Modernist Disguise
This book chronicles and theorises face and body masking in arts and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the new millennium. While featuring the modernist era in France, analyses include commentary on performers and visual artists from the margins of the European continent: Ireland and the Baltics; Denmark and the Mediterranean. Representations of silent Pierrots on stage are contrasted with images of fixed-form maskers and masquerades; two-dimensional depictions in paintings and photographs further the study of the form-altered human figure. The relationship of the European avant-garde with indigenous masquerade from Africa and the Americas is discussed and presented in a series of eighteen photographic counterpoints. Modernist explorations of the masked gaze and the nature of looking with the painted face are considered. Meanings suggested by the disguised body in motion and in stasis are investigated via citations of the work of a wide range of masqueraders: Akarova, Bernhardt, Cahun, Höch, Fuller, Mnouchkine, Stein and Wigman, as well as Artaud, Barrault, Cocteau, Copeau, Deburau, Fo, Milhaud and Picasso. Connections between modernist disguising with manifestations of masquerade in daily life, fashion, fine art, media, opera and theatre are proposed while arguing that masking and the carnivalesque are omnipresent in contemporary culture. Modernist Disguise provides greater understanding of the impact of facial masking upon everyday interactions and perceptions experienced, for instance, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The book proposes an interdisciplinary and international lexicon for critical conversation on masking objects, mask play and masquerade as performance.