Mask, Pentecost Island, Vanuatu

Pace Primitive, New York (inv. no. 54-0974)

Acquired from the above by the present owner on November 5, 1996

Tsubwan face masks are among the rarest of all Oceanic artworks, and this previously unpublished example is a significant addition to the corpus. As noted by Philippe Peltier,¹ these masks come from the north of the archipelago of Vanuatu, from the north of the island of Ambrym, the south of Pentecost Island and, in certain very rare cases, the east coast of Malakula and the islands of Vao and Rano that lie off its northeastern coast. Like the present example, many of these masks seem to be of great age.

Aesthetically, this tsubwan invokes a ghostly persona of great solemnity. The face is composed of elegantly rounded, abstract, forms; the heavy, protruding, forehead is bisected by a slight ridge, and the brow arches over narrow openings for the wearer’s eyes, with those of the ancestral figure depicted by the mask appearing squinted. Unusual, bulbous, teardrop shapes tilt downwards on either side of the nose, perhaps representing cheekbones. Huge nostrils transverse the large arching nose, above a slight and enigmatic smile. A pointed chin projects above a tapered tenon, which the dancer would grip with the mask in front of his face.

The overall shape of the mask is narrow, organic, and without any hard edge or straight line; a stern but ethereal spirit from another world. Tsubwan masks were danced in rituals related to the yam harvest, representing ancestral figures emerging to frighten young initiates. As Peltier notes, “Dances related to the harvesting of yams were abandoned from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century as a consequence of the people’s conversion to Christianity. Devoid of the purpose for which they were made, the masks were sold to European settlers and travelers. The rapidity which with the traditional were abandoned en masse means that the small number of known masks are unquestionably old.”²

The present mask shows a few characteristics of the masks identified as originating in Vao, but within the restricted corpus of recorded tsubwan masks, it unquestionably is most closely related to the example from Pentecost Island once owned by Helena Rubinstein and first sold in these rooms in the legendary auction of her collection of African and Oceanic art on April 29, 1966, lot 258. That mask, acquired at the Rubinstein auction by Harry A. Franklin of Beverly Hills, was sold again in these rooms, over fifty years later, as part of the sale of the Harry A. Franklin Collection of Pacific Art on May 13, 2019, lot 33. It is now in the collection of the Yale Peabody Museum at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. For a regional classification of these masks see Kirk Huffman's article “Masques, coiffures et chapeaux rituels du nord du Vanuatu”, in Joël Bonnemaison ed., Vanuatu, Océanie. Arts des îles de cendre et de corail, Paris, 1996, pp. 24-25.

¹ Philippe Peltier, “The Rubinstein Vanuatu Mask”, in Sotheby’s, ed., Pacific Art from the Collection of Harry A. Franklin, May 13, 2019, lot 33

² Ibid.