The theme of the mask is very interesting in the history of art. Its use has been witnessed since ancient times, but we also find it in contemporary art.
The mask is a theatrical tool par excellence that allows you to take on a different identity. Sometimes its function is religious and magical and allows you to take on the role of someone who interprets natural forces or divinities that are made to intervene. during manifestations of a cult-religious nature.
The mask hides and reveals hidden sides of the personality and, as Luigi Pirandello teaches us in his work One, no one, one hundred thousand , we often take on 'masks' to hide who we are and to please those around us making it very difficult to establish real relationships:
' You will learn the hard way that in the long journey of life you will meet many masks and few faces .'
(the link, associated with the title of Pirandello's work, refers to a Google search page with the covers of the novel)
Some examples of masks from antiquity to today
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The two masks, tragic and comic, of the Latin theater. Mosaic from the 1st century BC (Capitoline Museums)
image of Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany (FollowingHadrian); Public domain
examples of Greek theater masks
Picasso and the influence of African art on Cubism
Mbangu mask; wood, pigment & fibers; height: 27 cm; by Pende people ; Royal Museum for Central Africa. Representing a disturbed man, the hooded V-looking eyes and the mask's artistic elements - face surfaces, distored features, and divided color - evoke the experience of personal inner conflict
Pablo Picasso , Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, oil on canvas, 244 x 234 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Between the end of the Eighteen Century and the beginning of the Nineteen, ethnographic exhibitions about primitive cultures took place in various European cities.
It seems that initially, the aim of these exhibitions was to highlight the superiority of the West over the colonized peoples and thus justify the 'civilizing' presence of European countries. However, it is precisely from the contact with the artifacts of these populations that an interest of the artists towards what, with a general term, we can define primitivism was born.
The interpretation given by the artists appears rather influenced by the Illuministic thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau who argued that primitive populations lived in a state of nature in which man was happy and in authentic relationship with nature and society. According to this view, the modernization of society was the cause of inequality and unhappiness.
It is good, however, to point out that the term 'primitivism' did not mean only an attention to African tribal art, but also to all forms of popular artistic or decorative expression.
Following this myth, Gauguin left France to move to Tahiti, Matisse made several trips to Oceania, Modigliani and Picasso looked at African art, while Kandinsky referred to Russian folk art and, in a sense, many artists looked at Japanese art.
Let's go back now to Picasso who surely had visited one of the ethnographic exhibitions that had been held in Paris.
The comparison with the apparently crude and deformed interpretations of the human figure - particularly of the face, allowed Picasso to understand how to move away from the copy of reality (mimesis) in search of a new 'modern' dimension of art.
So, the primitivism of African masks, together with the simultaneous vision, derived from Cézanne's artistic conception, allowed the birth of Cubism.