Robert Bruce Inverarity
Robert Bruce Inverarity (July 5, 1909 – August 6, 1999) was an American artist, art educator, museum director, author, and anthropologist.
Fascinated with the Indian tribes of the Northwest from early youth, he amassed a major collection of North Pacific Coast Native art and authored several works on the subject.
His father was a manager and promoter of the Northwest vaudevillean theater circuit, and was a prominent member of various Seattle civic and social organizations; he had also served as an assistant to photographer Edward S. Curtis on the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899.
From boyhood he had been interested in both art and Native American culture, and after graduating from Garfield High School in 1928[1] he undertook a 500-mile hike along the coasts of Vancouver Island, studying the legends of local Indian tribes and collecting artifacts.
[3] In this capacity he provided employment for many notable artists (including William Cumming, Helmi Juvonen, Morris Graves, Carl Morris, Richard V. Correll, Hannes Bok, Guy Anderson, Hilda Grossman, Malcolm Roberts, Mark Tobey, Andrew Chinn, Jacob Elshin, Fay Chong, Julius Twohy, Z. Vanessa Helder, Joseph Solman, James FitzGerald, Kenneth Downer, and Ruth Egri) and oversaw the creation of the popular Spokane Art Center.
Among his best-known works are his portraits of artist friends such as Glenn Wessels, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.
[3][5] After a period working as an illustrator and designer for the University of California Press,[6] he returned to the East Coast in 1969 to serve as director of the Philadelphia Maritime Museum.
He sold his unique and extensive collection of Northern Coastal Native art and artifacts to the British Museum for what he described as "a tidy sum".
[6] The helmet logo used by the NFL's Seattle Seahawks football team is based on an image of a Kwakwaka'wakw transformation mask taken from Inverarity's 1950 book Art of the Northwest Coast Indians.
