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An exceptionally beautiful early historic Hopi

polychrome pottery plaque or shallow bowl with stylized bird pictorials by Nampeyo of Hano, c.1900

Here is one of America’s earliest Modernist painters at her very finest form. The painted design on this bowl is almost explosive in its creative power and exuberance, somewhat like a precision smart bomb going off in a paint factory, to use a descriptive analogy. The bowl’s striking painted design has its antecedent in the shockingly beautiful and equally Modernistically-styled designs found on the ancient form of Hopi pottery known as Sikyatki Polychrome. Made from 1375-1625 A.D. Sikyatki pottery designs are sophisticated, stylized, incredibly detailed and once again shockingly modern and often highly abstracted in their perspective and presentation. In the latter decades of the 19th Century, Nampeyo and several other Hopi potters began a “Sikyatki Revival”, using and adapting the old Sikyatki designs to their own pottery.

“When I first began to paint, I used to go to the ancient village and pick up pieces of pottery and copy the designs. That is how I learned to paint. But now, I just close my eyes and see designs and I paint them.”

At left, a Hopi Sikyatki Polychrome “Man-Eagle” Bowl excavated at Sikyatki Village by Jesse Walter Fewkes, Smithsonian Institution Sikyatki Expedition, 1895. At right, Jesse Walter Fewkes examining archeological specimens, 1926.

Left Illustration source and © "Prehistoric Hopi Pottery Designs" by Jesse Walter Fewkes, Dover Books, 1973, pp. 59. Right photo source and © Alamy Stock Photo

At right, a very similar Hopi black-on-red double bird bowl by Nampeyo, collected in 1926, in the collection of the Arizona State Museum, Tucson, Arizona. Note the distinct similarities in the overall design layout and presentation of the stylized birds.

Photo source and © Arizona State Museum

"Mrs. Nampeyo, an acknowledged best Hopi indian woman Pottery maker 1st Mesa Hopiland, Ariz. Sichomovi."

R. Raffius, 1905 photo source and © Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California

Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside

Because of Nampeyo’s particular genius and exceptional skill she was able to make these vessels, such as this bowl, into high art. There are some Southwestern museum curators who think it is pretentious to apply terms like “Modernism” to people such as historic Hopi Indian potters who were not trained European or American artists. These curators argue that it is indulging in intellectual acrobatics on the part of people like us to apply this term to historic Native artists who were never exposed to Modernism as defined in the Anglo-European sense.

We find that argument intellectually lacking. We would argue oppositely that ancient Native American artists, along with their cave-painting and sculpture-making counterparts in Europe and Asia were actually some of the world’s first Modernist artists, as witnessed by their many thousand year-old artistic tradition of extremely modernistic expressions in rock art, sculpture and pottery. To relegate this as being “primitive art” only is to diminish and disrespect it, in our opinions, a myopic view from a self-erected academic Ivory tower so to speak.

"Nampeyo makes her designs after some she has seen on ancient ware.”

-Hopi Ethnologist Alexander M. Stephen, 1893

Now back to the plaque/bowl. This "Sikyatki-Revival" design and execution has virtually all the hallmarks of a typical Nampeyo design and construction; a pair of horizontally-opposed identical designs, use of streaky red paint, fine use of positive and negative design space, an unbroken painted framing line around the design field, beautiful all-over long-stroke stone polishing of Antelope Mesa clay and hard thin vessel walls from ultra-high temperature firing with Hopi Lignite coal also from Antelope Mesa.

The vessel is slipped all over with a fine kaolin white clay slip which has a very slight crackle to it indicative of its c. 1900 time frame at the very end of the Polacca Polychrome pottery period or tradition at Hopi which was characterized by its crackled kaolin slip. The strikingly graphic painted design is Nampeyo’s own stylized adaptation of a Sikyatki-era design characterized as the “Man-Eagle” as seen below by Smithsonian Institution archaeologist Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850-1930) whose 1895 expedition excavated the ancient Sikyatki village on the Hopi First mesa and brought many of these pottery vessels to light for the first time in hundreds of years. The abstracted bird forms are perfectly rendered mirror-images of each other. The World renowned European Modernist graphic artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972) would have been proud to say he had done this one except that he was only around two years old at the time this bowl was painted. Nampeyo beat the great European Modernist to the punch by some twenty years here.

The plaque/bowl measures 9" in diameter and it is 2” in height. There are two old hanging loops on the back of the piece. It is in remarkably excellent original condition overall, especially in light of its 125 or so years of age. There are no cracks and no significant chips and a thorough examination of the vessel under Ultraviolet light reveals no evidence of restoration or overpainting anywhere. The bowl’s rim is just very slightly uneven as can

be seen in the photos, but this is a charactersitic indication of a completely handmade pottery piece and is of no particular consequence.

This plaque/bowl is a beautiful brilliant work of original art by a brilliant modern-era Native American artist creating her extraordinary art under the types of harsh and primitive conditions that would have made her artistic contemporaries in Europe and America blanch with horror and run for the hills. And, just try buying

a beautiful, iconic original work of art by one of Nampeyo’s distinguished late 19th/early 20th Century Modernist artist colleagues; M.C. Escher, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Salvador Dali, Amadeo Modigliani, etc. for anything even close to this amount of money. Good luck with that.

SOLD

Note: The Acrylic display stand pictured in the photos above will be included along with the purchase of the bowl.