The "Discovery" of the African Mask

The principal theme in this essay is the part played in Western art by masks from the Niger and Congo basins in Africa (to be referred to after this as Niger-Congo Africa), and the significance of their "discovery" in the years preceding and the years immediately following the First World War. It is therefore very specific, concerned with the form only of the masks that attracted Western visual artists and excludes the figures ² in a corpus which they referred to as l'art nègre, Negerkunst, or "black art." Introducing this theme I have used four terms that have been ill-defined and need re-defining, and the revision of their definition is necessary to clear the ground for the argument that follows. Previous writers have used them in a very confused manner. These are "the discovery," "the mask," "African art," ³ and "primitivism."

It has been customary for art historians to refer to "the discovery" of "African art" by Western painters and sculptors in the first ten years of the twentieth century. The term "African art" may have come into common use because these artists thought they had made a "discovery." By "the discovery," art historians have meant that some artists in Europe saw some pieces of "African art," and seeing them was a kind of revelation. These pieces had not been regarded as art previously, but now they had suddenly acquired a new status. However, the pieces came from a very limited part of the African continent and it was work from that very limited area that could aspire to that status, to be known as "African art."

Therefore, it is necessary to begin by clarifying exactly what is meant by the term "African art," but before I do that I want to emphasize that it is "the mask" that was "discovered" first ⁴ and that term itself is subject to a considerable amount of confusion, because here we have an object that has been torn away from its context in the masquerade. "The mask" was that part of the masquerade costume that covered the face. Its appearance should be considered in relation to the whole costume. In fact, what we mean by what we refer to as Niger-Congo mask is very often a complete head-dress and not just that part that conceals the face. The head-dress itself may be as much as four feet tall or, in some cases, carry a superstructure that could rise to as much as ten feet. The part that conceals the face is a very small part of the head-dress. On the other hand, a replica of a "mask" may have been carried by hand or worn at the waist. What we are talking about, then, is not, for example, the kind of mask that is worn to conceal the identity of a person in some European masked ball, although the Niger-Congo masquerade costume does frequently conceal the identity of its wearer. It may also be assumed that European carnival figures were possessed by spirits, e.g., sometimes of the unburied dead, sometimes of animals such as the wolf or the deer. However, it is the visual appearance of the masks and the masquerade costumes with which I am concerned and not with their function in the rituals connected with them. I may have to describe their function in rituals in order to discuss the nature of their visual appearance, but what I want to point out is the way in which the visual appearance of these costumes were of interest to Western painters in appropriating those images for use in their own work.

"The discovery," then, was the appropriation of an object that became known as "the African mask," a face-covering that had been torn away from its context. The rest of the masquerade costume had been discarded, but it is the part played by this object in the work of Western artists, this...