Word: kachina
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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During down time on his movie sets, for example, he was an inveterate chess player. At home he read Western history and gathered one of the world's finest collections of Hopi Indian kachina dolls. If his right-wing beliefs emblemized a rugged individualism, he also had a reputation among movie people as a fiercely loyal colleague quick to aid old comrades and as an affectionate if hard-kidding coworker...
They contain raw material: alchemical treatises and Renaissance architectural tomes, anatomical figures and worn kachina dolls. New Hebrides masks, pulp novels, turn-of-the-century store cata logues from which Ernst cut the engravings for his haunted collages - the vast flea market of the dreaming mind, here emblematically reduced like a ship in a bottle...
...Kachinas are the Hopi Indians' holy spirits, sometimes personified by masked, dancers or represented by wooden dolls. Thus the Hopis protested when Kentucky's Ezra Brooks distillery hit upon the less than divine idea of marketing its bourbon in bottles shaped like kachina dolls. "How would a Catholic feel," asked Tribal Chairman Clarence Hamilton, "about putting whisky in a statue of Mary...
...Indians enlisted the influence of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, himself a noted collector of kachina dolls. While Brooks had meant to sell 5,100 of the bottles in Arizona, the distillers agreed to stop at the 2,000 bottles already shipped; with the company's cooperation, Goldwater personally shattered the mold from which the bottles had been made. With that the dictates of religious sensibility gave way to the laws of supply and demand. Their rarity guaranteed, the Brooks kachinas have become an Arizona collectors' item...
...represented in this show were the last forms of "primitive" art to win general esteem outside their own tribal context. Only ethnologists were interested. The red man's images scarcely influenced white culture-unlike African art, whose impact on early 20th century painting was fundamental. Max Ernst collected kachina dolls, and Jackson Pollock, it is said, was interested in Navajo sand paintings; but as a rule, whether it was treated as knickknacks or, more decently, as ethnographical evidence, Indian art has languished on the fringes of white perception. The Whitney, by inviting its guest curator Norman Feder...