin lining of red pain something that is only seen in compositions of this artist’s style.

This inventive artist knew the principles of the traditional foundation so well that he could incorporate radical new ideas and concepts without disrupting the balance, harmony, and flow of the parent tradition, and did so with a mastery of painterly execution.

Steven C. Brown