4 Portrait of Carel van Lier Harmen Meurs (1891-1964) Oil on canvas 115 x 90 cm 1928 Location unknown
Sculpture) by Carl Einstein, was published there. In the Netherlands, interest in Africans and African art remained subdued because of its lack of colonies and a somewhat provincial climate for the arts, but this changed in large part due to the art dealer Carel van Lier (1897-1945). Van Lier’s primary passion was Dutch modern art. Yet in the 1920s, he carefully began combining the works of Dutch painters with ethnographic objects from Africa and Oceania. In 1921, he opened a business on the Damrak in Amsterdam, where he was the first person in the Netherlands to sell what was then known as ‘negerplastiek’3 or Negro sculpture. After a short time, Van Lier moved to Laren, but returned to Amsterdam in 1927, where he settled at Rokin 126. Through these years, he steadily expanded his collection of African art, which was exhibited in January 1927 in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Describing the exhibition, art critic Kasper Niehaus wrote: ‘The collection of negro sculpture
exhibited at present in three ground-floor halls from the collection of Kunstzaal Van Lier in Laren has been expanded considerably since it was last discussed here some years ago. So much so that, currently, though not the oldest (…), it is one of the largest and best in our country.’4 For the most part, Van Lier bought his collection abroad, travelling regularly on the art circuit to London, Antwerp, Paris and Germany. In 1937, he put together an exhibition from the collection of the famous Parisian art dealer Charles Ratton. Other parties began to show interest in African art. In 1925 the Amsterdam branch of Van Metz and Co presented a selection of Bundu masks. At other exhibitions in the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s, examples of the so-called ‘Negro Art’ were shown as well. Art critics such as Niehaus, Wiessing and De Gruyter became enthusiastic advocates. Due to these activities, and following the example of colleagues in France and Germany, Dutch artists cautiously began to collect African art, although not everyone could afford it. The well-known expressionist painter Jan Sluijters bought a modest, but interesting collection from Van Lier (Fig. 4). In several of his paintings, this interest in African art can be seen. All of these developments went unnoticed by the Colonial Museum. After its opening in 1926, the museum exhibited material only about and from the Netherlands East Indies and, to a lesser degree, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. But in museum storage – not yet on display – African materials began to accumulate. The museum received donations of African objects from various private individuals, the most prominent of which was a series of 15 bronze sculptures from Benin in 1926. In fact, the museum acquired the most important collection even before its opening, as a part of an enormous transfer of objects from Artis, the Amsterdam zoo. This gift plays a role in practically all parts of the collection at the Tropenmuseum. The Africa section of the so-called Artis collection was to stir a great commotion (see p.26).
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