An iconic Guro mask

An aesthetically beautiful mask with a fascinating story.

guro mask Lot 258

 

Text by John Warne Monroe

Masks from Côte d’Ivoire were one of the object types Parisian connoisseurs prized most highly in the 1910s and 1920s, when a market for African sculpture as art was just beginning to emerge. The grace, refinement and formal inventiveness of masks in Baule, Guro and Dan-complex styles made them quintessential examples of what was then called art nègre.  The final gallery in the landmark 1923 exhibition “Arts Indigènes des Colonies françaises et du Congo Belge” held in the Louvre’s decorative arts wing, the Pavillon de Marsan, featured a large ensemble of Ivoiran masks, including this one (Lot 258). The African and Oceanic objects in this exhibition – the first in a French public museum to feature such material as art, rather than ethnographic specimens or trophies of conquest – were vetted by Henri Clouzot and André Level.  Close associates of the noted dealer Paul Guillaume, the two men were among the period’s best-known authorities on art nègre, and in assembling the material for the 1923 exhibition, they drew heavily on their extensive connections with the period’s most important French collectors.  

This Guro mask, which likely dates to the late nineteenth century, is a classic example of the type of object that caught the eyes of such collectors during the 1920s.  Its rich patina, contemplative expression, classical restraint, elegant stylization and gracefully curving silhouette are all qualities Clouzot and Level singled out in their numerous books and articles as being qualities typical of the most beautiful African objects.  It is therefore not surprising that they gave the mask a place in the exhibition’s climactic gallery.   Indeed, this mask’s appeal proved so great that it went on to feature in a second important exhibition, one of the very first efforts to present a comprehensive survey of sub-Saharan African material culture as art, organized by Henri Lavachéry and Joseph Maes at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1930.  That show drew together a wide range of objects including key works from the collections of the Royal Africa Museum at Tervuren; the Parisian dealer Charles Ratton, then at the very beginning of his career, provided many of the objects from French colonies.

In addition to its timeless beauty, then, this mask is an important document in the history of taste.  It embodies the aesthetic ideals that inspired the connoisseurs who are in many ways responsible for inventing the Western mode of appreciating African objects as art. 

Book recommendation:

The new publication by John Warne Monroe: Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art (Cornell University Press) will soon be available.