Matter and Memory: the Patriarch's Realm - Press Kit

On the occasion of the 90th birthday of

JEAN-FRANÇOIS JAEGER and his 66 years as gallery owner

exhibition

Matter and Memory: the Patriarch s Realm 19th November 2013-25th January 2014 5 & 7 rue de Saintonge – Paris 3e 53 rue de Seine – Paris 6e

Press Kit

On the occasion of the 90th birthday of

JEAN-FRANÇOIS JAEGER and his 66 years as gallery owner

exhibition

Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm 19th November 2013 - 25th January 2014 5 & 7 rue de Saintonge – Paris 3e 53 rue de Seine – Paris 6e Private opening Saturday 16th November 2013

PRESS KIT

Press Kit | Jean-Franรงois Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Matter and Memory: The Patriarchย s Realm

Jean-Franรงois Jaeger Mark Tobey and Maria Helena Viera da Silva, Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

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or the general public, approaching art often means studying the masterpieces of great artists in museums. Little attention is paid to those who work in the shadows to promote artists and participate in their

success. Jean-François Jaeger, like many of his eminent colleagues Léonce Rosenberg, Louis Carré, Daniel Cordier, Pierre Loeb, Dina Vierny, and Aimé Maeght devoted his long life and career to discovering and promoting artists he believed in, while re-shaping in his own image the gallery that already bore the famous name of Jeanne Bucher. The list of his “laureates” is no less impressive than his action on their behalf in museums both in France and abroad (Nicolas de Staël, Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Hans Reichel, Bissière, Mark Tobey, Jean Dubuffet, Fermin Aguayo, Asger Jorn, Wilfred Moser…). From the 1960s on he was a precursor of such contemporary trends in the art world as Primitive Arts, the Orient, Public Art, Women in Art. His exhibitions, all marked by originality and high standards, have established his reputation over the past fifty years in France and in Europe.

On the occasion of Jean-François Jaeger s 90th birthday the gallery that now bears his name, coupled with that of Jeanne Bucher, is presenting an exposition entitled Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm. The three Parisian spaces of the gallery on the Right and Left Banks, headed by actual Director and main owner Véronique Jaeger, are all dedicated to the current exhibtion.

The title of the exhibition is an allusion to Henri Bergson s essay Matter and Memory first published in 1896. Dealing with the relation of mind to body and of mind to time Bergson s essay is an appropriate metaphor for the works of the artists exhibited by the gallery: the matter of their works is undeniably related to the artistic tendencies of particular times and places but the memory that animates them, inseparable from their perception, brings this past into the present, creating works that are profoundly free and belonging to no other time than that of their perception by the viewer.

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm 19th November 2013 - 25th January 2014

Will be presented In the Marais space: • 5 rue de Saintonge, Paris 3e, the pillars or the emblematic artists of the gallery with whom Jean-François Jaeger collaborated for fifty years: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jean Dubuffet, Nicolas de Staël, Roger Bissière, Mark Tobey, and Hans Reichel, all represented by a collection of works of exceptional quality from various periods.

• 7 rue de Saintonge, Paris 3e, works by artists emblematic of the period when they were shown at the gallery, were exhibited for the first time in France or were re-discovered: Jean-Jacques Ceccarelli, Miodrag Dado, Gérard Fromanger, Michel Gérard, Asger Jorn, Louis le Brocquy, Arthur Luis Piza, Paul Rebeyrolle and Felix Rozen, as well as young artists discovered by Jean-François Jaeger during the 1950s and who are still today promoted by the gallery: Fermin Aguayo, Louis Nallard and Wilfrid Moser. Included are works of Public Art, a theme dear to Jean-François Jaeger since the 1980s: Gérard Singer, Jean Amado, Dani Karavan, Jean-Paul Phillipe and Mark di Suvero.

Marais space 5 & 7 rue de Saintonge Paris 3e

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Historical space of the Jeanne-Bucher Gallery 53 rue de Seine Paris 6e

In the historical space of the Jeanne-Bucher Gallery: • 53 rue de Seine, Paris 6e, three exceptional thematics—precursors in the 1960s—are on display.

These presentations provide an opportunity to re-exhibit masterpieces of an earlier period in conjunction with contemporary artists who are working in a similar vein. The link between tradition and modernity is one of the values the gallery has defended since its founding.

