Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2007

Native American Hide Paintings at Versailles in the Eighteenth Century
By Christian F. Feest, director of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna. He is a recognized specialist in Native American art and history.

Introduction:
One of the challenges of Native American art history is the interpretation of data deriving from eighteenth-century collections. Few in number and often insufficiently documented in terms of provenance and meaning, the objects in these collections nevertheless provide evidence for styles that often bear only a vague—if any—resemblance to those reflected in better documented nineteenth-century works. It is generally unclear whether these differences are indicative of stylistic changes, fashions, or point to the previous existence of styles discontinued due to acculturation or ethnogenetic processes.
Geometric and representational paintings on hide provide a case in point. Although scattered references in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century written accounts as well as a few images document their presence in many parts of the region of North America east of the Mississippi, the vast majority of actual specimens were made and collected in the nineteenth century on the Plains. By far most frequently painted on bison skins, this representational tradition includes pictographic records of the passing of time (“winter counts”), of war deeds, and of gifts, whereas the geometric robes display various central motifs (complex-patterned “boxes,” hour-glass shapes, feathered circles, stylized calumets, sets of stripes or bars) generally surrounded by symmetrical or asymmetrical patterned borders (Ewers, 1939).