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Lot Essay
The Mask is one of the most important motifs as well as one of the greatest preoccupations of writers and painters in the 1920s and 30s. I think of Yeats' theories of the Mask and Antimask and his writing of plays influenced by the Japanese Noh dramas where masks were employed. His play The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935) is dedicated:
`To Ninettre de Valois
Asking pardon for covering
Her expressive face with a mask'.
Masks were in.
Allen Freer.
Although painted in gouache, watercolour and ink, this work has the layered look of collage, principally because the over-setting of imagery was a key strategy for Agar. When not actually employing collage material she often used stencils of her own devising to achieve a similar effect — as in The Blue Mask. But why this title? Is the area of rich blue bandaging the hat or mountain shape (which could also be a human profile) in the top right hand corner the mask in question? If it does depict a mask on a face, then the person has a cone-shaped head — and this is nearly 40 years before Saturday Night Live’s famous comic sketch about bald aliens (The Coneheads) became so popular. But then the Surrealists always wanted to be pioneering in their imagery, and in 1939 when she painted The Blue Mask, Agar was still very much involved with the movement, though later her interests would shift. A lyrical image, The Blue Mask seems to have more than a suggestion of the ocean’s depths to it, like so much of Agar’s work.
A.L.
`To Ninettre de Valois
Asking pardon for covering
Her expressive face with a mask'.
Masks were in.
Allen Freer.
Although painted in gouache, watercolour and ink, this work has the layered look of collage, principally because the over-setting of imagery was a key strategy for Agar. When not actually employing collage material she often used stencils of her own devising to achieve a similar effect — as in The Blue Mask. But why this title? Is the area of rich blue bandaging the hat or mountain shape (which could also be a human profile) in the top right hand corner the mask in question? If it does depict a mask on a face, then the person has a cone-shaped head — and this is nearly 40 years before Saturday Night Live’s famous comic sketch about bald aliens (The Coneheads) became so popular. But then the Surrealists always wanted to be pioneering in their imagery, and in 1939 when she painted The Blue Mask, Agar was still very much involved with the movement, though later her interests would shift. A lyrical image, The Blue Mask seems to have more than a suggestion of the ocean’s depths to it, like so much of Agar’s work.
A.L.