I/ Primitive Arts, masterpieces from New Guinea and New Hebrides, stone sculptures from ancient Mexico, are a reminder of emblematic exhibitions held in the early 1960s before the sixth arrondissement became the quarter for Primitive Arts.

II/ Espace en Demeure (Space in Dwelling) or the creative space of women artists of the early 1960s, a legendary exhibition featuring major works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Louise Nevelson, as well as two contemporary women artists working with the gallery, Fabienne Verdier and Zarina Hashmi.

III/ The Attraction of the Orient, recalling Jean-François Jaeger s invitation to a Chinese Taoist Master in the 1960s and a memorable Tea Ceremony held at the gallery, this exhibition features Mark Tobey, Kunihiko Moriguchi, Maître Chen, Wakako, Yang Jiechang and more recently Susumu Shingu. Not to be forgotten: an exceptional “Pierre de Rêve” (Dream Stone) that once belonged to the collection of Roger Caillois.

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Press Kit | Jean-Franรงois Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

The Jean-Franรงois Jaegerย s Arrival at the Gallery in 1947

The Gallery, 9ter boulevard du Montparnasse Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

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ounded in 1925 by Jeanne Bucher in the rue du Cherche-Midi before moving to the boulevard du Montparnasse in 1935, the gallery was from its very beginnings an outpost of the avant-garde,

exhibiting many of the great masters of Modern Art, some of whom were still unknown to the general public: Arp, Braque, Campigli, de Chirico, Ernst, Gris, Kandinsky, Lapique, Laurens, Léger, Lipchitz, Masson, Miró, Mondrian, Picabia, Picasso, Tanguy, and Torrès-Garcia. Jeanne Bucher s involvement with young artists led her to be among the first to promote the works of Giacometti, Vieira da Silva and her husband Arpad Szenes, Lucio Fontana, Nicolas de Staël and Mark Tobey.

Upon Jeanne Bucher s death on the 1st November 1946 and in accord with her wishes, the gallery stayed its course under the able leadership of her son-in-law Dr. André Cournand in New York and Marthe Bois in Paris, who had been Jeanne Bucher s assistant since 1938. Despite its out-of-the way location in a small pavilion on 9ter boulevard du Montparnasse, far from the mainstream left-bank galleries, the gallery continued to attract a fervent public.

At the end of the war a new generation of artists, schooled in traditional ways but influenced by Cubism, converted to Abstraction. Two distinct “climates” were discernible at the time, one illustrated by the Neoplasticism of Mondrian and Malévitch, the other by a group of former students of Bissière at the Ranson Academy Manessier, Bertholle, Le Moal, Bazaine and Singer who all stressed the importance of sensibility and a specifically French tradition of plastic rigour and poetic effusions.

It was in the “climate” of this second group that the future son-in-law of Jeanne Bucher, the 23 year-old Jean-François Jaeger, was entrusted with the direction of the gallery in 1947. Nothing pre-disposed him for this difficult task. Was it the irresistible force of destiny that made him respond “Yes, with passion” when his future father-in-law Doctor Cournand asked him to take over the business? Little did he know at the time the extent of his responsibilities and the total devotion to duty this decision would impose on him.

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Born in the shadow of Strasbourg Cathedral on the 3rd November 1923, Jean-François Jaeger remembers little of his childhood and adolescence but what he remembers left a deep impression on him: the village of Obernai, the haunting noise of a waterfall next to the “Old Mill” Family House, the shock of the discovery of the Retable d Issenheim at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar when he was only seven, Mozart operas and masses heard on the radio, bedside books on Rembrandt and the tales of Boccaccio, long walks in the countryside where his family had taken refuge at the beginning of the war. It was there that he was initiated into the art of painting by a young painter, Bernard Lavergne.

Lavergne taught him to see space and light in a new way. “In listening to him,” Jean-François Jaeger recalls, “your surroundings suddenly seemed to take on a “pictural” dimension. They were no longer mere images. They had a new depth and colourfulness, the enchantment of a nature redolent with smells and alive with magic.”

At the end of the war, Jean-François Jaeger assumed a position at the Direction of Information for the Ministry of Culture in Paris. Between 1945 and 1947 his responsibility was to mount exhibitions on cultural activities in Alsace under the German occupation. One of his first exhibitions was devoted to a presentation of photographic documents relating to death camps.

Left, Jean-François Jaeger and Roger Bissière, 1950 Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Jean-François Jaeger And Mark di Suvero, FIAC 1996.

Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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The Marais Space | 5 rue de Saintonge - Paris 3e Private opening Saturday 16th November 2013 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm

The Pillars Emblematic Artists of the Gallery

View of the Exhibition Jean Dubuffet at the gallery in 1968. Archives Gallery JaegerBucher, Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Hans Reichel Although Jeanne Bucher first encountered the Bavarian artist Hans Reichel in 1930, it was only after the war in 1946 that she presented an exhibition of his watercolours to a Parisian public. As Charles Estienne wrote of these works in the review Terre des hommes, “It is a small lyrical world of flowers and birds, of grasses and fish, and sometimes of non-identifiable signs… The same universe reveals itself in all the watercolours, oils or gouaches, painted with an extraordinary freshness and attention to detail…”

The following year the 23 year-old Jean-François Jaeger set up his first exhibition (14th October-1st November 1947), a presentation of some thirty small watercolours by Reichel. “The talismanic poetry and the sensual fluidity of his watercolours plunge us into a state of wonderment. Looking at them, I am dazzled by the presence of another light, of another order, a message from elsewhere that is so desirable, so overwhelming in its simplicity, its harmony and its truth that it transfigures the very format of oils and watercolours and confers on them a dimension of universality.”

This exhibition was a baptism by fire for the gallery, attended by prominent artists and critics such as: Staël, Vieira da Silva, Szenes, Poliakoff, Deyrolle, Hélion, Bertholle, Geer van Velde, Goetz, Domela, Lanksoy, Hartung, Roberta Gonzales, Hillaireau, Bissière and Manessier; Descargues, Lassaigne, Leymarie, Pillement, Tzara, Bourniquel, Herta Wescher and Robert Vrinat. Reichel became a model for Jean-François Jaeger as artist indifferent to social or professional success and wholly devoted to his art.

Hans Reichel L il cosmologique, 1938, watercolour on paper, 20 x 13 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

The intimate setting of the gallery, suitable to small watercolours, was home to several exhibitions in the 1950s. The year after Reichel was awarded the Jongkind prize in 1952, the first retrospective of his work was organised by Jean-François Jaeger. At a time when “geometry” was everywhere triumphant, artists, amateurs and critics flocked to admire the works of this “timeless” artist of inner spaces, with his vision of life and death. The exhibitions of 1955 and 1957 show him at his most austere: patches of colour and aquatic forms convey the light that dwells within.

Hans Reichel Poisson rouge dans la mousse, 1927, oil on cardboard 22 x 31 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

In 1962, four years after the artist s death, an exhibition entitled Retrospective 19221958 celebrated the seventieth anniversary of his birth. His closest friends, Brassaï, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Bissière and Jean-François Jaeger penned texts for an imposing catalogue in French and German presenting 54 oils and watercolours. JeanFrançois Jaeger in a moving homage to the artist wrote: “Your work has the limpidity of clear water in which the restless eye of the poet sometimes mirrors itself.

Hans Reichel Poisson et Fleurs, 1928, watercolour on paper Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

In 1976 fourteen works by Reichel were acquired by the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar thanks to the generosity of Madame Schimek-Reichel and the help of JeanFrançois Jaeger who knew of the artist s attachment to the treasures of this museum.

Four years later forty watercolours from 1920 to 1958 were exhibited with The Gurs Notebook, a magnificent collection of self-revelations painted while the artist was interned in a concentration camp during the Second World War. These were presented to the public along with a study on the artist by François Mathey in an exhibition entitled From the Land of the Gostersool.

The last important exhibition, bringing together works by Reichel and another German artist, Günter Haese, took place in 2007. Organised by Véronique Jaeger in the rue de Seine, L œil cosmologique was a confrontation between different mediums and periods, plunging the spectator into the sensibility of German romanticism and nourishing a dialogue between two visions of nature —the aquatic, biological world of Reichel s watercolours on the one hand and the airy, delicate world of Haese s sculptures spun out of thread on the other. This presentation retraced the itineraries of two great artists both of whom sought to create —without haste, in the laborious silence and intimacy of their studios— a vast and enchanting world that is in the image of the universe, at once fragile and perfect.

Roger Bissière In the life of Jean-François Jaeger the relationship with the painter Bissière held a preponderate place. When he arrived at the gallery in 1947, he was initiated into painting by Jean Bertholle, who sang the praises of the older Bissière, the spiritual mentor of a whole generation of young artists in search of their identity at the Académie Ranson.

