Topic: Masks1. Factsheet

A mask conceals something from view. It can be worn to cover all or part of the face: to disguise, hide, protect, amuse or

frighten others. It may be something we metaphorically wear to present ourselves to the world but

used to hide what we really think or feel. Masks don’t have to be things people wear, they can also hide or disguise objects or

even buildings (like camouflage!) Masking could also refer to the process of covering or protecting areas of image or

surface in order to build up layers or create hard edges within a painting.

MASKS abstractedPablo Picasso famously said at the beginning of the twentieth century:

A head is a matter of eyes, nose, mouth, which can be distributed in any way you like.

He refers to a museum visit where he saw masks and sculptures created by artists from non-Western cultures.

These masks, with their flat angled planes, were one of the main inspirations for cubism.

They also had a profound impact on the way Picasso painted faces from then on. Many other artists were also inspired by the raw power of these masks. These

include German Expressionist artists such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Henry Moore.

Masks as disguiseMasks are a way of disguising who we are. Although often worn as fancy dress or to carnivals, they can also have sinister connotations.

Max Beckmann and C.R.W. Nevinson painted party scenes. The masks worn by the figures, as well as the claustrophobic spaces they are painted in, create a menacing atmosphere.

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Masks can be worn by people to protect their identities as they carry out criminal or subversive activities.

A main source of inspiration for artist Sidney Nolan was the legend of nineteenth century Australian outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly. Ned was the leader of a gang of daring bank robbers who famously wore metal body armour. Nolan always depicts him in a distinctive square metal mask.

The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of artists who protest against sexism and racism in the art world. They demonstrate at museums and other art events and put up posters that raise awareness of discrimination. They use false names and wear gorilla masks to hide their identities.

As well as protecting a real identity, masks allow people to become someone else. in her video Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian Version II 1994, Gillian Wearing gets people to reveal their secret thoughts and desires while disguised. As well as empowering them to share things they normally wouldn’t, it allows them to make up lies about themselves, knowing they would never be found out!

Cindy Sherman masks herself as other ‘types’ of women in her self-portrait photographs in order to explore stereotypes. She uses pose, dress, expression and make-up to create her disguises.

Rebecca Horn also created masks that, in a way, allowed her to become someone else. Pencil Mask and Cockatoo Mask belong to a series of wearable body sculptures – or body extensions – the artist made which allow the wearer to interact with their environment (and with others) in new ways. Pencil Mask, transforms the wearer’s head into an instrument for drawing. Cockfeather Mask was made to touch the face of a person standing in front of the wearer. This creates a sense of intimacy and tenderness but also of tension.

It isn’t only people that can be masked in order to disguise their true nature.

In the 1920s surrealist artist Man Ray masked everyday objects by wrapping them in cloth. This had the effect of making the objects mysterious, altering their function and purpose. In one work, a sewing machine becomes a mysterious bulk. Christo and Jean-Claude used cloth wraps to mask the appearance, and explore the forms of, iconic landscapes and buildings.

Masks that reveal more than they hide!

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Masks don’t necessarily have to be things we wear in order to hide who we are.

The faces of Francis Bacon’s tortured figures, often confined and isolated in boxy structures, look like grotesque masks contorted and grimacing. Rather than portraits that represent the features of individuals, his work can be seen to reflect the human condition. Bacon also painted the death mask of poet and visionary William Blake. The painting is built up with delicate layers of paint against a rich black ground. The broad strokes of pink and mauve paint suggest the wax of the mask as well as human flesh.

Eileen Agar creates a sense of angst with her blind-folded head, Angel of Anarchy. Its beads, feathers and silk evoke evening dress and glamour. But the blindfold hides any obvious features and makes the head a sinister omen. Agar said she wanted the work to be ’malign’. Made in the late 1930s when World War seemed inevitable, it symbolised the sense of uncertainty Agar felt about the future.

Masks feature a lot in the work of John Stezaker. Masks feature a lot in the work of John Stezaker. He collages one image over another, which masks the image underneath and suggests a new meaning to the image on top. For his Masks series he places postcards of landscape features over publicity portraits of actors from the 1940s and 1950s. The facial features are covered by the collage. The over-laid image doesn’t only hide – it also seems to reveal. The eyes are substituted with blankness or holes from landscape scenes – dark and empty or leading into other spaces. This creates a disturbing sensation of seeing other worlds, as well as skulls, beneath the features of the people in what used to be glamorous photos.

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2. Images

John Stezaker, Mask XIII, 2006 John Stezaker, Mask XIV, 2006

Rebecca Horn, Pencil Mask, 1972 Rebecca Horn, Cockfeather Mask, 1973

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1976, printed 2000

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Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, Dance Hall Scene, c.1913-4, Tate

Max Beckman, Carnival, 1920, Tate

3. Kate Davis reflects on Eileen Agar’s Angel of Anarchy 1936–40Angel of Anarchy is an object rife with contradictions. As an artist, this appeals to me. I have admired Eileen Agar for some time. She was a refreshing and significant presence in the predominantly male camp of Surrealist artists active in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, and her resolute head with its flamboyant garb continues to intrigue me. Is the angel’s blindfold a defiant act against world events (she had already endured one world war), or a nod of despair towards an uncertain future? The very notion of an angel of anarchy suggests a conflict of interests: should a celestial being incite lawlessness?

