Young Brunette Girl With A Mask Reveals On The Antique Chair

Contemporary theatre
Masks and puppets were often incorporated into the theatre work of European avant-garde artists from the turn of the nineteenth century. Alfred Jarry, Pablo Picasso, Oskar Schlemmer and other artists of the Bauhaus School, as well as surrealists and Dadaists, experimented with theatre forms and masks in their work.
In the 20th Century many theatre practitioners, such as Meyerhold, Edward Gordon Craig, Jacques Copeau and others in their lineage, attempted to move away from Naturalism. They turned to sources such as Oriental Theatre (partically Japanese Noh theatre) and commedia dell'arte, both of which forms feature masks prominently.
Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) in A Note on Masks (1910) proposed the virtues of using masks over the naturalism of the actor. Craig was highly influential, and his ideas were taken up by Brecht, Cocteau, Genet, Eugene O'Neill - and later by Arden, Grotowski and Brook and others who "attempted to restore a ritualistic if not actually religious significance to theatre".