The 1951 exhibition, Images sans titres, would mark a milestone in the gallery s history. After the failure of an exhibition at Drouin s in 1947, Bissière wanted—in all modesty—to return to the Paris art market as a debutant. So at the age of sixty-three he retreated to his studio in Boissiérettes (Lot), living as a recluse in primitive conditions, attuned to the seasons and cut off from the cultural life of Paris. The egg tempera paintings that came out of this retreat, born of a rage to defy fate, would result in a successful exhibition that re-launched his career: “There were two rooms and the walls were covered with paintings. The exhibition was a huge success. Two thirds of the paintings were sold. The prices were ridiculously low. Bissière had wanted to “stoop to conquer,” which he did. There was considerable enthusiasm among art lovers for this novelty and his notoriety quickly spread both in France and abroad.” Paris artists discovered with the same fervour the deceptively elementary technique of painting using patches of colour in mat tones that had long been practiced during the Middle Ages.

Roger Bissière, Oiseau, 1950, egg tempera on canvas, 42 x 34 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Twenty-five canvases of more imposing formats figured in the exhibition the following year. The impact of this presentation was considerable, both at the time and in the long run, in French and foreign museums. A few days after the preview on the 10th December, a trio of important Dutch museum curators singled out three large format works for acquisition: Willem Sandberg, recently appointed head of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (Bleu), Eddy de Wilde of the Eindhoven Mu-

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

seum (Drapeau), and K.E. Schurman at the Gemeentmuseum in The Hague (Croix du Sud). In subsequent years dozens of paintings would be acquired by some of world s great museum collections but mainly in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland.

The 1954 edition of Bissière s Cantique au soleil de François d Assise remains to this day one of the most beautiful examples of an engraved book, although no printers at the time were willing to take the risk of printing it (there are only 28 copies). Two years later the artist returned to oil painting, abandoning the mat and bright tones of egg tempera in favour of transparent and chiaroscuro subtleties.

Jacques Lassaigne was responsible for the catalogue, the first to be published by the gallery. Among the masterpieces presented were La fête à Neuilly, today in Berardo de Sintra s collection, Souvenir de Ville d Avray, in the collection of the Boymans Museum in Amsterdam, Equinoxe d été at the Centre Pompidou as well as La Guingette and Esprit des forêts. In 1958, from the 10th June to the 12th July, a series of 34 oils on paper on the theme of the four seasons was presented, a kind of running diary the artist kept of his daily dialogue with nature and landscapes.

Roger Bissière, Le chat, à la maison, 1951, egg tempera on canvas 81 x 65 cm, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

The 1962 spring exhibition in the new premises in the rue de Seine gave a foretaste of the grand retrospective that would take place at the Lucerne Kunstmuseum featuring 34 pictures painted over a period of two years. Raymond Cogniat, an art critique at Le Figaro, wrote of them: “These compositions are both a mood (état d âme) and a state of nature, existing in perfect harmony. One senses the whole past of the artist behind the freedom he has won.”

The last presentation during the artist s lifetime—a few days before the Venice Biennial which awarded him an honourable mention—consisted of a Journal en images, a series of fifty small panels realised after the death of his wife Mousse, to express “the full measure of his distress.”

Le Chemin et la manière in 1973 brought together works in small formats from 1920 to 1964, most of them on paper using graphite, charcoal, red chalk, litho pen, ink, pastel, watercolour, wax, tempera or oil. At the 1987 FIAC paintings and drawings were presented along with the publication of Saison published by Porte du Sud. Four years later, in March 2001, a rigorously researched Catalogue Raisonné in three volumes by Isabelle Bissière and Virginie Duval was published to accompany a very successful presentation of the artist s works.

The last presentation at the Carrousel du Louvre for Art Paris in 2005 was a retrospective featuring twenty works, oils on canvas and on paper, egg tempera paintings and in China ink realised between 1934 and 1964, including the magnificent Floréal and Oiseau.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Bissière, a retrospective of his work is planned at the museum of Lodève and at the museum of Bordeaux, followed by an exhibition at the gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher in 2015.