In my own practice, I am interested in the associations that a certain visual language may have acquired through time, and how I can interpret that language or vocabulary to say something today. In terms of a visual vocabulary, Agar’s angel defies the Cubist and Futurist language of her time. Not only has she dared to abandon conventional art materials and work with found objects, but her angel/warrior flaunts common forms of feminine decoration on a classical subject: the sculpted head. There is no artifice about this struggle. Patches and layers of materials fighting with each other are visible. It is not a representation of these objects, it is the objects themselves, but not as we may expect to see them. Agar was obviously well aware of the need to re-create chaos to build a new kind of order. She rose to the responsibility of both looking at her world and pushing on from what may become conventional in visual language at a certain time.

However radical and vivacious Angel of Anarchy may still look today, maybe this object and what it stands for isn’t such a contradiction. Instead, it may be a breath of sanity. For me, it is a reminder that rebellion should be divine and imperative for art and society at large. I believe Agar is seeing clearly and daring us to do so too.

Angel of Anarchy was presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery in 1983 and is on display at Tate Modern.

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4. Angel of Anarchy, Eileen Agar, 1936-40(Natasha Adamou, March 2016)

Angel of Anarchy is a sculpture by the Argentine-born British artist Eileen Agar. It comprises a plaster cast head covered with found materials and objects such as embroidered silk fabric, feathers, sea-shells, African beads and diamante stones. While some of the elements suggest facial features, others seem more like decorative accessories or jewellery. At times they could be read as either: for instance, feathers could be errant tufts of hair or part of an elaborate headdress. Similarly, the patterned fabric serves as skin for the face as well as a blindfold. This ambiguity creates allusions to seduction and submissiveness, although the accumulation of elements also appeals to the anarchy referenced in the title. Angel of Anarchy is displayed on top of a white pedestal under a protective Perspex case due to its fragile condition.

The work was created by Agar in 1936–40. Agar was a friend of Henry Moore and she would accompany him on visits to the ethnographic collections at the British Museum in London, whose collection of African sculpture influenced both artists. In contrast to Moore, Agar worked primarily in plaster, which she chose because ‘bronze was too expensive’. In addition, rather than making preliminary drawings, Agar used found materials, applying them directly onto the head. The white plaster cast in this sculpture is from a modelled clay bust of the artist’s future husband Joseph Bard.

The sensuous and uncanny nature of Angel of Anarchy relates to surrealism, which Agar was deeply interested in. Agar was one of the few women artists to become a member of a surrealist group in a cultural world dominated by men. In 1936 she joined the British Surrealist Group and signed the group’s inaugural manifesto. In that same year she exhibited her work at the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, which marked the emergence of surrealism in England and was organised by Roland Penrose, David Gascoyne and Herbert Read in collaboration with French surrealists such as André Breton and Paul Eluard.

Art historian Anna Gruetzner notes that Tate’s Angel of Anarchy is the second version of an earlier yet substantially different sculpture with the same title made by Agar between 1934 and 1936. The first version, now lost, was initially shown in the exhibition Surrealist Objects and Poems at the London Gallery in 1937 and was subsequently sent to the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galerie Robert in Amsterdam in the spring of 1938, but was never returned (Nairne and Serota, p.115). An illustration of the first version was reproduced on the cover of the exhibition catalogue Surrealist Objects and Poems in 1937. Agar’s piece Angel of Mercy 1934, along with the two versions of Angel of Anarchy, constitute the sculptural element of the artist’s practice, which mainly focused on painting and photography.

According to Patricia Allmer, art historian and curator of the exhibition Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism (Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, 2009), Agar’s Angel of Anarchy addresses issues of gender identity by ‘enacting a man’s becoming-woman’ (Allmer 2010, p.26). Allmer goes on to suggest that ‘the angel is one of the key symbols of women surrealists’, standing for ‘hybridity and becoming’, and as such enabled

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women surrealists to ‘challenge patriarchy’ and ‘to overcome its own blindness’ towards women (Allmer 2010, pp.26–7). Allmer also suggests that in accordance with the revolutionary spirit of surrealism, Agar’s title, Angel of Anarchy, ‘could be construed as a surrealist programme in miniature, with its promise of an outrageous fusion of the sacred and the dissident’ (Allmer 2010, p.43).

Further to the gender critique that Allmer highlights, there were other important political contexts surrounding the sculpture since, as Gruetzner has observed, ‘English surrealism developed in a strongly political climate’. Gruetzner continues:

There was an enormous sympathy for the Spanish Anarchists within the English group and several manifestos were issued on their behalf. In 1937 Herbert Read, who was the ‘angel of anarchy’ and author of Surrealism, published by Faber and Faber in 1936, announced his commitment to Anarchism and published The Necessity of Anarchism. But the outbreak of the Second World War complicated and confused these political causes and when the second version of The Angel of Anarchy was made in 1940, Eileen Agar added a blindfold because the future was so uncertain.

(Gruetzner in Nairne and Serota, pp.113–15.)

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5. Questions1. Describe some of the different uses of masks.

2. Using the factsheet and the images of masks, describe how the different artists have used masks to protect, disguise, hide and amuse?

3. Choose one or two of the artists mentioned. How have they used faces as masks that express emotions, pains or feelings?

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4. Cindy Sherman explored stereotypes by making herself look like different types of women as presented in the media. What happens if you make yourself look like someone else? Do you feel different? Does it make you behave differently?

5. Think about masks as a disguise. What happens when you cover up your face or parts of your face? How does it make you look? How might other people respond to you?

6. What issues does the work Angels of Anarchy address?

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7. What is Kate Davis’ view of Angel of Anarchy, by Eileen Agar? How does it agree/disagree with the view of Patricia Allmer (Art Historian)?Do you agree with this interpretation?

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