The Sande mask: a dynamic phenomenon

Introduction

In the winter of 1990, I found myself in the company of Ger Luttik and Charles Miller III on Long Island. We were behind the fences of a heavily secured storage depot and we were selecting masks from the more than hundred Sande masks Charles had acquired in Libya in a cold, rough wind.

Picture 1.

A surprising variety of forms were passed in review: masks adorned with a bird, a cooking pot, a crown, a hat, different hairstyles, eyes, necklaces, style features, small faces with high foreheads, a naturalistic face, a long neck with a small head ( a men’s mask that did not actually belong there). A new world opened up to me. The selection resulted in an exhibition named ‘Sande’ in gallery Balolu in Amsterdam and a book of the same name by Daniel Mato and Charles Miller III (picture 1).

I received photographs of an intriguing Sande mask last year: a special charisma and a fine piece of mask architecture. There were references to the book Representing Women by Ruth Phillips, who writes that around 1900, a number of masks by the same maker or workshop, had ended up in European museums. However, when I finally got hold of the item in question, it did not completely meet the criterion of authenticity, by which we first assess items from Africa. No patina, no holes to attach the raffia collar and evidently too small to fit a person’s head, but unmistakably with expressive qualities.