Roger Bissière, Soleil levant, 1960 oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher Paris, photo : J-L Losi

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva Few artists in the history of 20th century art have had a destiny so closely bound up with a gallery as Vieira da Silva. For more than sixty years the work of this Portuguese artist has been assiduously defended and promoted by Jean-François Jaeger.

With the publication in 1933 of KO & KO, an illustrated children s book, Vieira da Silva became one of the gallery s major artists, featured in more than fifteen monographic exhibitions from 1951 to the present. After moving into the vast space on the rue de Seine in 1960 the gallery was able to invest itself actively in promoting her works in museums both in France and abroad. Numerous publications dedicated to her works, a Catalogue Raisonné, the creation of a Parisian association bearing her name and the permanent support of the Vieira da Silva Foundation in Lisbon, have all contributed to winning recognition for this outstanding artist.

The exhibition Gouaches at the gallery, followed by one at the Berne Kunsthalle in 1951, in connection with the publication of Et puis voilà, marked the beginnings of a long collaboration between the artist and Jean-François Jaeger. A decade later the first monographic exhibition was dedicated to her in the enlarged space of the rue de Seine. Because of the physical decline of Pierre Loeb, who had been promoting her work, and the talent shown by Jean-François Jaeger in defending the work of artists such as Bissière and Tobey, Vieira da Silva decided, on the advice of Ted Schemp, to entrust the promotion of her work to Jean-François Jaeger in partnership with the Knoedler Gallery in New York. During the months of November and December in 1960 large crowds flocked to view an artist at the height of her powers: twenty-eight landscapes and cityscapes apprehended in a space of constructed networks, characteristic of her vision of the world.

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, La Bibliothèque de Malraux, 1974, oil on canvas 130 x 97 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Preparation for the exhibition Temperas, gouaches against a lithographic and serigraphic background from 1st December to 15th January 1972, in association with the publication of Vieira da Silva by Dora Vallier, remains one of the high points in the gallery s history. Over the weekend before the preview Jean-François Jaeger built a wood-beam structure in the image of the artist s work, “appropriating” her space.

When she first saw this structure she was speechless. Suddenly she felt as if she had been revealed to herself.

There have been other high points. In 1976 the gallery published Chère voisine, multiple et une… celebrating twenty years of friendship between Vieira da Silva and René Char.

A poem dedicated to her accompanies seven portraits of the poet. In its classicism Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, La Scala ou les yeux, 1937, oil on canvas, 60 x 92 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, photo: J-L Losi

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

this work bears witness to the moving encounter between a great poet and a deeply human artist obsessed by her aspiration to transcend her original anguish and attain spiritual freedom.

From the 14th October to the 22nd November 1986 the gallery presented eighteen paintings realised by the artist between 1984 and 1986 along with an edition of Elegy for Philippe-Manguilen Senghor, a poem by President Senghor evoking the sorrow and despair of a father devastated by the death of his son a few years earlier. The visitors book, with over a hundred pages of signatures, attests to the considerable success of this exhibition. Senghor, Simone Veil, Claude Pompidou, present at the preview, were followed several days later by President Mitterrand and Mario Soarès.

The artist s death in 1992 left an immense void at the gallery. A year before she had created the Vieira da Silva-Arpad Szenes Foundation to ensure the continuing promotion of her works and those of her deceased husband, making JeanFrançois Jaeger the general Secretary and his brother George the President.

With her passing, the dwellings she had imagined, in which the colour white predominates, belonged henceforth to a transcendent world haunted by the spirit of her deceased husband Arpad Szenes, a world she had fervently desired to rejoin.

1994 was in part dedicated to honouring the memory of Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes. Two exhibitions were held, the most important being Homage to Vieira da Silva Lisbon-Paris, 1908-1992, to promote the publication by Skira of a Catalogue Raisonné of her works and an accompanying monograph co-authored by Virginie Duval and Diane Daval-Bérand.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death in the spring of 2002, twenty-five of her works covering the creative years 1932 to 1990 oil paintings, gouaches, temperas and drawings—were exhibited, giving a general overview of her entire career, from her arrival in Paris from Lisbon to the works of her later years evoking the memory of voluntary exile in Brazil during the war. On this occasion, Véronique Jaeger was the co-curator of the 10th Anniversary exhibition of the artist s Foundation in Lisbon.

Top, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Stèle, 1964, tempera on oil, 195 x 114 cm © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist.

