Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents

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In this celebrated image, two disembodied egglike faces are juxtaposed as if each were the other's reflection. The formal elements paired are a shiny dark Baule portrait mask from Côte d'Ivoire and the porcelain-white visage of Man Ray's mistress, Kiki. First published in May 1926 in the French edition of Vogue, this visual experiment was initially inscribed within the trend for everything African that had seized Paris during the 1920s. Due to its dreamy introspection, the photograph was later assimilated into the Surrealist discourse.

The Baule mask in this photograph belonged to junior art director at French Vogue, the American George Sakier (1897–1988). It is closely related to the mask in the Metropolitan Museum's collection included in the exhibition (see next image), which—like the mask in Man Ray's photograph—circulated within Modernist circles during the first decades of the twentieth century. The Metropolitan's Baule mask was exhibited in Paris as early as 1913 in the first display of African sculpture as fine art, and was published two years later in Carl Einstein's pioneering book on the aesthetics of African art.Ironically, Man Ray's interpretation unknowingly captured the essence of this mask genre's original function. In Baule communities of central Côte d'Ivoire, such works were conceived of as portraits of prominent individuals. Often commissioned to honor a female beauty, they were featured in a performative tradition known as "Mblo," which combined dramatic skits and solo dances. When danced, the portrait's subject, or "double," was present to accompany it. Several examples of such masks are on view in the Museum's galleries for African art.

See the Collection Database for images of "Mblo" masks: 2004.445; 1979.206.294.