Elizabeth Catlett’s Magic Mask (c.1970–80) is a rhythmic study of volume and void. Assimilating Catlett’s command of radical abstraction with the narrative expressiveness of her figurative sculpture, Magic Mask demonstrates the profound capacity of organic form to convey essential human emotion. Projecting a humble authority, the sculpture’s polished mahogany surface invites the eye to probe the elegant interplay of its concaves and convexes, paying homage to African and pre-Hispanic Mexican art forms while also finding a vital place within the modernist abstraction of 20th-century sculpture.

Primarily pursuing graphic arts in her early artistic career, Catlett was exposed to the immediacy and expressive potential of sculptural form when she worked in the studio of the Russian-French sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York in 1942. Under Zadkine’s mentorship, Catlett assimilated the principles of cubist form, adopting an abstracted stylisation of the figurative that would become central to her sculptural practice. Realised in varieties of wood, metal or stone, Catlett’s sculptures render a continuum of representational and evocatively abstracted portrayals of the human body – including the Black female figure, mother and child groups, and monolithic heads. Transposing the hatched and decisive markings of her printmaking into expressions of volume, form and material, Catlett enacted in both print and sculpture the political principles that drove her life’s work – that of representing the underrepresented as a form of resistance to the predominant Western influence that pervaded the art world.

Catlett’s abbreviated sculptural vocabulary, wherein anatomical and physiognomic forms are elongated and abstracted to their essential components, finds a direct visual lineage in African art. In 1987, the artist wrote, ‘I am impressed by the use of form to express emotion […] by the life and vitality achieved through form relations […] the variety is unending. All African art interests me. I see such force, such life!’ (letter to Timothy D. Brown, 23 April 1987, in Elizabeth Catlett archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans). During her undergraduate studies at Howard University in the early 1930s, she visited the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, whose collection of African objects proved a vital source of inspiration for her practice. The rolling arcs and animated voids observed in tribal masks resonate in the abstracted mahogany composition of Catlett’s Magic Mask, whose exaggerated portals retain a semblance of the human visage while exploring fundamental aspects of form, including the synergy of positive and negative space. In the early 20th century, a widening appreciation of African aesthetics was also exerting its influence on the European art scene, spearheaded by artists associated with the École de Paris, including Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani.

Catlett’s use of negative space to amplify mass also shares similarities with the work of modernist sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Moore’s Large Totem Head (1968) demonstrates on a monumental scale how modernism integrated ‘primitive’ sources to craft a language of organic abstraction. Like her contemporaries, Catlett celebrated and honoured her materials, carving along the diagonal grain of the wood to establish a dialogue between form and material. According to the art critic Michael Brenson, Catlett’s use of organic form serves as an act of healing: ‘the impact of light on the unblemished surfaces makes it seem as if scars have already become new skin. The way the surfaces reach out to us as well as to light bring us into the healing process’ (in Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, exh. cat., Neuberger Museum of Art, University of Washington Press, London, 1998, p.28).

Considering African art as a precursor to modernist abstraction, Magic Mask emerges as both a forerunner to and inheritor of its era, embodying an approach that resonates with the contemporary milieu while reflecting the artist’s distinct diasporic heritage. The abstracted mask was a motif that Catlett re-imagined several times in the 1970s, and to which she returned in 1990 to create a larger version in onyx, now held in the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland. Through its intimate scale, Magic Mask is a celebration of the alchemical potential of humble materials.