PARIS 1931
97
FIG. 11 (right): Ornament,
ivipo’o. Marquesas Islands.
Bone. H: 5 cm.
Paul Rupalley, Paris; Étude Flagel,
Paris, “Collection Paul Rupalley,” 16
March 1930, lot 38; Charles Ratton,
Paris; Michel Leveau, Paris; Béatrice
and Patrick Caput, Paris; Binoche et
Giquello, Paris, “Collection Béatrice
et Patrick Caput,“ 15 November
2018, lot 27.
Private collection.
Photo courtesy of Binoche et
Giquello, Paris.
FIG. 12 (below): Page from
the 1930 Rupalley catalog
showing fi gure 11 (upper
left).
Image courtesy of the author.
and around 1927, when the Parisian vogue du
nègre was at its peak, he made a few major purchases
of African art. The most striking of these,
a hammered-metal Fon fi gure from the treasury
of King Behanzin in honor of Gu, god of iron
and war, appeared in an important special issue
of the magazine Cahiers d’Art in 1927 (FIG. 9).5
It was his fi rst “published” object, and marked
his emergence as a signifi cant player in the Parisian
market for what was then called art nègre.
THE GALERIE PIGALLE EXHIBITION
Three years later, Ratton took another important
step by joining the poet Tristan Tzara and
the dealer Pierre Loeb in organizing a major
exhibition of African and Oceanic sculpture in
the gallery attached to the ultra-modern Théâtre
Pigalle.6 Reviews of this show, the largest of its
type in Paris since the landmark L’Art indigène
des colonies françaises et du Congo Belge at the
Louvre’s Pavillon de Marsan in 1923, indicated
that French taste had reached a turning point.
Among the capital’s art critics and cultural
commentators in the early 1920s, African and
Oceanic art was a minority enthusiasm. The
fashionable position had been to express skepticism—
usually with smug irony, sometimes in
more virulent terms—of the avant-garde “missionaries
in reverse” who declared art nègre to
be “the only true art, inspirer of all the others,
just as Bach is the father of music.”7 Reviews
of the Pigalle exhibition, in contrast, gave voice
to a new conventional wisdom. First, critics
overwhelmingly emphasized the close connections
between African and Oceanic sculpture
and cutting-edge modern art, retelling what was
fast becoming the familiar story of its “discovery”
by fauves and cubists in the years before
the war and proclaiming its ongoing relevance
for succeeding waves of the avant-garde, from
purism to surrealism. Roger Lesbats, critic for
Le Populaire, saw a “strange reverse shock” at
work: “The public is able to value the primitive
arts so highly because it sees them through the
works they have infl uenced.”8 Second, many
journalists presented the Pigalle exhibition as a
breakthrough in connoisseurship. Where once
“snobbery required one to swoon before every
piece of art nègre, authentic or fake,” Paul Fierens
wrote in the Journal des débats, it was now