Unmasked: Colonialism and its rewards

Francis Picabia’s “Monster”, from 1946.

The Chamba in Nigeria and Cameroon kept masks like this one well away from the village when not in use. The spirit depicted — and those who carried and wore the mask — were believed to lurk in the bush, ready to bring violence.
Modern art’s fascination early in the last century with so-called primitive art chagrined Salvador Dali to the tweezer-tips of his moustache. He was appalled that Picasso and the cubists and, worse, his fellow surrealists André Breton, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, could derive inspiration from “savage” artisans.
But he must have recognised the parallel. In their anguished and grotesque imagery, the surrealists in particular were evoking the same monsters of the subconscious that tribal shaman recruited for their ends.
At any rate, it’s a shame he couldn’t at least appreciate the fundamental beauty of the traditional craftsmanship of Africa, Oceania and the aboriginal Americas, whose face masks are as expressive as anything in modern art, as Modigliani well knew, being able to improve on them only by cocking an eyebrow here and there.
The only problem in absorbing this influence, I think, is the matter of ownership.

A Bamileke helmet mask from Cameroon, today valued at about €15,000, represents a buffalo, an animal embodying power and courage and thus aligned with the tribe’s chief.
I’m not aware of any major controversy today over the sale of antique African carvings. The current debate seems more about the market for the “craft guns” that are used in Africa’s inter-tribal conflicts.
There are quite righteous grumblings from Southeast Asia about foreigners making off with venerable sculptures, but you don’t hear about Africans objecting to the resale of 18th-century masks at the big auction houses in Paris and New York. These masks were scooped up in the thousands by rampaging colonists who history continues to excuse en masse as “explorers”.
To be fair, of course there was an educational factor, with many of the masks and other artifacts finding their place in First World museums, the better to share the culture of faraway places. These were, however, the minority of the purloined items.

A Kanak mask on the left from New Caledonia (€50,000 to €80,000), usually used in rituals mourning the death of chiefs. Representing the chief himself, it has long hair, since it was forbidden to cut one’s hair during the period of transition from life to death.
At its side is a Lu bo bie elephant mask of the Kran tribe in Liberia (€18,000). with perforations in the resin at the ends of the eyes in which seeds were fixed. Villagers who broke the law or refused to pay a debt faced this visage with the threat that if restitution wasn’t forthcoming, the elephant would destroy his house.
I own a bronze Buddha head I picked up for a couple of dollars in Cambodia, and although it’s not remotely antique — they’re mass-cast in huge quantities for tourists — I can’t control some winces of guilt.
It was the same with a large face mask I bought in Jamaica. The carver probably lacquered it the week previous, ready for the local straw market, but you still feel like you’re absconding with a chunk of sovereign culture. See the rest.



Even Winslow Homer of Maine came up with “East Hampton Beach, Long Island”, seen here, and in 1877 he and J Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, William Merritt Chase and Thomas Moran formed the Tile Club to paint decorative tiles — they spent so much time chugging up and down the island on the new railroad and writing about it that a tourism boom was fomented.
Moran decided to move here, as did Chase, who in 1891 established the country’s first outdoor art school in Southampton’s Shinnecock Hills. George Bellows migrated out, then Frederick Childe Hassam, and then, soon after the 1913 New York Armory Show, modern art moved in, beginning with abstract painter Arthur Dove (seen here is his “Sun” from 1943) and his artist wife Helen Torr and, fleeing the rising Nazis, George Grosz, who lived in Huntington.
She cites Charles Riley, the co-curator of a late-’90s island retrospective called “Dreams on Canvas: Surrealism in Europe and America”: “The first bikini ever worn on Long Island was a surrealist prank executed by a very brave young woman named Catherine Yarrow … She hand-knit an extremely revealing bathing suit. It was part of a surrealist house party.” (Apologies to Paul Delvaux — that’s not really Catherine Yarrow in the picture.) 
Ernst had spent his first summer in America on Long Island, with the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim who’d bought so many of his paintings and helped him get clear of the Nazis and move to the States. 

Derain was drafted for a three-year stint with the army, and painted little during that time. Only two of his works have been ascribed to 1903: “The Soldiers’ Ball of Suresnes” (detail here), done while he was on leave, and “Self-portrait in the Studio”, now at the National Gallery of Australia.

“Parody” is the word most often used in describing “LHOOQ”. Others are hot bum, hot ass, hot arse and hot pants. Commentators do the jitterbug when they “translate” the title. Pronounce the letters aloud in French slowly, quickly, in a slurred fashion, with gusto, and you ought to hear Elle a chaud au cul, common street lingo for “She has a hot arse” or “She is hot in the bum / ass” or “She’s got hot pants” or, Duchamp once dubiously offered, “There is fire down below”, by which someone else presumed “She’s horny”.







