From Faces to Masks

In modernist literature there is an overarching concern for the place of the human being in the modern age. This concern manifested itself in many different ways, one of the most notable of which is in the constant questioning of individuality and identity. For example, Ezra Pound's technique in drawing upon the medieval Troubedore poets, his "translations" of Chinese poetry from the 8th century, and his fascination with the Noh theater of Japan all reflect his desire to create meaning in the modern world by re-inhabiting masks and personas of the past. Similarly, poet Mina Loy, in her poem "To You," juxtaposes the minstrel mask on to the backdrop of the American city in an attempt to show how identity has become lost amongst the chaos of modern life. But most striking is the "faceless" man that reemerges throughout the poetry of Apollinaire, portraying man as one who has lost any sense of who he is, and what his place is in the modern world.

The question of what led modernist poets to question, and then to deny the authenticity of the human face --and, finally, to create various masks with which to cover that face--can be answered by looking at the trends that were occurring in the visual arts at the same time. This belief that the human face, and more specifically the modern face, could not adequately express emotion seems to pervade the thinking of many artists at the turn of the century. Within the visual arts, we can note that a shift had occurred in many painters' philosophies, revolutionizing the way man was depicted. With Impressionism in the late 1800's, we can see that artists placed a great deal of emphasis on the expression of the face for meaning within the portrait, but by as early as 1906, Cubism had completely reinvented the image of man's face. Instead of soft expressive portraits that attempted to capture the essence of humanity through the face, Cubism, with it's African masks and distorted proportions, nullified any attempt to use the human face as an indicator of identity. This radical change of artistic perception, making its initial impact in the early 1900's, created a ripple effect that managed to entirely transform modern art and literature, and hence, man's view of himself.

Masks and the Carnivalesque

In his book Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin discusses the carnivalesque in terms of how its meaning has been transformed throughout different eras. Finding its roots in grotesque imagery that can be witnessed in the mythological and artistic perspectives of pre-classic Greeks and Romans, grotesque realism gave birth to medieval folk humor and a series of images that have prevailed since the middle ages, the most noted of which is the mask (30). As the above mentioned quote reveals, the grotesque in carnivals was a means by which man could remove his fear of the unknown from consciousness as festivals offered a reality that was antithetical to the every day life of Christian sin and possible damnation; however, beginning in the Renaissance and carrying over into the Romantic period, the grotesque, and more specifically, masks began to contain within them definitively negative meanings:

Although it was the original goal of the grotesque to exhibit and celebrate the dual and paradoxical aspects of life, where "negation and destruction" are necessary in order to bring forth new life, the use of the grotesque mask in Modern art is lacking in the ability to reflect an optimistic view of the "better life" that is expected to come (65). Moreover, the positive meanings inherent in the mask at its original inception are completely reversed by the idea that behind the mask there is no substance at all, which, as with the work of Amedeo Modigliani, is an important part of the question of identity in the 20th century.

Bakhtin cites Wolfgang Keyser's modern conception of the grotesque as an example of how the original ideological implications of carnival were victimized through a 20th century perspective. In his book The Grotesque in Painting and Poetry, Keyser defines the grotesque as "something hostile, alien and inhuman," and argues that its use in art can be likened to the personification of the id: being defined as that which is " an alien, inhuman power, governing the world, men, their life and behavior" (46-49). Although Keyser's views of the grotesque are antithetical to its initial purpose and meaning, they explain, somewhat, the motivation on the part of modern artists in using masks to express their feelings of isolation, and their fear that human beings have lost a sense of their own humanity.

Because masks are so closely aligned with the concept of transformation, the modern artist's fascination with them is not surprising. Masks are paradoxical because they enable a person to become what he is not; however, the physical paradox of disguise is complicated by the historically established conception of the mask as an abstract symbol of duality. According to A. David Napier, with every paradox there is the possibility of either a reconciliation of opposing ideas, or the lack thereof, and inherent in our ability to recognize and accept the transformation of a thing from one state to another (or in other words, the actualization of something appearing to be what it wasn't before) is the resolution of the paradox at hand. Without this ability or desire to reconcile a paradox, our acceptance of change is inconceivable (1).

