Masks and Totems

Many artists from the European Avant-Garde drew from ethnographic collections for inspiration for their art. Visual and textual evidence of fascination with “L’Art négre” can be found in the works of Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice Vlaminck and Pablo Picasso. As Joshua Cohen explained in his article for the June 2017 Art Bulletin, Derain made drawings of specific Maori objects from the collection of the British Museum that related to his own artistic concerns, while Matisse’s exploration of volume and light from African objects that he collected can be seen in his Blue Nude, Memories from Biskra. In this session, we look at the tradition of carving in the Maori culture and specifically the integral relationship between the carved objects, the building of which they were part, and how those objects performed in their context. Additionally, we explore a specific aspect of West African artistic culture, the performance of African masks in the Baule culture. In both instances, in the Maori and with the Baule people, at the time of artistic appropriation by European avant-garde painters at the turn of the century, the colonial legacy was fraught. Many of the Maori objects became available for European collections because they had been dispossessed from the land on which the buildings sat. The Côte d’Ivoire also was experiencing a new wave of colonial activity, as speculators who could no longer profit from the gold mines of South Africa, due to the Boer Wars, had moved into the region as a potential place for mining.

Baule Mask,
This photo was taken by Roman Bonnefoy ( Romanceor [parlons-en]).