One of the most striking changes in thinking about the arts in the past half century has been the abandonment of framework of the so-called system of fine arts. Subject of a canonical account by the historian Paul O. Kristeller in the early 1950’s, the system of fine arts might be characterized as embodying the following claims: A. There are a small number of fine arts: poetry, music, painting, and sculpture; and perhaps also theater, dance, and architecture; and some additional, historical emergent arts, such as photography and film. B. The fine arts are to be distinguished from everyday artifacts on the one hand, and the applied arts on the other. The applied arts include an indefinitely large number of artistic practices, including ceramics, textiles and their various manners of decoration, and landscape architecture. C. The fine arts are the paradigmatic arts, the only arts properly speaking. Everyday artifacts may have an artistic or aesthetic dimension, and the applied arts involve centrally involve function, everyday usage, and appreciation and, and in addition to the distal sensory access of sight and/or hearing that they share with the fine arts, the applied arts are also enjoyed through the non-distal or contact senses of taste, touch, and/or smell.
Every aspect of this conception has been widely disputed and indeed rejected; and to my knowledge no contemporary thinker in philosophy, anthropology, or sociology would treat it as anything other than an historical curio. Still, the rejection of the conception of the fine arts does not as such provide an alternative. One of the questions that immediately arise is how to treat the so-called applied as art. Should we think, for example, that applied arts exhibit something of the same kinds of meaning and meaningfulness that are exhibited by fine arts such as painting? Does ceramics practiced as an art form exhibit representation, expression, semantic and symbolic density, and resonance? An opportunity for thinking about these questions is offered by the current (Spring 2021) show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco of the work of the Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo, who is widely viewed as the major Native American artistic ceramicist of the early twentieth-century.
Nampeyo was born around 1860, and died in 1942. By the very early twentieth-century she was widely viewed as perhaps the most skilled and accomplished Native American maker and decorator of ceramics. Her work was largely made for the tourist trade, and consisted of traditional forms, such as seed jars and bowls, which were decorated with original motifs, patterns, and over-all designs. Nampeyo said that in her earliest works her motifs drew freely from ones she had seen on shards from the much earlier Hopi village and archeological site of Sityatki; later her motifs were her own inventions. Some of these motifs are nonetheless readily identifiable as based upon traditional motifs of stylized spiders, bats, and, as in this exhibition, eagles. Although she made pots until the end of her life, by around 1920 she had abandoned decoration due to her failing eyesight. Since her pots are unsigned, the extent and limits of her oeuvre are impossible to determine; but many works, like those in this exhibition, from the end of the 19th century into the second decade of the 20th are securely attributed to her, both in their making and in their decoration.
The four pots are seed jars, whose distinctive characteristics are a squat, wide, symmetrical vessel with a single large hole centered in the top. The major variation within the form is whether and what sort of neck is given, that is, whether the hole opens with a slight rise from the major upper contour, and so seems cut into the top, or whether with a more salient rise a more complex outside curve is created by having a longer rise of a convex neck form. Whether or not the pots have salient necks, Nampeyo arranges two major paired motifs symmetrically around the hole. The immediate effect of this is to introduce a canonical viewpoint from directly above the pot wherein the radiating symmetry is most salient. And so from the canonical viewpoint the lower part of the pot is unperceived as it curves rapidly downward under the occluding furthest width of the pot. To single-viewpoint vision the minimally necked pots are like the decorated undersides of upside down bowls that hover a short distance over the ground. By slight contrast, the pots with necks relieve something of the horizontality and squatness of the minimally necked ones, and so introduce a secondary viewpoint, or rather viewing area, from 3/4s to side-on, so that something of the particular proportions and complex curvature thereby introduced can be appreciated. In all cases the decorations seem very much applied to a solid monochromatic ground, usually brownish yellow, though here in one case whitish. Maintaining a sense of the continuity of the ground seems like a central imperative for Nampeyo, as she avoids any sense of the small-scale figure/ground reversals so common in world’s ceramic and textile decoration. Further, the seed jars here lack much sense of the ‘somatic resonance’, the sense of the pot as a metaphor for parts of the human body and the body as a whole, that Philip Rawson in his book Ceramics sees as a pervasive dimension of the meaningfulness of the world’s pots.
