Collection Baud
The Baud Collection was a collection of African masks, bronzes and figures brought together in French-colonized areas of West and Central Africa between 1894 and 1904 , which was brought to Paris, achieved historical significance and influenced the art scene of the 1930s.
The discovery of the "primitives"
The Baud Collection was a collection of African folk art created during the French colonial era at the end of the 19th century. She helped shape the term “ L'Art Négre ”. The 1935 exhibition in Paris , organized in collaboration with the Societé de l'Africanistes, attracted attention in the art scene in the 1930s. For the first time among intellectuals in Paris there was recognition and admiration for the so-called art négre, which was publicized by artists such as André Breton , Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse and marketed by Pierre Vérité in his gallery Carrefour.
The origin
The pieces in the Baud Collection reflect the expeditions Capitaine Joseph-Marie-Louis Baud undertook together with Lieutenant Jean Vermeersch between 1894 and 1904 from the French colonial area of Dahomey .
From around 1888, Baud and Vermeersch were employed by the French colonial troops to put down the uprisings in Dahomey. On behalf of the French colonial administration, they undertook expeditions for military conquest as far as the Sahel , the north of Dahomeys and the Niger . It went further west, to the Haute Volta region, today Burkina Faso , and to the north of Côte d'Ivoire . Around 1898 began a run of two expedition that followed the Niger to the east, then from its valley to the east unnoticed northern Nigeria crossed, and the trading post Maiduguri the Lake Chad reached.
After the conflict between France and Great Britain in 1898 over the fortress Faschoda , the colonial policy in French West Africa changed . Baud and his team now had to operate carefully on the colonial border with England, which ran east of Dahomey. In the west, their conquests were limited by Togo , which was claimed as a German colony . From the end of 1898, for example, Baud and Vermeersch continued the subjugation of ethnic groups in the fringes of French West and Equatorial Africa , whose territorial boundaries did not coincide with the colonial borders. In doing so, they designed their expeditions with astonishing ethnological caution for the military of the time .
It can no longer be determined today whether the collection of masks, statues, spears and other objects on their so-called expeditions really corresponded to an ethnological interest of Baud and Vermeersch. The quality of some of the items in the collection suggests a certain understanding. It is no longer possible to trace which of the items in the collection were confiscated, given as gifts, exchanged at markets or otherwise taken into possession.
Baud stored his sizeable, ethnologically interesting collection of pieces from several ethnic groups from West and Central Africa in the police prefecture of Porto-Novo . When he died of malaria in Dahomey in 1904 , his collection was unknown in Europe. In Dahomey, the trail of Lieutenant Vermeersch is also lost.
Before World War II
From Porto-Novo to Paris
In early 1934, in the police prefecture in Porto-Novo in Dahomey, Sylvain Robert, who was taking up his post, found the estate of Capitaine Baud. He arranged for the pieces to be numbered consecutively and provided with rudimentary indications of origin to be sent to France to the testamentary heir Monsieur Raynal. The loading list attached to the ship's papers later served as the basis for an order for the collection of the Capitaine Baud.
The Baud and Raynal families
A niece of the Capitaine Baud, Yvette Baud, was hired by Raynal to look after the African pieces of heritage and to attempt sales. The philosophy student, with acquaintances in the artist avant-garde in Paris who dealt with the so-called art d'négre, made contact with gallery owners. With the help of Monsieur Dupres of the Societé de l'Africanistes, pieces that were classified by her were exhibited and sold under the title "L'Art Négre - Le Collection Capitaine Baud" in March 1935 at the Hotel Paix Madelaine in Paris.
The exhibition catalog mentions Sylvain Eugène Raynal as the owner of the collection and contains a biography of Joseph-Marie-Louis Baud. The exhibition and sales were a success. Pierre Vérité bought the most.
The Carrefour Gallery
Pierre Vérité, b. 1900, originally a painter, discovered his passion for African art around 1920. In 1937 he and his wife opened “Carrefour”, a gallery for African art with many pieces from the Baud collection. The son Claude, born in 1929, worked with his wife Janine from 1948. The brasserie “La Coupole” was located near the gallery on Boulevard Raspail. Pablo Picasso, André Breton and Paul Éluard frequented both addresses. Josef Müller, a Swiss collector of African art, was also one of the gallery's customers.
From the documents it is possible to determine exactly which pieces Yvette Baud sold to Pierre Vérité and others, including famous painters and sculptors today. A bronze head that Pierre Vérité bought for 8,000 francs (roughly the price of a small Peugeot) he sold to Picasso in the Carrefour Gallery in 1944 for 48,000 francs (roughly the price of a Citroën of the type "gangster limousine").
Pierre Vérité was an important supplier to the Swiss collector Josef Mueller, from whose collection the Barbier-Müller Museum in Geneva emerged.
Furthermore, was Abel Bonnard occasional customer of the gallery and discovered his love of African art. Bonnard, poet and novelist, was Minister for National Education under the Vichy regime (1942–1944) and one of the members of the Académie française who were expelled after the Second World War for cooperation with Germany.
Over the years of collaboration
Before Raynal died in 1939, he had appointed Robert Brasillach , a family friend and son of a French colonial officer, to be the manager of the Baud Collection. Brassillach was publisher and editor-in-chief of the radical right-wing magazine “Je suis partout” during the German occupation, worked with the Gestapo and was looked after by Lieutenant Gerhard Heller , the German literary censor in Paris .
At the urging of Heller and the German ambassador Otto Abetz , Brasillach brokered the "donation" of the collection, probably to Abel Bonnard in the summer of 1942 , probably on the occasion of his appointment as Minister for National Education in the Vichy regime .
In a trial brought against the French state by Bonnard after returning from his Spanish exile in the early 1960s, the former confidante of Hitler's Vichy ambassador Otto Abetz complained : “But who will give me back the 15,000 volumes in my library? My collection of Chinese porcelain and my African masks and statues? "
In Sigmaringen or in Switzerland
After the Allied landing in Normandy, the Vichy government was relocated to the Hohenzollern Castle in Sigmaringen in Swabia from the end of August 1944. Among the refugees was the spokesman for the French broadcasts of the Reich Propaganda Ministry, Jean-Hérold Paquis. and Georges Oltramare , a man of the far right. According to information from the Wiesenthal Center, he was an agent paid for by the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, and a good friend of Abel Bonnard. Bonnard, along with the ex-prime minister of the Vichy government, Laval, was one of the privileged collaborators who were flown to Barcelona in a Junkers plane on May 2, 1945.
Even before Bonnard fled to Spain, Jean-Hérold Paquis commissioned the journalist Oltramare, probably with Bonnard's consent, to move the suitcases and sell the art objects in Switzerland in order to get foreign currency. But after Bonnard's departure, Paquis waited in vain in Sigmaringen for the return of Oltramare, who had fled to Switzerland before the German surrender, where he was arrested on April 21, 1945. Paquis tried to follow Oltramare to Switzerland, was arrested on July 8, 1945 on the green German-Swiss border by the French military police, brought to France, sentenced and executed. What remained of “his” Bonnard property in Sigmaringen, or got elsewhere, is unclear.
Parts of the collection can be found in the vicinity of the Swiss banker and presumed Nazi financier François Genoud . Genoud, a banker in Lausanne and a helper to Nazi criminals, financially supported their escape after the war (Operation ODESSA ). He was involved in the exploitation of the looted Nazi art that was transferred or smuggled into Switzerland .
During his interrogations in France in 1947, Oltramare essentially confirmed the history of the transfer of art objects from Bonnard to Genoud, but claimed that some suitcases with the Chinese porcelain collection and a suitcase with pieces from the L'Art Négre collection remained in Sigmaringen.
The remains and other traces
Remnants of the Baud collection appeared in 1945 at the Hohenzollern Castle in Sigmaringen . At the end of the 1960s, a middleman from Abel Bonnard approached the family of the current owner of the remains of the collection and asked for it to be returned. However, he submitted a list that included more pieces than remained in Sigmaringen. It can then be assumed that Bonnard did not know that many of the pieces remained in Switzerland. Bonnard's request was not responded to. The few pieces that survived the war unscathed are now in private hands, along with historical documents.
Even after the war, Vérité's sons Pierre and Claude sold some pieces that they had taken over from their father and that came from the Baud Collection. The Carrefour Gallery remained one of the most important art dealers for African art until 1995. Individual pieces from the collection could have been present at the auction of the Carrefour-Vérité gallery at Sotheby’s .
Parts of the collection can be identified as the core holdings of some large collections and museums.
interpretation
The interplay between art, commerce and politics in the course of European history can be seen in the history of the collection, from the origin to the current whereabouts of parts of the collection. With the destruction of the African art collection as looted art , its fate becomes exemplary for other art and ethnic collections in private hands and in museums.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d List de inventaire personelle d'Capitaine Joseph Baud Porto-Novo, Dahomey (1942 certified copy Paris)
- ↑ a b Annuaire de Societé de l'Africanistes (Paris 1935)
- ↑ Galerie Pierre Vérité, Paris ; “Auction of the Mysterious Tribal Art Collection Verite” , Die Welt ; tribalmania.com
- ↑ Joseph-Marie-Louis Baud (1864-1904), explorateur passé de Saint-Cyr à l'infanterie de marine, multiplia les expéditions. La plus fameuse d'entre elles le mena au Dahomey pour un long périple aux côtés du chef d'escadron Decoeur et du lieutenant Vermeersch: il s'agissait de multiplier les protectorats français en songeant toujours à prendre de l'avance sur les Allemands et les Anglais. Au terme d'une course-poursuite, ils avaient signé nombre de traités avec les indigènes, ce qui valut à notre explorateur la médaille de la Société de geographie et le titre de capitaine. Il voyagea jusqu'à la fin de sa vie afin d'offrir à son pays toujours davantage de territoires nouveaux.
- ↑ Jean Veermersch (1866-?), Lieutenant Lorraine
- ↑ Dareste, P. Le régime de la propriété Française en Afrique Occidentale Française (Paris 1908)
- ↑ Delafosse, M. Le nègres (Paris 1927)
- ↑ a b Exhibition / sales catalog L'Art Négre, La Collection Capitaine Baud, 1935, incomplete (private property, southern Germany)
- ^ Museum Barbier-Mueller, Geneva
- ↑ Louis-Ferdinand Celine, D'un château l'autre, (German. From one castle to another) Gallimard, 1957
- ^ A b New York Times Archive. Paquis, Jean-Herold (1912-1945) - French collaborator; Radio Paris broadcaster; member, French Popular Party (Parti Populaire Française - PPF) arrested near the Swiss frontier 8 Jul 1945 (LT 10 Jul 1945: 3: c); put on trial by a French court for treason Sept 17, 1945 (NYT Sept 17, 1945: 12: 6); convicted and sentenced to death by the Paris Court of Justice 17 Sept 1945 (NYT 18 Sept 1945: 9: 6; LT 18 Sept 1945: 3: d); executed by firing squad at Fort de Chatillon 11 Oct 1945 (NYT 12 Oct 1945: 5: 2; LT 11 Oct 1945: 3: d; LT 12 Oct 1945: 3: c; Purge p. 140). new York
- ↑ a b Archive SKKitson UK Georges Oltramare, French antisemitic journalist; paid agent of German Ambassador Otto Abetz [6p-1] in France and went to Sigmaringen, Germany in 1944; then escaped to Switzerland; arrested there Apr 21, 1945; provisionally released; rearrested by French authorities Feb. 1, 1947; put on trial for collaboration; convicted and sentenced to 3 years imprisonment; released; sentenced to death in absentia by a French court 12 Jan 1950; fled to Spain and later to Egypt where he made anti-semitic radio broadcasts; died at Paris 16 Aug 1960 (SKKitson, La persécution des juifs d'Europe)
- ↑ Art and Knowledge / ed. from the Free German Cultural Association in Great Britain. “... After the surrender, Paquis tries to bring pieces from the Baud Collection (L'Art Négre) to Lausanne, Switzerland. On July 8, 1945, he was arrested by the French military police on the German-Swiss border, brought to Paris, sentenced to death and executed. Where his possessions, including the Baud collection and other works of art of his political friend and the collaborator Abel Bonnard himself, remained, is unclear. ”(London 19 Oct 1945) Commentary from a newspaper note v. October 19, 1945 in the exile newspaper Kunst und Wissen / London about Paquis and the Baud / Abel Bonnard collection (and the attempt to sell / move the collection to Switzerland via the banker Francois Genoud ??)
- ↑ Peter Dittmar: Dark alluring world. Welt Online, accessed on December 4, 2009 : "All pieces came from the Vérité collection, the owners of the Carrefour gallery in Paris, one of the most important art dealers for African art until 1995."