Editor’s Letter
Ayear has passed since, in a Rome on the verge of lockdown, I first noticed how many people were wearing facemasks. To me at the time, on holiday from a country that had registered but a handful of Covid cases, it felt like an overreaction; but a few months later, when compulsory maskwearing in shops and other venues was introduced in the UK, it no longer did. More than six months on from that, most of us have grown into our masks. Leaving the house without one these days would feel like stepping out without your keys or wallet – or worse, without any clothes on.
For the artist Gillian Wearing, who Martin Herbert interviews in this issue, all of us presented masks to the world long before fabric face coverings became obligatory (see Feature, pp. 34–39). Wearing’s work has often come at how we construct our identities, and perhaps particularly our visual appearance, through images that advertise how she might have constructed her own – as was so wittily shown in the exhibition that paired her up with Claude Cahun at the National Portrait Gallery in 2017. In this context, the concept of being masked is a type of freedom, writes Herbert, which gives a person scope to play whichever role they wish to in public. What’s not so easy to control, of course, is how others will construe the mask that you’ve chosen.
Artists surprise us. Wearing did so with a series of painted self-portraits, shown last autumn at Maureen Paley in London between periods of national lockdown, in which she ostensibly unmasked herself. With the directness of their observation and their medium – at least those in watercolour, a method so firmly associated with sincerity – these seemed more candid than the works that have won her acclaim, as well as true to the psychological pressures of the times. But all is not as it seems: in one oil painting, Wearing portrays herself in the type of prosthetic mask she often wears in her photographic work. For me, the complex honesty of this suite of paintings, in relation to Wearing’s earlier career, makes for extraordinarily moving images. In terms of art made in the past year that admits to the pandemic, it is the most eloquent work that I have seen.
There is escapism on the cover this month, with a showstopping self-portrait by Doris Zinkeisen, an artist and designer who (among other things) created sets for plays by Noël Coward. Coward’s milieu, too, was a world of masks, in its attachment to surface glamour and the sense that, for all the fun, everyone was constantly putting on a brave face (see Feature, pp. 46–50, and look out for the wonderful photograph of a zombie-like chorus wearing masks designed by Oliver Messel). I hope that an exhibition on Coward and his circle at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London, scheduled to open this spring, will not be knocked off course by Covid. We could all do with some decadence right now. They ought to sell velvet face masks.
I have written here before about the bittersweet privilege of visiting near-empty museums last summer, of the pleasure of standing in front of art but the rather melancholy feeling of not encountering other people. Mark Pimlott’s review of ‘Art on Display 1949–69’, an exhibition that revisits innovative museum designs from the postwar period, reminds us that the interactions between people are as integral to how we experience museums as the private meetings they allow us with works of art (see Review, pp. 76–77). In the UK, museums are finally gearing up to reopen. See you at the masked ball.