Lo the Adaptable Indian

Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is crusading for the idea that the U. S. Indian is not merely a hewer and weaver of interesting anthropological knickknacks, but a full-fledged artist, whose works can stand comparison with the sculpture, painting and architecture of many a more highly civilized people. The result is an exhibition of 834 works of U. S. Indian and Eskimo art.

Compared to the huge, cluttered permanent collections of Indian anthropology in such U. S. institutions as Manhattan's Museum of the American Indian and Museum of Natural History, Washington's Smithsonian and Chicago's Field Museum, the Museum of Modern Art's specimens were a mere shop window. But artistically they were the cream of what U. S. and Alaskan Indian craftsmen have produced, from the prehistoric Tennessee mound builders to the present-day Navaho rugmakers and sand-painters. Looking over the assortment, which included such highly skilled items of sculpture and mask work as those shown on the two preceding pages, gallery-goers were inclined to agree that U. S. Indians are far finer artists than they have generally been considered.

To clarify and dramatize all this artistic tomahawkery, the exhibition's directors, Rene d'Harnoncourt, Frederic Douglas and Henry Klumb, had carpentered one of the trickiest jobs of installation in the museum's history. Towering South Alaskan Kwakiutl idols leered from dimly-lit corners; ceremonial masks hung like primitive waxworks in their showcases, their hollow eyes lit at shadowy angles by concealed spotlights.

To wandering gallerygoers, U. S. Indian art looked as disunited and jumbly as a Victorian attic. Reasons: 1) the widely scattered Redskin tribal groups of North America had very little communication with each other before the white man came; 2) U. S. Indian culture has been blown this way & that by the encroachment of white civilization. Though U. S. Indians made pottery, peace pipes, masks, sculpture and baskets before Columbus' day, many of their most typical later arts were based on materials (beadwork, silver, etc.) introduced by white settlers.

Not until the whites brought hatchets from Europe did the Indians begin making tomahawks. When the whites began selling horses to the Plains Indians, they became nomadic, gave up solid wood and mud architecture and fragile pottery for easily portable tepees, skin and feather ornaments. When Spaniards introduced sheep to the Southwest, the Navahos and Pueblos learned to weave woolen blankets. When, later, tourists demanded rugs, the Navahos, who had never used rugs in their lives, began making them by the thousand.

Reflecting these cultural and economic upheavals in U. S. Indian life, the Modern Museum's Indian Art did show the U. S. Indian as a painstaking and imaginative craftsman, and as one of the most adaptable of folk artists, capable of absorbing the most unfamiliar techniques and materials to his own type of design.

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