Senufo: Art and Identity 77 FIG. 10 (top left): Helmet mask. Unidentified artist(s). Wood, glass, animal horns, fiber, cowrie shells, mirrors. L: 68.6 cm. Reported provenance: Sam Hilu, New York; David T. Owsley, New York, before 1995. Dallas Museum of Art, gift of David T. Owsley (1997), 1997.24. Photo: Brad Flowers © Dallas Museum of Art. Accumulative helmet masks similar to this example are often linked to Komo, an organization commonly classified as Bamana or Mande. Recent scholarship demonstrates that Komo transcends such categorization (Diamitani 1999, Colleyn 2009, Gagliardi 2010). The wooden female figure incorporated into this helmet mask coincides with visions of the Senufo style but does not necessarily confirm that a Senufo-speaking artist created the figure. FIG. 11 (bottom left): Helmet mask. Unidentified artist. Wood. L: 44.3 cm. Reported provenance: Komor, New York, 1951. Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 51.13. Photo: © Seattle Art Museum. Limited surface decoration, an absence of horns, and an overall austerity of form characterize this remarkable helmet mask often classified as korubla. More than forty years after conducting fieldwork in northern Côte d’Ivoire, art historian Albert Maesen (1981) identified Korubla as the name of a masquerade-sponsoring association separate from Poro male initiation organizations. FIG. 12 (right): Helmet mask. Unidentified artist. Wood. L: 96 cm. Reported provenance: Ulfert Wilke, Iowa City, before 1978; Pace Primitive, New York; Lee Bronson, Los Angeles; Pace Primitive, New York; Galerie Jacques Germain, Montreal. Guy Laliberté Collection. Photo: © Jean Blais, Montreal. While connoisseurs have sought to correlate helmet mask names and forms, Dolores Richter (1979) has argued that context rather than form determines masks’ names, signaling the impossibility of identifying a mask’s name without information about its specific context of production or use.
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