African Masks

To Europeans the term African art sounds synonymous with African masks. The mask has become the symbol of that continent, as the Acropolis stands for Greece, the Eiffel Tower for France. There are good reasons for this. Just as the Acropolis was considered an expression of the spirit of ancient Hellas, the mask expresses the spirit of traditional Black Africa. Both have become expressions of moral postulates and aesthetic canons of a given society in a given geographical setting. When at the recent World Festival of Negro Art at Dakar the African mask was compared to the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, there was great truth in this comparison. It is true only, of course, if we accord an accidentally chosen, isolated phenomenon the right to symbolize complex cultural and social features and a phenomenon at that which has attracted the attention of the uninitiated. The art of Africa does not only take the form of masks; on the contrary, the use of masks is not an exclusively African matter.