Dance mask

This mask shares with the Fang reliquary head (240) the honour of being a founder-member of the African part of the Sainsbury collection. Both formerly belonged to Paul Guillaume, who for over twenty years had been in the first rank of French connoisseur-dealers in African art. Still among the most prized and beautiful carvings in the collection, they bear witness to Paul Guillaume’s discernment.

Many Guro masks are demonstrably and, on the part of their sculptors, consciously made to be ‘beautiful’, and perhaps conform to a universal ideal of beauty — a view shared by André Malraux, who included this mask in his Musée Imaginaire (1952: 400).

Corroboration of Guro aspirations towards the beautiful may be sought among the numerous masks in which the human face is accompanied by animal representations, which in many cases appear to follow a different standard. A notable example is the beautiful human mask in the University Museum in Philadelphia (Fischer and Homberger, 1985: fig. 168), which is surmounted by a particularly ungainly white bird (perhaps a heron or egret). The work of Guro and Baule artists may, especially when influenced by European responses, tend too much towards self-consciously suave virtuosity to appeal to our contemporary taste. The fine pieces, however, while still within the smooth tribal style, have an underlying harmonious strength that allows Baule and Guro art to be counted among the great schools of African art.

Although generally ascribed to the Guro, this mask has features which associate it with the Yaure, a small group living east of Bouaflé who culturally and geographically are midway between the Guro and the Baule. Masks bearing horns, whether of ram or buffalo, or the figure of a cock, are linked with fecundity and may have been used in the men’s secret society die. The die calendar, which follows the lunar Year, marks different phases of agricultural work; the dance masks sometimes incorporate an allegoric personage and tend to have feminine faces.

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