Charles Ratton

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Charles Ratton (born March 11, 1897 in Mâcon ; † July 21, 1986 in Villefranche-sur-Mer ) was a French art dealer who devoted himself to African , oceanic and pre-Columbian art.

Life

Charles Ratton, the son of a hatter, studied art history at the École du Louvre , with a four-year hiatus due to the First World War . His brother Maurice Ratton also became an art dealer, his nephew Lucas Ratton later continued the business. Influenced by the art of Cubism , Ratton developed a weakness for the marketing of the art of African peoples as early as the 1920s, for whom designations such as Negro art or tribal art were common at the time ( art premier , tribal art ). Paul Guillaume discovered this art in the 1910s , began trading with it and thus aroused the interest of European avant-garde artists.

In 1927 Ratton received the trade license for his "Galerie Charles Ratton" in the rue de Marignan in the 8th arrondissement , where he worked for sixty years. In 1930 he and Tristan Tzara , the gallery owner Pierre Loeb and he organized the Exposition d'art africain et océanien , the execution of which threatened to fail because of seven exhibits that were contested as obscene, until the host , Henri de Rothschild, enforced the exhibition against censorship.

Maître des Yeux Obliques , formerly in the Ratton Collection, in the Louvre since 1999
Snake pendant , formerly in the Ratton Collection, now in the Brooklyn Museum

From 1931 he also worked for the auction house Hôtel Drouot . He supplied the Founded in 1931, the colonial museum in the Palais de la Porte Doree and differed in his views and actions from that on the Paris Colonial Exposition presented colonialism only insofar as the emphasized the artistic character of the traded objects it. Ratton's (quite selfish) achievement was to raise the recognition and prizes for tribal art .

In 1932, bronzes from Benin were exhibited by him . In 1935 he sent the first exhibition for Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City , which was documented by Walker Evans . A subsequent exhibition at the gallery owner Pierre Matisse in New York was unsuccessful, and an American market for tribal art emerged - for Ratton too - only in 1957 with the opening of the Museum of Primitive Art . His friendship with the surrealist artists Tzara, André Breton and Paul Éluard resulted in the Exposition Surréaliste d'Objets in his gallery in May 1936 , a forerunner of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme , which was held in 1938, but not by him . Ratton arranged masks from Alaska and New Guinea alongside Man Ray's Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse . In 1937 Adrienne Fidelin posed for Man Ray wearing a Congolese headdress, which Ratton exhibited. During the German occupation of France he did not need to close his art shop and was accused of collaboration after the war .

In 1946 he made the prognosis that in the future fewer art objects from the colonies would be offered, since these were now (with his help) plundered and since the emerging decolonized states would impose export restrictions. In 1944 he became friends with Jean Dubuffet and in 1947 was one of the founders of the Compagnie de l'Art Brut . In 1953 he advised Alain Resnais on his anti-colonialist documentary Les statues meurent aussi . In the 1980s, he unsuccessfully offered parts of his collection to the Louvre , which at the time still had reservations about non-European art.

In 2013 the Musée du quai Branly dedicated the curated exhibition Charles Ratton, l'invention des Arts “primitivs” to him .

Fonts (selection)

  • with James Ross: Masques africains . Librairie des arts décoratifs, Paris 1931

literature

  • Raoul Lehuard: Charles Ratton et l'aventure de l'art negre. In: Arts d'Afrique noire 60, 1986, pp. 11-33.
  • Sophie Laporte: Charles Ratton. L'invention des arts primitifs. Skira, Paris 2013, ISBN 978-2081295407 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Gareth Harris: Tribute to a tastemaker. In: Financial Times . July 20, 2013, p. 16.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Musée du quai Branly: Short guide to the exhibition Charles Ratton, l'invention des Arts “primitivs”. 2013 (English, 18 pages)
  3. ↑ Rue de Marignan, see French Wikipedia fr: Rue de Marignan
  4. ↑ Les statues meurent aussi in the Internet Movie Database (English)
personal data
SURNAME Ratton, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Mâcon
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 1986
Place of death Villefranche-sur-Mer