The Mask Slips - Esther

What mask are you wearing today? 

Are you using it as a protection for yourself & others or as the threat of an unknown wearer?

Is it perhaps metaphorical? Depending on who you’re talking to will you wear a wide variety of masks throughout the day? 

Doesn’t the concept of a physical mask reach into our very humanity? The wanting & ability to become Other – another person, creature, the idea of disguise & stealth? The metamorphosis into a representative of something more or better? The cunning & trickery of fooling our fellows?

The wearing of masks functions as an addition to the fun of fancy dress, to protection in sports or battle, to a means of fooling & frightening others, all the way through to aiding more sinister acts of theft & destruction.

Comic Mask, Roman mosaic

The protective masks in Henry de Groux’s First World War Trench Guards seem flimsy & wholly unsuitable for their task. The sense of downtrodden misery is only underscored by the lack of complete faces, therefore the figures lack humanity. Like much of the reporting on victims of the current pandemic, they are reduced to mere numbers. In Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor Der Krieg 12 by Otto Dix however, they are already dead. Deconstructed & skull-like, these masked figures are the stuff of nightmares, coming for us, reminding us that we’re next.

Few artworks depict the mask as a regular part of life more explicitly than James Ensor’s The Intrigue. Though to the viewer’s eyes they appear gaudy & showy, these people are attempting to pass for ordinary. Because everyone wears a mask, it’s believable & normal. Work by Liza Montgomery is concerned with how we build up our “everyday” masks in an almost ceremonial fashion, how we form our identities from the outside in & exploring the impact of women’s appearance on society, as in Women in Marquee Lights: Lilah.

Everyday masks can be extended to personal-political perceptions of the self, how we see ourselves & how we wish to be seen. Take the photomontage for Aveux non Avenus (Disavowed Confessions) by Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, representing a collaboration that explores gender & identity. Due to their capture by the Nazis (they were subsequently liberated) & destruction of their work, unfortunately little remains of Claude Cahun’s art but their involvement in conceptualising the self as a gender-neutral artist through their imagery (including self-portraits with physical masks) is highly contemporary. The photomontage is therefore much sought after for exhibitions.

Perhaps one of the most prolific artists dealing with the mask, tinkering about with the face as a structure & identity in general was Surrealist René Magritte. Despite his own appearance being that of a tidy, respectable Belgian gentleman, he managed to subvert the human face completely…& frequently. Not only did he challenge the faces we wear for & shield from the outside world, he questioned what objects were, what was real, pointed out the obvious - “Ceci n’est pas une pipe…” No, it’s a picture, silly. Or a silly picture, depending on your point of view.

We now accept many of Magritte’s works as surrealist masterpieces without really thinking about it. They’ve become shorthand for quirky, sometimes amusing ideas. Surrealism might initially draw in the viewer through humour but it also has the power to cause thought.

It has been proposed for example that the depiction of face coverings in Les Amants II & L’Invention de la Vie derive from the incident where Magritte’s mother, having taken her own life by drowning, was removed from the water with her dress draped over her face.

Rather than clutter his paintings with many conflicting images, or automatic drawing as with many Surrealists, Magritte tends to evoke one central idea with realism, in a clean & crisp style. Much of the time the “treachery of images” would dominate a piece & this was often combined with ideas about identity. & masks. In this detail of Le Carnaval du Sage & Souvenir de Voyage simple, traditional eye masks are used. The apple became a symbol in Magritte’s work of the interminable tension between what is concealed & what can be visibly observed.

Man In a Bowler Hat & The Son of Man however seem to be more concerned with a frozen moment in time: the capture of a falling apple or flying dove are caught & we’re left with the queasy, dreamscape feeling of what they might represent. His chosen trademark bowler hat identifies him rather than the features of his face.

“It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see… This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict one might say, between the visible that is hidden & the visible that is present.”

The Double Secret & The Face of Genius plumb darker Surrealist depths, by taking the head apart & replacing sections with invented bilboquets (resembling chess pieces) & sleigh bells, recurring objects in his works.

Painting fluffy white clouds within a beautiful blue sky (another symbol beloved of Magritte) on the death mask of Napoleon might seem like the ultimate macabre Surrealist act. Equally it could be interpreted as a transformation of death. Perhaps here we’re seeing death as just another dream, perhaps even rejecting the “treachery of images” once more to mask death rather than simply paint a picture on a death mask. The death mask itself is merely an object of plaster, not the real face of the dead.

Today, as in other times throughout history (& for some as part of their every day lives & occupations), many of us are wearing masks for safety. These masks are not worn to deceive or to harm others but we wear them out of love. We hope not only to protect ourselves but also those around us, the vulnerable seen & unseen strangers who might be wearing many masks of their own. We look forward to the day we can slip off these masks & get back to revealing the masks we have chosen for our hidden selves.

Divinity, Paul Richmond