Between "Self" and "Other": The Mask in German Expressionist Painting and Dance

This thesis puts German modern dancer/choreographer Mary Wigman’s use of a mask in dialogue with that of Expressionist painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. From the early 1910s, Kirchner and Nolde began to feature masks and mask-like faces in their art. They derived these forms in part from visits to ethnographic museums, whose collections featured hand-carved masks from communities in Africa and Oceania then under German colonial control. For Kirchner and Nolde, the abstracted forms of these masks embodied the simplicity, spirituality, and naturalness that they attributed to the cultures that produced them. By incorporating masks into their artworks, they aimed to recover an approach to artmaking that was pure and authentic, to reconnect with their “primitive” essence. While we cannot pinpoint precisely how or when Wigman became aware of these artists’ use of the mask, we know that she met Nolde at the beginning of her career, around 1910, and that she made Kirchner’s acquaintance during the 1920s. It was at this time that she introduced the mask into her dance practice; like Kirchner and Nolde, she believed that the mask would allow her to tap into a “primitive” state of being. The mask acted as a “second skin,” a point of contact between the inner and the outer, the “self” and the “other.” Inspired by Wigman’s use of the mask, Kirchner and Nolde reimported the motif back into their art in a series of images that depicted the dancer. Between her work and theirs, the use of the mask brought clarity to the “primitive” dimensions of Expressionism. However, the dynamics that they conceptualized remained unresolved.