CHUGACH MASK

Reportedly found by a fisherman in Prince William Sound

Lawrence Tyler, Seattle, acquired from the above

George Terasaki, New York, acquired from the above in 1966

Alberto Costa Romero de Tejada and Paz Cabello Carro, eds., Espíritus del Agua. Arte de Alaska y la Columbia Británica, Barcelona, 1999, p. 97, cat. no. 37

Steven C. Brown, ed., Spirits of the Water: Native Art Collected on Expeditions to Alaska and British Columbia, 1774-1910, Seattle and Vancouver, 2000, p. 158, cat. no. 121

Steven C. Brown, Transfigurations: North Pacific Coast Art. George Terasaki, Collector, Seattle, 2006, n.p., pl. 34 (two views)

“Monumental Legacy”, Native American Art, No. 23, October and November 2019, p. 126, fig. 1

Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona, Espíritus del Agua. Arte de Alaska y la Columbia Británica, October 6, 1999 - January 9, 2000; additional venue: Fundación La Caixa, Madrid, February 2 - April 2, 2000

The Menil Collection, Houston, Spirits of the Water: Native Art Collected on Expeditions to Alaska and British Columbia, 1774-1910, April 28 - August 6, 2000

Wooden masks of uncomplicated, dramatic sculpture and minimal painting were made in the Prince William Sound area, and certain of these feature the kind of tall, exaggerated forehead seen here. Probably representing a particular spirit image, these masks are most often sculpted with simple planar arrangements in the face. Often there is a single relief-drop from the eyebrow to the eye level, with the nose extending down the face at the same level as the forehead. The eyes are either produced as raised ovoid shapes, as they are here, or as simple slits or round holes cut in the surface of the eye sockets. In many examples, the eyebrow lines are angled with their inner ends drawn high up. Like some others, this mask illustrates the opposite, where the outer ends of the brows are higher up, possibly the indication of a particular character in ancient Chugach or Koniag masking dramas. Some masks of this type from this region are portrayed with round. protruding mouths, as if the image were singing or whistling. Others are depicted with downward-turned, nearly pointed mouths. Still others, like this one, have a wide protruding mouth shape. The image of the dancing figures in masks such as this, performing with intense, rhythmic drum accompaniment and singing, evokes the vision of a world far beyond one’s everyday comprehension. That world, with its ancient native belief system, employed its powers in the healing of disease and the divination of the future, helping to make visible the interactions of the spirits and magical powers that were believed to govern human existence. Steven C. Brown

As Steven Brown states in the preceding notice, there exist among the Alutiiq Sugpiaq people in the Gulf of Alaska (those in the region of the Prince William Sound referred to as Chugach) a corpus of powerful masks of strikingly abstract, geometric design. Very few of early date are preserved in public or private collections. Although there is variation among the known body of masks in both style, aging, and wear, a typographical chronology is difficult to establish. The present mask from the Terasaki Collection is sculpturally among the very finest in the corpus, and its apparent age, quality and size suggest an early dating, and a possible origin in an previous, prototypical generation of production. It was reported to have been found in the waters of Prince William Sound by a fisherman, and at that time must have been of significant age, as it bears signs of gradual wear, surface erosion, insect activity, and very faint surface pigment. It was acquired by George Terasaki in 1966; Teraski kept it in his personal collection for over 50 years and considering it to be the finest of its rare type.

A group of related masks from the nearby Kodiak Archipelago was collected in the Spring of 1871 by a young French explorer named Alphonse Louis Pinart (1852-1911), who brought them back to France in 1872; today they are preserved in the Château-Musée, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and in the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. This well-documented group was the subject of exhibitions in 2001 and 2002 in Ancorage and Kodiak, Alaska, as well as Washington D.C., organized by the Musée du Quai Branly.  In 2008 a selection from the Boulogne-sur-Mer group was exhibited in Kodiak and Anchorage, and then in 2009 at Boulogne-sur-Mer, as part of a collaborative study and publication undertaken by the Alutiiq Museum & Archaeological Repository, Kodiak, Alaska, and the Château-Musée, Boulogne-sur-Mer, with the participation of contemporary Sugpiaq cultural leaders.  Today one of the finest examples of this courpus is on view at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. A related pair of Alutiiq Sugpiaq masks dated circa 1870 is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York from the The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of Native American Art (accession nos. 2017.718.4.1 and 2017.718.4.2, Gift of Valerie-Charles Diker Fund, 2017); also on view with the Diker Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a single mask described as Chugach and dated 1860 (Loan from the Charles and Valerie Diker Collection, no. L.2018.35.65).

Beyond its status as a masterwork of Arctic Art, the Terasaki mask rises above its own corpus, finding the universal sculptural aesthetics of geometric abstraction, predating and predicting the artistic explorations of early 20^th century European modernists. The concept of a human face formed in a pyramidal structure composed of straight lines and flat planes relates to the idiom that the west would later call cubism, championed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.