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Lot Essay
William Fagg described the purpose of the Gelede masquerade as 'to placate the witchcraft in women'; Henry J. and Margaret T. Drewal wrote exhaustively on the subject focusing on Gelede as 'a symbol of female power' (Gelede. Art and Female Power among the Yoruba, Bloomington, 1983); and Babatunde Lawal demonstrated that it is 'that and much more' in The Gelede Spectacle (Seattle, 1996).
The wooden mask is only a part of the elaborate costume of a dancer - invariably a man although formerly women could also dance masks - which comprised shawls, wrappers and scarves of rich fabrics over a cloth garment. They were often danced in pairs by friends who would practice together, thus strengthening the bonds between the families.
Ketu, in western Yorubaland near the border with Dahomey (Bénin), is the centre for the most complex Gelede rituals and its artists were particularly fond of exotic eleru masks (eleru is a head with superstructure). Their sphere of influence extended for hundreds of miles beyond Ketu, certainly to Pobé in Dahomey. Maupoil (La Géomancie à l'ancienne Côte des Esclaves, Paris, 1943 pl.IIA) illustrates two masks, similar to the present example, probably by the same hand, also with dundun drums, photographed by Labitte 1934-36. Drewel illustrates a mask with similar face which he describes as representing a bearded Muslim cleric (op.cit.p.192, Pl.122). All these masks are inventive without losing the tension of the composition often found in later works.
The wooden mask is only a part of the elaborate costume of a dancer - invariably a man although formerly women could also dance masks - which comprised shawls, wrappers and scarves of rich fabrics over a cloth garment. They were often danced in pairs by friends who would practice together, thus strengthening the bonds between the families.
Ketu, in western Yorubaland near the border with Dahomey (Bénin), is the centre for the most complex Gelede rituals and its artists were particularly fond of exotic eleru masks (eleru is a head with superstructure). Their sphere of influence extended for hundreds of miles beyond Ketu, certainly to Pobé in Dahomey. Maupoil (La Géomancie à l'ancienne Côte des Esclaves, Paris, 1943 pl.IIA) illustrates two masks, similar to the present example, probably by the same hand, also with dundun drums, photographed by Labitte 1934-36. Drewel illustrates a mask with similar face which he describes as representing a bearded Muslim cleric (op.cit.p.192, Pl.122). All these masks are inventive without losing the tension of the composition often found in later works.