The paradoxes confronting a person at the beginning of the 20th century: God vs. Darwinism, capitalism vs. collectivism, man vs. machine, etc..., were, and are still rather difficult to reconcile. Absent from the masks in modern art and literature is the understanding of their symbolic meaning as a celebration of paradox. Instead, they came to be used as a means of avoiding the chaos of the present by covering and protecting man from his confusion in the face of opposing forces, and his fear of the unknown. In his book African Masks, Franco Monti compares Western to African culture in terms of their respective uses of masks:

Monti's somewhat limited analysis of the mask as a means of establishing oneself as an individual separate and superior is, admittedly, an oversimplification of this convention; however, it seems clear that the question of how man is supposed to assert himself and his individuality in the face of assembly lines and the determinism of Darwinism was on the minds of many artists and writers at the turn of the century.

A. David Napier writes that throughout history, masks have appeared in art and literature at times when change was occurring (xxiii). At the turn of the 20th century, in a world riddled with rapid technological change, introspection about the place of the individual in society took the artist on a quest for a human face to reflect the modern era. What can be seen as skepticism on the part of the artist to find meaning in an accurate depiction of the face, and the use of masks that followed, is a testament to the fact that change results in a transformation of values concerning the nature of both the physical world and the artist's depiction of that world.

The 19th Century: Faces

There can be no better example of how the human face was fetishized by artists in the 19th century than through these words written by Ellen Russell Emerson in 1892. Although nearing the end of the century, writers and artists had not yet recognized the potentiality for despair that would become apparent in the decade to come. The human face has often been regarded as the most definable trait that each person possesses, and it is this belief that seemed to rule schools of thought concerning portraiture in the 1800's. With Impressionist painting, great pains were taken by the artist to create an accurate and meaningful representation of the human face, with its various expressions and oddities. This method can be noted in the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Mary Cassatt, where the most important aspects of the portraits themselves are the faces of the subjects represented.

The story behind Renoir's 1877 painting, Girl in a Boat, (if we are to presume that there is a story at all) is told through the face of the subject.

Although the soft, round, lightly painted texture common to all impressionistic paintings creates a hazy scene that lacks focus, the girl's face, in the right foreground of the painting, is strikingly direct, staring back into the gaze of the viewer. Renoir's approach of confronting the spectator with the complexity of the human face and its subtleties of expression reflects what seems to be a desire on the part of the artist to, at the very least, get at the heart of the girl's temperament at that moment. But in a more general way, the emphasis that is given to her face speaks to a much larger sense of Renoir's belief that the human face can reveal some aspect of the "truth" about what it means to be human. We can see examples of this "facial fetishism" throughout Renoir's work in such paintings as Portrait of Lucie Berard (Child in White), 1884, and By the Seashore, 1882.

Another late 19th century artist that can be noted for the care with which she executed the painting of the human face is Mary Cassatt. Like Renoir, both her paintings and color prints, which reflect a desire to give dimension to the face, hint at the underlying implication that an accurate depiction of the human face is able to capture more truth and meaning than any other part of a portrait. Her interest in exploring maternal and paternal relationships is exhibited through the expressions on the faces of both parent and child, possibly in her hope of revealing the mysterious elements of the bond that exists between the two. In her 1885 painting Portrait of Alexander Cassatt and His Son Kelso,

the boy and his father sit side by side, dressed in black against a largely undefined background. Because of the blackness of their attire and the lack of detail in the rest of the painting, the faces of the subjects stand out, leaving the spectator to gaze upon them for meaning within the portrait. The same can be said of some of her other portraits such as, Baby Bill in Cap and Shift, 1889-90, and Margot in Blue, 1901.

The importance attributed to the portrayal of the human face can also be seen in films from the early 20th century, in which the practice of using the iris lens to frame the overly-expressive face of a heroine was popular. This can be explained partly through the fact that early filmmakers had not yet acquired the technology to implement sound into their movies and needed to show exaggerated facial expressions in order to get the emotions across. It is likely, however, that the emphasis on the face speaks to the same general beliefs that were behind 19th century portraiture--that the human face is a repository of shared values and meaning. In his The Art of the Moving Picture, Vachel Lindsay discusses the virtues of the face of silent screen actress Mary Pickford in detail:

Amid Lindsay's strange infatuation with Pickford is the idea that, before the invention of film and its earlier counterpart, photography, people had to rely on painting and sculpture for reproductions of the human form and, more importantly, the face. And although Vachel Lindsay can hardly be said to speak for the mass public in terms of everything he says about film as a new art form, his interest in film's ability to represent the human face follows in the same tradition as Impressionistic portraits of the aforementioned painters.

