On my second visit to the Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibit at MOMA in 2015, I spent half an hour in the last room, the room with the wall-sized works, the beautiful world Matisse was making with colored paper as his final act.
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At the end of a gallery talk in front of Large Decoration with Masks, the speaker connected the two mask images in the piece to the early emphasis of mask imagery in Matisse and Picasso’s work, and that this is “problematic”. In the context of that room, the comment struck me as unnecessary, as well as inaccurate. Afterwards I asked him why he said it. He gave the explanation I expected, that a current understanding links the appropriation from cultural sources in the “Modern Primitivism” those artists were doing in the 1910s as connected to European colonialism.
I gathered he felt he had to add that comment about the masks, but it wasn’t the social necessity for the statement that bothered me, I understood that, it was my perception of an incorrectness in his description of these mask images.
In this work, these are not really “masks”, these are faces. In modern art, the mask has become a face. In traditional cultural arts, the mask is a disguise and transformation of human identity. In Matisse and modern art, the mask stylization is used to explore/reveal identity in portraiture. In this work, these faces could not be more essentially human. They are the human face boiled down to the simplest form, a set of shapes encircled by a line, just as the flowers are the simplest form of flower shapes. Matisse has gone far beyond the inspirations he found in African mask art.
And to say that the inclusion of two small mask images by an accomplished elder artist nodding back to his inspirations, in this incredible 11′ by 33′ garden of colors, created in a technique Matisse invented, is somehow “appropriation” seemed so unnecessary. Especially in the case of Matisse, whose early mask exploration were just one part of a period of “Radical Invention” (MOMA exhibit 2010, how quickly they forget) as he worked through multiple inspirations to develop them into his original art.
From this experience, and others, I realize that I have an insight into problematic questions about cultural appropriation, and not just in my own problematic career. My work gives me a lens into larger questions. I have been developing stories and performance pieces on such origins, inspirations and appropriations for schools and adult audiences, and this has become my new show: Talking Art
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- Henri Matisse The Cut-Outs — Transformations Gallery
- Why Body Painting? – 3A: Origins – Why did we start painting ourselves? Ancient bodypainting kit discovered at Blombos Cave (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
- Kumadori – Japanese Kabuki Theatre Makeup (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
My introduction to this Mexican fusion of death and beauty came via the mummies of Guanajuato when I was there as a student in the 80s. In 2001 I had the opportunity to return to Guanajuato as part of the Festival International Cervantino, painting faces in the street as one of a number of international performance artists. A few days after the festival ended, just before I had to leave, the center of the town was filled with stalls of the artisans creating items for the coming Dia De los Muertos. I bought this mask, and felt really great when the woman who sold it recognized me as a fellow artist for the facepainting I’d done in those plazas the week before.
I approach the Day of the Dead as a celebration of the presence of death within life, and the continuation of life within death through the love we retain for those who have passed. I want to retain stark images of death in the faces I paint, and for inspiration I look less to the current sugar skull style and more to traditional imagery such as Posada’s La Catrina and Mexican skeleton figurines.
