Ratton, Charles Alfred Marius (1895-1986)
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Expert and dealer in ‘extra-European’ arts, Ratton built a large network of customers in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States and was responsible for the first sales and exhibitions of so-called primitive arts. For a few years after 1930, he associated with the art dealer Louis Carré, with whom he organised sales and exhibitions. As part of their collaboration as the... Read more
Expert and dealer in ‘extra-European’ arts, Ratton built a large network of customers in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States and was responsible for the first sales and exhibitions of so-called primitive arts. For a few years after 1930, he associated with the art dealer Louis Carré, with whom he organised sales and exhibitions.
As part of their collaboration as the ‘Carré-Ratton firm’, they bought objects using common funds. After the firm dissolved, the objects they had not sold were shared between them.
Ratton was mobilised during the Second World War but was back to business in 1945. His gallery, 14 rue de Marignan, Paris, was an important address for several German dealers. Since the interwar period, Ratton’s clients also included numerous museums: Frankfurt, Mainz, Bonn, Munich, Wuppertal and Düsseldorf . He acquired and sold objects from the collections of Maurice Edmond Karl de Rothschild (Agorha database).
Before his death in 1986, Ratton tried to donate his collection of extra-European art to the Musée du Louvre, which refused the offer. It was therefore dispersed, and the Musée Dapper became one of its main buyers.
In the 1930s, he became one of the first French dealers to develop a specific focus on objects from the Kingdom of Benin. In 1932, he published an illustrated article, ‘Les bronzes du Bénin’, in an issue of Cahiers d’Art (nos. 3–5) and co-organized a major exhibition with the Musée du Trocadéro in Paris and Georges Henri Rivière (Bodenstein, 2018, 272-276).
He sold these pieces over a long period (1930s–70s). They were obtained by exchange with museums (Pitt Rivers, Frankfurt), purchased from other dealers or during sales in London (such as the 1930 Fosters sale of George William Neville’s collection, which had been looted during the British Military Campaign on Benin in 1897, and Sotheby’s in 1965, 1968 and 1972). He bought the objects for himself or in collaboration with Louis Carré and later Kenneth John Hewett (Pitt Rivers data 2022).
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27 objects
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