Special Exhibition: 

Masks of the Himalayas

The subject of Himalayan masks has been dear to my heart for a long time. The tale of how my friend Mort Golub found his first Tibetan mask at the Marin Flea Market circa 1986 and how I tried to buy it from him for ever greater amounts, only to be turned down by an ever more incredulous Mort is a well known and oft told tale. Eventually, after making no progress, I told him he was lucky because he bought a masterpiece Mahakala, and if he was not going to sell it to me, then he should see its acquisition as a stroke of karma. It was his destiny to collect!

And so we began to assemble what was to become the finest Himalayan mask collection in the USA, later published in Demons and Deities and Hali Annual II 1995. Now his name is a world recognized  provenance.

Many of the masks here presented are from that collection and were published in my recent book, Masks of Fabled Lands, which also includes fine pieces from Indonesia, Siberia, Sri Lanka, Japan and New Guinea. This book is available at the bookstore of The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Librairie Fischbacher on rue de Seine, Paris; Select Books in Singapore and through my website under the heading "Publications."

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