Helmet Mask

Helmet Mask

Attribution: Museum-publishedProvenance: Museum accession

Attribution follows a published museum catalogue or peer-reviewed scholarship. Object is held in a public collection under a published accession number.

Helmet Mask, Igbo — front view
Front · Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 — Cleveland Museum of Art

The iconography of this helmet mask is comprised of sculpted renderings of different animal attributes including a ram’s horns, a warthog’s tusks, a crocodile’s mouth, and a hyena’s snout. Carved between the long antelope horns is a miniature chameleon that holds an abstract wing-shaped motif called mangele. Intended to impress and terrify, the sculpture’s fearsome aesthetic alludes to the mask’s power as an anti-sorcery device.

Catalogued by Cleveland Museum of Art as “Helmet Mask”, dated early to mid-1900s. Harvested from the museum’s open-access record; every field below is copied from that record and none of it has been inferred.

Record

People / cultureSenufo
CountrySudan
Common nameHelmet Mask
Form categoryVertical helmet
Subject depictedHybrid or composite creature
Materialswood
DimensionsOverall: 122 cm (48 1/16 in.)

Provenance

Julius Carlebach, New York
Julius Carlebach, New York; Katherine White Reswick

CollectionCleveland Museum of Art
Accession number1972.336

Source

Cleveland Museum of Art, Helmet Mask, accession 1972.336. https://clevelandart.org/art/1972.336

https://clevelandart.org/art/1972.336

This record is a catalogue entry, not an appraisal, valuation or legal determination. Nothing here should be read as evidence that an object was lawfully acquired or exported.