False Faces

Some children call it "the dead zoo." Last week kids--and adults--saw a host of disembodied faces keeping company with its stuffed animals. In a dark hall of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, beneath the mottled, 76-ft. belly of a sulphur-bottom whale, the Museum had assembled and spotlighted some 200 masks from all over the world.

One of man's first great advantages over the gorilla had been his imagination, and by art he forged that imagination into palpable weapons. Primitive people imagined that if they could get away with pretending to be gorilla-spirits, or human ghosts, or gods (by hiding their real faces behind deliberately carved and painted false ones) they would be able to influence these superior beings and even make use of them.

Among the best and most beguiling disguises in the show were twisted Iroquois Indian masks of crooked-faced Go-gon-sa (a god who, like Adam, disobeyed the Creator and took a cuffing for it); a mask of the sacred, snake-devouring eagle Gurula from Ceylon, its head alive with twining cobras; Haidu, Tlinglit and Salish masks from the northwest Pacific coast, representing ancestors who could appear in various shapes at will (one, a wooden wolf-head, came open to reveal a fearsome cormorant); a proud yet friendly mask of Hamtman, Javanese version of the Indian monkey god.

When human beings finally came to realize that their masks fooled nobody but themselves, their disillusionment had a new creative result. Naturalistic masks like the Museum's Tibetan Comic Monk (see cut) and Japanese No masks, whose expression could be altered with a nod, were put to use in stage plays.

But not all the purely magic masks were past history. The Museum's leopard-like Devil .Dancer (see cut) resembles some still in use in Ceylon. And the Eskimo King of the Salmon (see cut), a driftwood disc which looked like neither fish, flesh nor fowl, was but one face of a still-living god.

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