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Julien Gauthier

A Guerre singer mask, collected in the Taï region, Ivory Coast, ornamented with metal studs and bells and beads around the chin. Signs of ritual use and age. Incl stand.

This wooden mask originates from the Guéré people, also known as Wè or Wobe, of southwestern Côte d’Ivoire. It corresponds to the “war-mask” or téé gla classification, associated with the Krou-speaking communities in the region. The form includes distinct features: a rounded and sometimes bulbous forehead, recessed or tubular slit-eyes, a pronounced central nose, horn- or tusk-like projections from the face or rim, and an open mouth with visible teeth, often accented with metal or organic material.

These masks are part of annual dry-season masquerades, generally held between November and February. In such festivals, the mask becomes part of a complete gela, a masquerade figure that incorporates mask, costume, and performance, and functions as a manifestation of bush spirits or ancestral power. Although referred to as “war masks,” their role is broader than literal warfare. They serve to mediate conflict, reassert community cohesion, invoke fertility and healing, and enforce social discipline. The term “war” thus reflects both martial symbolism and spiritual intensity, not solely battlefield use.

The aesthetic of the mask is one of disruption and force. It deliberately distorts the human form, combining animalistic and supernatural motifs to express the chaotic, powerful nature of the forest spirits. Horns, tusks, and compressed facial planes suggest a being that is not part of the ordered human world but erupts from the bush to challenge it. Scholars have noted this visual vocabulary as influential to early twentieth-century European modernism, particularly in sculpture, with Guéré and Wè forms cited in studies of Picasso and other artists engaging with African abstraction.

The mask’s construction is typically in wood, sometimes incorporating pigments like kaolin white or red ochre, metal elements such as brass tacks, and decorative additions like cowrie shells. Signs of use—such as abrasions, surface darkening from oils, insect damage, or repaired attachments for raffia skirts—attest to its ritual employment. Provenance, when traceable, adds significant ethnographic and monetary value, particularly when linked to named collectors or field acquisition prior to the 1960s.

In the academic context, the Guéré-Wè war-mask has been described as part of a regional cultural matrix in which masquerade plays a central social, political, and spiritual role. The mask embodies what some art historians describe as “the aesthetic of force,” an approach where the object does not organize or clarify the world but destabilizes it, presenting an eruption of spiritual presence. The mask enacts rather than represents—its dance and performance reconfigure the space of the village and open a channel to bush or spirit forces.

Some scholars connect this to a wider system of belief where the forest (the “bush”) is the source of untamed, ancestral, and spiritual power. Masks like this one materialise those energies, bringing them temporarily into the realm of the living. In this way, they are understood not as art objects, but as socially active, animated beings. Among the Dan, Wè, and Guéré, such mask-spirits regulate the moral order, make visible tensions in the community, and offer a space for their resolution through public spectacle.

From the perspective of art history, the Guéré war mask has also been situated within the narrative of African influence on European modernism. Its exaggerated, frontal geometry, projecting elements, and use of visual abstraction provided aesthetic models that inspired sculptors in the early twentieth century. Scholars such as Werner Speiss have traced how these influences shaped modernist principles of form fragmentation and symbolic distortion.

References

Jean-Baptiste Bacquart, The Tribal Arts of Africa
Eberhard Fischer and Hans Himmelheber, The Arts of the Dan in West Africa
Meurant, Ubangi
Werner Speiss, Picasso sculpteur, 2000
Sotheby’s Catalogue, “Masque, Wé / Guere, Côte d’Ivoire”, Lot 53, 28 Nov 2003
Galerie Wolfgang Jaenicke, catalogue notes on Guéré / Krou mask
David Malik Arts, description of Guéré-Wè-Wobe mask
Christa’s, description of Dan-Guéré (Ngere, Kran or Wè) masks
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection Record: Miniature Mask, Wè artist, late 19th–mid-20th century

Height: 41 cm without stand.

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Eine Holzmaske - Krieg - Elfenbeinküste  (Ohne Mindestpreis)

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Eine Holzmaske - Krieg - Elfenbeinküste (Ohne Mindestpreis)

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