Tussian Ioniake Mask, Burkina Faso

Loudmer-Poulain, Paris, December 19, 1974, lot 85
Gayle L. Fisher, Los Angeles
Private collects ion, California, acquired from the above on December 19, 1999

Tussian masks of the type "loniake" with early collects ing history are exceedingly rare. Of smaller scale and lacking the fiber attachments, the offered lot relates closely to the famous mask in the collects ion of the Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva and was probably collects ed around the same t.mes .  Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller recalls the circumstances of the acquisition of this mask, as well as a second one previously in the collects ion of the Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva, as follows (note dated August 24, 1983, quoted after Bognolo 2009: 104):  "In 1967 an African brought three or four Tussian masks to Paris.  I bought a large one, topped with a bird, from Robert Dupperier.  Then I saw [a second mask] at Ernest Ascher's boutique (on the corner of Rue des Beaux-Arts and Rue de Seine).  He told me he had refused to sell it to his friend Pablo Picasso.  He was thinking of giving it to him as a gift the next t.mes he visited him on the Côte d'Azur.  But Ascher wore down all his old friends with his constant moaning and Picasso stopped inviting him.  Ascher was sad about this at first, but then angry.  One day he asked me if I remembered 'Picasso's mask' [...]. By 1969, the mask was hanging on the wall of my Paris flat [...]."

The striking affinity of Tussian masks and works by 20th-century avant-garde artists has been pointed out prominently by William Rubin (1927-2006) who featured the Barbier-Mueller Tussian Ioniake mask on the cover of the second volume of "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art (1984), juxtaposing it to Max Ernst's Bird-Head of 1934-35. 

For Rubin, the affinity between both works was exemplary for the program of the "Primitivism" show as a whole, as explained in the catalog's introduction (Rubin 1984, vol 1: 25):  "[The] resemblance between Ernst's Bird-Head and the Tusyan [sic] mask, striking as it is, is fortuitous, and must therefore be accounted a simple affinity.  Bird-Head was sculpted in 1934, and no Tusyan masks appear to have arrived in Europe (nor were any reproduced) prior to World War II.  [However,] that such striking affinities can be found is partly accounted for by the fact that both modern and tribal artists work in a conceptual, ideographic manner, thus sharing certain problems and possibilities.  In our own day it is easy to conceive of art-making in terms of problem-solving.  But this was also substantially true for tribal artists, though their solutions were arrived at incrimentally - as in much Western art - over a period of generations."