From June 24 to September 24th, 2017, The Musée Granet will give its visitors the chance to discover, through nearly 100 masterworks of Modern and Contemporary Art, the history of the Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery, where adventure and passion for art have mixed since 1925.

In 1925, Jeanne Bucher created the gallery and exhibited cubists, surrealists, primitivists, and abstract artists from the pre-war period.

From its origins, the Jeanne Bucher Gallery was situated in an avant-garde climate, not limiting itself to any one trend exclusively, and exhibited cubists, surrealists, primitivists, and abstract artists from the pre-war period.

Originally from Alsace, Jeanne Bucher (Guebwiller, 1872 – Paris, 1946) arrived in Paris in 1922 from Switzerland, where she had taken refuge during the First World War. Trilingual, she ran a foreign language bookstore at 3 rue du Cherche-Midi in 1924, above Pierre Chareau’s la Boutique, which rapidly became a meeting place. The store was transformed in 1925 into an exhibition space for artists from diverse origins with whom Jeanne Bucher formed profound friendships, among whom was Jean Lurçat, who served as her mentor. Thus began to appear on her little picture rails works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, André Masson, Chaïm Jacob Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Max Ernst and his Histoire Naturelle, Giorgio de Chirico, André Bauchant, Hans Arp and Piet Mondrian.

A gallery recognized for promoting and supporting the most innovative artists

These universally lauded presentations allowed Jeanne Bucher to open her own gallery in March 1929, at 5 rue du Cherche-Midi, where she showed Massimo Campigli, Alberto Giacometti, Joaquín Torres-García, Henri Laurens, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes and Francis Picabia.

From 1935 until the beginning of the Second World War, with the support of Marie Cuttoli, Jeanne Bucher opened a space at 9ter boulevard du Montparnasse, where she exhibited artists that are today among the greatest names in modern art: Vassily Kandinsky, Raoul Dufy, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Lucio Fontana, Yves Tanguy, Otto Freundlich, Willi Baumeister, Jean et Sophie Taeuber Arp, Etienne Hajdu and Arpad Szenes.

During the war, Jeanne Bucher, an engaged gallerist recognized for her fearlessness in promoting and championing the most innovative artists, also supported Joan Miró, Dora Maar and Vera Pagava, Hans Reichel and the new currents of abstraction, André Lanskoy and Nicolas de Staël. She pursued her considerable work as editor of art books, principally with Georges Hugnet, and brought back from the United States in 1946 important works of American artists such as Mark Tobey and Robert Motherwell, whom she intended to present to the Parisian public before death took her in November of the same year.

Beginning in 1947, Jean-François Jaeger takes over direction of the gallery and solidifies its international dimension

These artistic directions were maintained thanks to the efforts of Bucher’s great-nephew, Jean-François Jaeger, who would assume direction of the gallery beginning in 1947. He showed European and American postwar Abstractionists, but also the new figurative and realist painters of the 1970s. He also aligned himself with Jeanne Bucher by assuring the continued promotion of artists such as Hans Reichel, Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Etienne Hajdu, Jean Lurçat and Nicolas de Staël.

In the 1950s, he exhibited Roger Bissière, Jean Bertholle, the young Fermin Aguayo, Wilfrid Moser, and Louis Nallard as well as Mark Tobey and Louise Nevelson, the latter two being shown for the first time in Europe. The new space at 53 rue de Seine, beginning in 1960, allowed for large-scale exhibitions of indigenous art mounted with Marcel Evrard, but also the abstract artists Jean Dubuffet, Asger Jorn and Miodrag Dado, as well as the narrative figuration of Gérard Fromanger, the naturalism of Paul Rebeyrolle, and the concrete basalt sculptures of Jean Amado.

The introduction of great Asian artists such as the Japanese Kunihiko Moriguchi, the young Chinese artist Yang Jiechang, the Taoist master Chen, as well as public art with sculptors such as Gérard Singer, Dani Karavan, Jean-Paul Philippe and Mark di Suvero, attests to the gallery’s international importance.

The year 2000: Véronique Jaeger and an inherited passion for art

The directorship of the gallery was set up at rue de Seine in the beginning of the 2000s by Véronique Jaeger, great granddaughter of Jeanne Bucher and daughter of Jean-François Jaeger. Véronique Jaeger has initiated a major cycle of important solo exhibitions of artists linked for years to the gallery, such as Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Roger Bissière, Jean Dubuffet, as well as rediscovered artists such as Hans Reichel, Antonio Seguí, Dani Karavan, and Vera Pagava. She is also dedicating herself to the organization of the gallery’s archives, all the while securing the promotion of new artists, thus perpetuating the gallery’s tradition of discovery and adventure.

In addition to the left bank space on rue de Seine, in 2008 she introduced a vast double space in the Marais which permits her to present new living international artists, among whom are Michael Biberstein, Miguel Branco, Dani Karavan, Rui Moreira, Susumu Shingu, Fabienne Verdier, Paul Wallach, Evi Keller, Yang Jiechang, Hanns Schimansky and Zarina as well as the historical figures of the Gallery.

Curators of the exhibition: Bruno Ely, Head Curator of the Musée Granet, and Véronique Jaeger, Director of the Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery.