The Dan mask, lot 3503 is not part of the Jan Sluijters collections but was bought in the same

The Dan mask, lot 3503 is not part of the Jan Sluijters collections but was bought in the same famous exhibition of 50 objects from the collection of Charles Ratton at Kunstzaal Van Lier in 1937. The following text is about Carel van Lier as the important nestor of Tribal Art in the Netherlands:

Carel van Lier, pioneer of tribal art in the Netherlands



A reviewer of De Telegraaf in 1927 called the ethnographic collection of art dealer Carel van Lier (1897-1945) ‘one of the greatest and best in our country’. Another reviewer estimated its size on ‘one and a half hundred pieces’.

The occasion was the ‘Exhibition of old Negro sculptures’ from the collection of the Kunstzaal Van Lier, which was on show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 8 to 31 January. That was the first time that a museum for modern art in the Netherlands paid attention to tribal art in a separate exhibition.

Where Carel van Lier had acquired his predilection for exotic art is unclear. His first wife, Katinka van der Veen, was a favourite model of Jan Sluijters and befriended Doortje Parree, the wife of Wim Schuhmacher. She introduced Van Lier in the Amsterdam art scene, where around that time the interest in ‘negro art’ began to penetrate. He befriended Sluijters and Schuhmacher, who both would later frequently exhibit in his Kunstzaal and also bought ethnographic art from their friend.



London, Antwerp, Brussels, Paris

Already in 1921, Van Lier opened his own showroom on the Amsterdam Damrak where he exhibited a ‘small collection of negro art’. Shortly thereafter, he moved his trade to the artists’ village of Laren, where he first continued his business in hotel Hamdorff and from 1924 onwards in his own shop. Here, in addition to Eastern and African art, he also showed modern paintings by, among others, Ernst Leyden and Jan Sluijters.

From notes to his second wife, it appears that Van Lier travelled from the mid-twenties to London, Antwerp, Brussels and Paris, where he traded with colleagues like Henri Pareyn, Charles Raton, Paul Guillaume and C.T. Loo. After having exhibited his now extensive collection of tribal art in the Stedelijk in 1927, his name was so well established that he could bring his business to the heart of the art world, the Rokin in Amsterdam. In the same year, Ratton opened his gallery in Paris.



Internationally famed

There, the Kunstzaal Van Lier grew into a gallery of international fame, where one could see the work of modern artists of that time: Schuhmacher, Sluijters, Dick Ket, Charley Toorop, Edgar Fernhout, Carel Willink and Hendrik Chabot and foreigners including Max Beckmann, Georg Grosz, Erwin Blumenfeld, Hannah Höch, Moïse Kisling and Margherita Toppi (see lots 4621 and 4622). Their mostly realistic work was combined with Asian and African ethnographic of the highest quality. Prominent collectors such as Eduard Baron Von der Heydt, Han Coray and Georg Tillmann were regular customers. Partly through them, many pieces from the Van Lier collection have ended up in museums in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the United States.

Schuhmacher, Sluijters and other artists also bought or exchanged ethnographic objects from Van Lier. Some of the Sluijters pieces are now on sale (lots 3501, 3502 and 3504). In 1937 Van Lier showed fifty pieces from the collection of his famous Parisian colleague Charles Raton. A Dan mask from that exhibition is offered in this auction, lot 3503 and the horned Baule mask, lot 3502, from the collection of the Dutch painter Jan Sluijters.

Van Lier, Jewish but married to a non-Jewish woman, fell prey to the persecution of the Jews in 1943. Via Auschwitz he finally ended up in Hanover, where he lost his life to exhaustion.