I think something of Nampeyo’s most distinctive artfulness can be seen in the differing treatments of the eagle motif on two of the pots.
Both pots exhibit short rises at the neck, so short as to be unemphatic and easily overlooked when seen from a medium-distance above. Both show four heraldic ‘tail-feather’ motifs radiating symmetrically from the centered hole, with symmetrically opposed curvilinear ‘claw’ elements between each tail-feather. In both cases the claws come close to, but do not touch, any other decorative element, so the sense of the yellow ground as continuous underneath them is maintained. The particularities of the tail-feathers in particular differ: in the upper space one has a fretted swastika, the other a complex polygon whose angularity suggests a homeland in textile decoration. A mesh of cross-hatchings surround both of these sub-motifs.
On the account of Hopi-Tewa ceramic design given in Mary Ellen Blair’s The Legacy of a master potter: Nampeyo and her descendants (1999), all of these characteristics fit comfortably within the practice of Nampeyo as well as other potters. Among those working within this cross-generational stylistic set, Nampeyo stood out for her technical abilities, the fertility of her decorative imagination, and the precision of her marks, all of which were made with only her hands themselves as measures and guides. But perhaps something of her distinctive sensibility can be seen in her variations with borders and colored fields. As noted above, Nampeyo never encloses the yellow ground within a figure so as to render ambiguous whether the internal yellow is part of the field or the local color of a motif. The prima facie counter-example to this in the pot with the swastika is within the square with curved sides that surrounds the top hole.
Nampeyo drew a border at the edge of the eagle designs of three lines, the outer two thin black lines, the inner one a somewhat thicker red. But there is no ambiguity: this bordering transforms the unworked yellow ground into an internal color of the square, as if the corners of a yellow cloth are coming out of the hole and draping the pot. Now this transforming treatment of the ground is further articulated in two ways. First, in contrast with the other pot, Nampeyo has not drawn a bottom border, thereby relatively intensifying the sense of the continuity of the yellow. The field yellow is experienced as underlying the yellow of the square. Second, Nampeyo gives the area in the tail-motif that is below the swastika and above the ‘feathers’ a light red wash, thereby eliminating the possibility of seeing the yellow within the eagle motif as ambiguous between field and figure. These three treatments conspire to maintain the strong sense of the so to speak initial integrity of the pot as a simple unity.
By contrast, the other pot with the eagle motif shows an inversion of each of these treatments.
In the latter pot, an emphatic bottom bordering is given with two black lines, one thin and one so thick that it hovers between being a line and being a plane. Second, the top curvilinear square is given a darkish red wash, the effect of which is to eliminate the sense of the square as emerging from the whole; rather the square seems to sit on the surface, and the blackness of the whole is recruited into a surface decoration. Third, the inner structure of the eagle motif is worked so that the issue of an interior plane does not arise; and roughly where the red wash was placed on the first pot Nampeyo has used the darkish red to create a rectilinear element that communicates with the internal markings of the tail feathers. With the second pot Nampeyo has not just integrated, but also so to speak localized all of the decorative elements over against the ground; the decorations cohere as a kind of textile-like ensemble laid over the relatively weak continuity of the yellow ground.
So, to the extent that one wishes to find a distinctive individual sensibility in Nampeyo’s work, perhaps one needs to look at the play of elements across a range of her work, and consider the particular realizations, work by work, of the relations between, on the one hand, bordering or the lack thereof, and, on the other, the internal articulations of the motifs. Perhaps what is most distinctively Nampeyo’s is the search for novel kinds of coherence.
References:
Mary Ellen Blair, The Legacy of a master potter: Nampeyo and her descendants (1999)
Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts” (1951, 1952) in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (1990)
Philip Rawson, Ceramics (1971)