Mblo Portrait Mask

Origin: Baule Tribe, Ivory Coast
Composition: wood, henna-based colonial pigments, encrustation
Age: late 19th century

Baule sculpture is among the most distinctly recognizable and universally appreciated art forms in the entire corpus of the arts of Africa. This is due in no small part to the soft and gentle curves, stately lines, and highly polished and carefully rendered surfaces (not all Baule sculpture, of course, falls into this category). The pinnacle of Baule sculpture, according to the Baule themselves, are the masks used for the Mblo.

The Mblo masks depict actual people, unlike many other masks from Africa where spirits or ancestors are created in a generic form. With masks used for the Mblo, the mask is often an actual representation of a known individual.

According to Susan Vogel, "Mblo is the name of a performance category that uses face masks in skits and solo dances—it describes a structured form of performance (equivalent to a genre like 'opera' or 'film noir') that individuals have used to create many different scripts with different names."

This mask, cool and serene, is imbued with great poise and balance (save the deliberately asymmetrical cheek scars). The interplay of the smooth surfaces with the small, raised scarification markings adds a textural quality that immediately catches the eye. The strong, solemn face would have been an idealized portrait of a noble Baule man whose image forever radiates through the medium of this mask.

The teal and deep magenta/red colors that adorn this mask are unusual among African sculpture, as they are not easily derived from indigenous resources. These colors are in fact henna-based pigments imported dating from the colonial era (Ref: Rodolitz, "Emblems of Passage").

Please contact us to inquire about this piece at (415) 362-6601 or info@sujaro.com.