Face Mask (early 1900s): Art, History and Details

Face Mask (early 1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Central Côte d'Ivoire is characterized by cultural assimilation and adoption. Connections can be seen in masquerades and in composite mask forms. Here, masks often blend human and animal features, and the depiction of elephant traits is a recurring theme. Yaure peoples associated elephant masks with a cult called Dye, and they appear when important sacrifices have to be made.

Object facts

• Title: Face Mask
• Date: early 1900s
• Culture: Africa, West Africa, Côte d'Ivoire, possibly Yaure-style carver
• Type: Mask
• Technique: Wood, paint, and colorant
• Dimensions: Overall: 31.7 cm (12 1/2 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 1971.296

A detail from the museum

The carver compressed the scale of both the elephant's ears and tusks in this mask.

Collection credit

Gift of Katherine C. White

Further reading listed by the museum

• Fagg, William, and Cleveland Museum of Art. 1968. African Tribal Images; the Katherine White Reswick Collection. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, cat. 73.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art "1972 Year in Review." Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 60, no. 3, cat. 22.
• African Arts 1972b, "New Acquisitions." African Arts 6, no. 1 (1972): 75.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.