The 20th Century: Masks

Soon after the turn of the century, and even while some artists were still painting in the Impressionistic style, others began to branch off in the attempt to find more effective ways to depict the modern world. As early as 1907, artists were developing new ways to represent the human form through the fusion of Cubistic techniques and tribal art, the most noted of which was Pablo Picasso. In "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,"

one of his most famous works, Picasso placed masks on all five figures within the portrait, a method he continued to use throughout his lifetime. In a letter, he explains to Andre Malraux how he was influenced by Iberian statues:

In the beginning of this passage, Picasso's sense of alienation in the face of the crowded, foul-smelling "Flea Market" is later transferred to his reaction to the "masks, dolls made by redskins, and dusty manikins" in the Museum. Picasso saw tribal art, and more specifically masks, as a means of warding off the "threatening spirits" that were everywhere surrounding him. Disgusted by the crowds of people and the decomposing state of the modern city, Picasso's reaction to the tribal art reinforced his belief in the modern artist's need to transform present reality with artifacts from the past. When he says that the "negro pieces were intercesseurs," there is an explicit reference to the concept of intercession: a prayer or a petition made in favor of another. Picasso felt that the pieces not only acted as mediators between human beings and both the spiritual and material forces that surrounded them, but they also existed as protection against evil, as "weapons."

This view of tribal art, as artifacts that are "against unknown, threatening spirits" is identical to Bakhtin's description of the folk tradition of using masks to "liberate the world from all that is dark and terrifying"(Bakhtin 47). The difference between the Medieval conception of masks as they are associated with the carnivalesque, and Picasso's reaction to the artifacts he saw at the museum in Paris is that Picasso was unable to identify what he saw as the liberating elements of a convention that had been in existence for centuries, and instead, reversed the meaning of the masks to exemplify protection from the modern world rather than acceptance and then absolution from it.

The religious tone of Picasso's account reinforces the sanctity with which Picasso approached both the masks and his work that followed. When he speaks about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as his first "exorcism painting," we can see that among other things, the use of masks is a reflection of the modern artist's desire to depict man as an entity isolated from other humans and the rapidly changing world around him. These "demons" from the modern world that haunted Picasso (and others that were disenchanted with what appeared to be an era headed towards inevitable destruction and despair) were concurrently exorcised from his soul and revealed to others through the use of the masks in his paintings. Because the human face, which had possessed such great importance in the century preceding our own, represented to Picasso only the modern man's lack of identity and individuality, he saw the masks as a means of liberating humans from the oppression of self-sameness, and therefore, dependence upon one another. Thus, the "face fetish" that was prominent in Impressionistic art was transformed into a "mask fetish," as the human face was under attack, no longer seen as a viable means of creating meaning in modern representations.

Nor was Picasso alone in his use of masks to reflect man's isolation. Max Weber, his contemporary, used masks in his paintings to suggest this same alienation from the world and the people in it. In Two Women in a Landscape,

the two figures along with the landscape that surrounds them are represented through flat, angular, geometric shapes typical of Cubist art. The closeness of the figures juxtaposed against the flat bleakness of their masked faces and the landscape behind them contains within it the paradoxical relationship between humans and their modern environment. Just as Picasso was disgusted and alienated by the crowd of people he encountered at the Museum, Weber's figures, although within close proximity of one another, give the impression of utter isolation.

Both Picasso and Modigliani painted portraits of Max Jacob that, when set in sequence, show how the symbol of the mask was transformed within in modernist art.

