Lot 72
UNIDENTIFIED ARTIST, HAIDA
Model Totem Pole, c. 1890s

argillite, 13.75 x 3.5 x 3.5 in (34.9 x 8.9 x 8.9 cm)
unsigned.

Provenance
Sotheby Parke Bernet Auctions, NY, July 1981;
A Toronto Collection;
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Toronto, 2014.

This model illustrates an intermediate step in the evolution of argillite totem poles through the latter decades of the nineteenth century, during which such models ceased to be based on the forms of full size Haida cedar poles and took on proportions and sculptural characteristics of their own. By 1900 the backs of these model poles were flat, while their cross-sections changed from being wider than the depth to much deeper than the width. This enabled the figures to fill their own space, unhindered by the volumetric limitations of a cedar half-log. This transitional 1890s pole is still hollowed out, but in cross-section it is almost exactly as wide as it is deep.

Three primary figures make up the length of his pole, with two smaller subsidiary figures overlapping and incorporated into the forms of the main three. At the top is a humanoid figure with a mammal-like snout, its hands grasping a dorsal fin-looking element extending up between its knees. Its feet rest on the eyebrows of a bear-like head also with a toothy snout. This figure sports a pair of large wings, made up of big ovoids and layered feathers, though the head is not apparently that of a bird. Captive between these wings with its head caught in the snout is a small human figure crouched in what is often called the hocker position, its feet resting on the forehead of the bottom figure. That lower head is very like a bear, with small short ears, long snout and many teeth. Its tongue extends below to the upside-down face of a second subsidiary figure, whose arms reach up with the hands grasping the bear’s tongue. On either side of that figure we again see wing forms with classic formline U-shapes flowing upward from a large ovoid that rests on the thick base beneath the pole.

Steven C. Brown

References

For the section on argillite late model poles see Peter L. Macnair and Alan J. Hoover, The Magic Leaves: A History of Haida Argillite Carving (Victoria: Royal BC Museum, 1984/2002), pp. 127-138. See also Leslie Drew and Douglas Wilson, Argillite: Art of the Haida (Vancouver: Hancock House, 1980), pp. 216-227.