AIX-EN-PROVENCE.- From 24 June to 24 September 2017, the Musée Granet invites you to discover, through nearly one hundred masterworks of modern and contemporary art, the history of the Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, whose acquisitions have been driven by a sense of adventure and a love of art since 1925.

Jeanne Bucher opened her gallery in 1925 to present works by Cubist, surrealist, primitivist and pre-war abstract artists.

The avant-garde artists shown by the Galerie Jeanne Bucher were never limited to a single movement and included Cubist, surrealist, primitivist and pre-war abstract painters.

Originally from Alsace, Jeanne Bucher (Guebwiller, 1872 - Paris, 1946) arrived in Paris in 1922 from Switzerland, where she lived during the First World War. In 1924, Bucher, who spoke three languages, took over the management of a foreign-language bookshop at 2 rue du Cherche-Midi, above Pierre Chareau’s Boutique, which rapidly became a regular haunt for artists. In 1925, Bucher began to display works by artists from a range of backgrounds. She formed close friendships with many of these artists, including Jean Lurçat, who served as her mentor. Among the paintings hung from the gallery’s small picture rails were works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, André Masson, Chaïm Jacob Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Max Ernst (and his Natural History), Giorgio de Chirico, André Bauchant, Hans Arp and Piet Mondrian.

A gallery recognised for promoting and championing the most innovative artists
Widely acclaimed, these presentations allowed Jeanne Bucher to open her own gallery in March 1929, at 5 rue du Cherche-Midi, where she showed works by Massimo Campigli, Alberto Giacometti, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Henri Laurens, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes and Francis Picabia.

From 1935 to the start of the Second World War, with the support of Marie Cuttoli, Bucher managed a space at 9ter boulevard du Montparnasse, where she presented work by a range of painters, now among the greatest names in modern art: Vassily Kandinsky, Raoul Dufy, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Lucio Fontana, Yves Tanguy, Otto Freundlich, Willi Baumeister, Jean and Sophie Taeuber Arp, Etienne Hajdu and Arpad Szenes.

During the war, Jeanne Bucher, highly active as a gallery owner and a fearless protector and promotor of the most innovative artists, also supported Joan Miro, Dora Maar and Vera Pagava, Hans Reichel and new abstract artists André Lanskoy and Nicolas de Staël. She also continued her considerable work as an art publisher, mostly with Georges Hugnet, and brought back works by American artists Mark Tobey and Robert Motherwell from a visit to the USA in 1946, which she planned to show in Paris. Her death in November the same year prevented her from putting her plans into practice.

In 1947, Jean-François Jaeger took over the gallery and continued to present artists from outside France.

Jeanne Bucher’s great nephew, JeanFrançois Jaeger, took over the management of the gallery in 1947 and continued to run it along the same artistic lines as Bucher. He presented post-war abstract works from Europe and the United States and the new figurative and realist painters of the 1970s. He continued Bucher’s work by promoting artists such as Hans Reichel, Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Etienne Hajdu, Jean Lurçat and Nicolas de Staël.

In the 1950s, he presented Roger Bissière, Jean Bertholle, young artists Fermin Aguayo, Wilfrid Moser and Louis Nallard and, for the first time in Europe, the works of Mark Tobey and Louise Nevelson. From 1960, he organised ambitious indigenous art exhibitions with the ethnologist Marcel Evrard and abstract artists Jean Dubuffet, Asger Jorn and Miodrag Dado including the narrative figuration works of Gérard Fromanger, the naturalism of Paul Rebeyrolle and the concrete basalt sculptures of Aix-based Jean Amado.

The gallery continued to provide a showcase for major international artists, such as the Japanese painter Kunihiko Moriguchi, the young Chinese artist Yang Jiechang and the Taoist master Chen, and public art with sculptures Gérard Singer, Dani Karavan, and Jean-Paul Philippe.

2000s: Véronique Jaeger, heir to a passion for art
Véronique Jaeger, the great-granddaughter of Jeanne Bucher and daughter of JeanFrançois Jaeger, took over the gallery on rue de Seine in the early 2000s. Véronique Jaeger initiated a series of major solo exhibitions of artists shown by the gallery in the past - Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Roger Bissière and Jean Dubuffet - and rediscovered artists Hans Reichel, Antonio Segui, Dani Karavan and Vera Pagava. She also manages the gallery’s archives and promotes new artists to keep the gallery’s spirit of discovery and adventure alive.

In addition to the gallery on rue de Seine, she opened a spacious double exhibition area in the Marais in 2008 to present new living artists including Michael Biberstein, Miguel Branco, Dani Karavan (mentioned above), Rui Moreira, Susumu Shingu, Fabienne Verdier, Paul Wallach, Evi Keller, Yang Jiechang, Hanns Schimansky and Zarina Hashmi alongside the gallery’s established artists.

In 2015, the gallery celebrated its 90th anniversary and the work of Jeanne Bucher Jaeger with exhibitions in its spaces on both banks of the Seine.