Modigliani's 1916 Portrait of Max Jacob, as with all of his depictions of the human face, is a face/mask hybrid. Unlike Picasso's similarly mask-like Portrait of Max Jacob, completed nine years earlier, Modigliani's painting does not portray Max Jacob as man wearing a mask, but as a man who is only a mask. Modigliani's method of giving each subject a hollow head, where the background of the portrait is seen through the holes where human eyes are expected to be takes the masks theme to yet another level, where the essence of the modern man is incapable of representation at all. When Bakhtin discusses the Romantic conception of the mask as something that covers "a terrible vacuum," behind which "a nothingness lurks," the portraits of Modigliani instantly come to mind. His works contain within them the rather compelling implication that men have been reduced to the convention that meant only to hint at alienation, rather than to explicitly state that man has become the embodiment of his alienation.

This effort on the part of the visual artist to portray the human face in a non-conventional way may be due, in part, to the advent of film at the turn of the century. If humans can be filmed, and thus be presented to an audience in their realistic form, the question of what painters can do to make their art form new again must have been on every artist's mind. However, soon after the invention of moving pictures, filmmakers also concerned themselves with the use of masks for exploring the various dimensions of the individual in contrast to society. Because film uses technology as the basis for its art form, it serves as a perfect place for the conflict between society and the individual to play itself out. In Victor Seastrom's 1924 film, He, Who Gets Slapped,

a mask in the form of heavy face make-up is used to exhibit the tension that existed between the key figure and his respective environment. Just as Picasso used masks paradoxically as a means of depicting the alienation that he felt from his environment, as well as using this convention to further alienate himself from that which he despised, this film utilizes a mask to both isolate the main character and to show the despair of isolation.

He Who Gets Slapped is a story about a nameless scientist who discovers the nature of existence, but who is denied the notoriety he deserves because, when he goes to present his findings to a group of scholars, a more powerful friend takes credit for his achievements. And not only does the Baron steal his ideas, but he also steals his wife. In reaction to both the figurative and literal slap on the face that he has received, the man joins the circus and becomes a clown known only as "He Who Gets Slapped."

The fact that the main character is denied even a name is only one way in which this movie attempts to define modern man in terms of his lack of identity. But it is his sado-masochistic desire to reenact the slap and the mocking laughter of the scholars that marked his alienation from himself and the others in the world that is most curious. The paradoxical nature of masks resurfaces here with the main character's ability to receive pain from pleasure and vice versa. However, the existence of two seemingly opposing states of mind occurring simultaneously manifests itself within the character as an irreconcilable state of being. "HE" becomes incapable of dealing with the incongruities of his life and the underlying implication of change. He, therefore, reenacts this irreconcilablilty in a way that makes his hopes and fears inescapable. The mask of clown make-up that he wears becomes an explicit reference to the separation between man's ability to find meaning in the world and the impossibility of being able to hold on to it.

In He Who Gets Slapped, laughter is an inverted illustration of what Bakhtin called "a sign of victory over fear," because instead, the laughter serves to incite fear in its subject through a bare mockery of the individual rather than the laughter of universality and reprieve (90). Bakhtin cites that in Rabelais, the "speech and music of the medieval clown" is intertwined with the joyful abandon of carnival, as well as with the "physician's science and practice," "political experience," and "humanist scholarship" in order to create a unified whole through laughter (72). However in 1924, in He Who Gets Slapped, the universality of the carnivalesque is transformed into the buffoonery of a circus clown who is the sole focus of mockery rather than a participant in the collective mockery of the institutions that rejected him.

Unlike the visual arts, in modern Literature the concept of using a mask is more complex, for it is the use of certain words or the absence thereof that determines what can be said about the intent of the author to create masks. Ezra Pound, for example, reached into the past of the troubadour poets, as well as into Chinese poetry and the Noh plays of Japan to hint at an attempt to make modern poetry out of the stuff of a rooted, yet idealistically contrived past. Poems like "The Ballad of the Goodly Fere," "Piere Vidal Old," and "The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter," are all examples of Pound's approach to poetry through the inhabitation of people from centuries past; however, it is the poem "Masks" that is most telling of Pound's view of the present state of the world in comparison with the past. The last two lines of the poem

seem to get at the heart of what made Pound reject the modern world and return to the European and Asiatic past for material. In his book The Latin Masks of Ezra Pound, Ron Thomas describes Pound's career as "an historically modern struggle to discover meaning in an apparently meaningless age"(1). Just as Picasso saw the approaching century as a terrible mystery, Pound escaped from the formidable future's destruction of all vitality by combining the past with the present.

Pound's fascination with the Noh theater of Japan can also be cited as an indication of his attempt to use masks to create meaning. In 1916, he published a translation of four plays from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa with an introduction by William Butler Yeats. Yeats saw the art of Noh theater as

Both Pound and Yeats shared this view of the modern world as a place that lacked the substance of symbols and images that are timeless and complex, as well as a distrust of mechanization. Later, Yeats explicitly refers to the mask as a virtuous element of Noh theater in that it is the "fine invention of a sculptor" and, thus, elevates the dull status of the face to an art form (vii). It seems ironic that the stoic mask of the Noh theater would be seen by both Pound and Yeats as a vessel of authentic emotion; however, in an age where humans could no longer be defined by their individuality (their faces), Yeats, as well as others began to believe that "being is only possessed completely by the dead"(vii).

Although somewhat differently than Pound or Yeats in both her writing and her poetry, Mina Loy also took on the task of redefining the human face. In her poem "To You," Loy juxtaposes images of "the city/ wedged between impulse and unfolding" with the black-face mask of a minstrel (89). This interplay between the urban chaos of an emerging century, and the white man who adopts the minstrel mask, comments on the Western man's need to find a new face to coincide with the "lit cavities in the face of the city." Within this poem there is a sense of lack and trepidation that Loy is expressing, where humans who have no sense of an identity walk "the tightrope stretched above the commotion" of a rapidly changing world (89).

Perhaps the most compelling work that Loy did with the face, however, is in her treatise on "Auto-Facial-Construction." In this one and a half page vignette, Loy proposes that she will "instruct men or women...to become masters of their facial destiny"(283). This concern for the human face as something that has "lost the power to communicate [its] true personalit[y] to others," and is in need of rejuvenation is not unlike Yeats' doubts concerning the face's ability to express true emotion. Although Loy's procedure for "re-construction" of the face is rather elusive at best, her apparent interest in getting others to reevaluate what their faces mean to them, and express to others, seems to be a result of the fear that humans are losing the ability to authenticate themselves through their faces.

Of all the modernist poets, Guillaume Apollinaire depicts modern man and the crisis of identity in the most striking way. In his book Apollinaire and the Faceless Man, Willard Bohn looks at Apollinaire's poem "The Musician of Saint-Merry" as an example of how the "faceless man" became an influential image for the twentieth century. Apollinaire describes a "man with no eyes no nose no ears," who parades through the streets with his song and his flute(16). This faceless man, a poet, traveling through the street and revealing the woes of all the people, seems to capture the tone of human representation in modernist art. The musician calls attention to the mocking laughter of the present, as well as to a longing for the century preceding our own when he says:

 

 

The last line gives presence to the idea that the 20th century was giving way to an existence that further removed man from his origin, the earth. No longer driven by horse and carriage, and living in the dead "architecture" of skyscrapers, the modern man is transformed to fit his surroundings, and to artists like Modigliani and Apollinaire, the face that best matches the modern world is a depiction of facelessness.

The persistent mask theme--present throughout literary history--manifests itself in a rather bleak way during the early 20th century. In a godless world, it became the job of the artist to create meaning out of modern chaos, to find identity during a time when it seemed that the machine was becoming more valuable than the autonomous human being. We can see a progression of thought from the "face fetish" of the 1800's to a "mask fetish" at the turn of the century, eventually leading to depictions of facelessness, where the hope for man to have the opportunity to assert himself as an individual seemed unlikely. These beautiful, yet haunting images that were created for us in the early 1900's linger on even near the turn of the next century, giving precedence to Bakhtin's idea that symbols can be transformed beyond the initial purpose of their creator:

Other Related Sites

Click here if you would like to visit Jenifer Wolkowski's site, The Truth is Out There: Mina Loy's Lunar Odyssey.

Click here if you would like to visit Aparna Deshpande's site, Facticity of Language: Pound's Poetics and Politics.

Click here if you would like to visit Brian Ballantine's site, Ezra Pound and the Occult.

Click here if you would like to visit Yonjae Jung's site, William Faulkner and the Visual Arts.

Click here if you would like to visit Brad Ricca's site on The Fourth Dimension.

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