RMNGrand Palais/ Philippe Migeat. © ADAGP Paris 2013 Bottom, View of the exhibition Vieira da Silva at the Gallery in 1971, Archives Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Mémoire, 1966-1967, oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, photo: J-L Losi

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

An exhibition commemorating the hundredth anniversary of her birth was presented at the gallery and at the FIAC in 2008. The first brought together around fifty works on paper from the period 1930-37, a selection highlighted by several emblematic canvases such as La Scala ou les yeux, La Basilique, Vers la lumière.

The second at the Grand Palais, where twenty years previously a memorable retrospective of the artist had taken place, featured twenty masterpieces, some of them from the world s great museums, notably La Gare St-Lazare, Mémoire, Ariane.

Mark Tobey The “little pictural cosmogony” by Mark Tobey, some of whose works were brought back from the United States by Jeanne Bucher in 1945, had its first European exhibition in 1955 in partnership with the Willard Gallery of New York. In a letter to Marian Willard Jean-François Jaeger expresses enthusiasm for Tobey s craftsmanship: “Such extreme conscientiousness in an artist is rare. In the maze of lines and signs that compose the space of his works there is a faith that enlightens and animates, akin to the faith that animates forests, star constellations and motley crowds.”

Mark Tobey, Animal Totem, 1944, tempera on cardboard, 37 x 17.5 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher Paris, photo: J-L Losi

On the occasion of Tobey s second prsentation at the gallery in 1953, Ernst Beyeler travelled to Paris especially to meet the artist. This new presentation in late 1959, one of the last to be held at the Montparnasse Gallery, drew a large public: Miró, Vieira da Silva, Pierre Restany and the young Gérard Singer all came to admire the most recent works of Tobey who had just been awarded the international “grand prix” at the 1958 Venice Biennial. Though a contemporary of prolific New York artists , Tobey had not been much appreciated in his native country, which was fascinated by the spectacular. His inward-looking works, in which sensation and emotion are subtly spiritualised, found a more receptive welcome among European art lovers.

The acquisition of forty of his works by the Beyeler Gallery prompted the artist to settle permanently in Basel where he led a monk-like existence in the monotonous tranquillity of Switzerland until his death in 1976. His relations with the Jeanne-Bucher Gallery did not come to an end however. A new series of monotypes won widespread acclaim in 1965 and attracted the attention of the MOMA in New York and the MANAM in Paris, which bought two of the works exhibited.

The history of a gallery is also made up of the events of extra-cultural history.

In May 1968, as demonstrators fled tear gas in the Latin Quarter, a considerable crowd made their way “in tears” to the gallery to the see a presentation of fifteen recent tempera and two larger-format paintings: Sagittarius Red lent by the Basel Mark Tobey Rive Gauche, 1955, tempera on paper, 61 x 91 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher Paris, photo: J-L Losi

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Kunstmuseum and Unknown Journey finished on the day Tobey s friend Pehr died and acquired by the MNAM/CCI. The tempera Existence in Space would eventually find its home in the collection of the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam.

The 1990 and 2010 FIAC would commemorate the hundredth and one hundredth and twentieth anniversary of the artist s birth in Wisconsin. Park Avenue Crucifixion, acquired by the Valence Museum in the Drôme after its exhibition in 1990 was presented along with the magnificent World and Escape from Static.

Nicolas de Staël The promotion of Nicolas de Staël from the late 1950s was partly due to the solid friendship between Jean-François Jaeger and the painter s second wife, Françoise de Staël. For more than thirty years the gallery supported her research for the preparation of Catalogues Raisonnés of paintings and works on paper. It also lent her its assistance in setting up and organising the Comité de Nicolas de Staël, based until recently at the gallery in the rue de Seine. The presentation in the spring of 2013 of her Catalogue Raisonné was a fitting homage to a woman who had passed away a few months earlier.

Nicolas de Staël Jour de Fête, 1947 oil on canvas 100 x 73 cm, courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Everything began in the late 1930s. The promotion of young artists was a cause dear to Jeanne Bucher, and to introduce their works she often chose to present them alongside more established artists. Thus in February 1944 the gallery exhibited several small-scale, geometrical plain compositions by de Staël amid painting-objects by Domela and gouaches by Kandinsky. Despite the constraints of wartime Paris, the preview drew some of the leading figures of the art world: Picasso, Braque, Dora Maar, Vantongerloo, Bazaine and Lanskoy. Won over by de Staël s works, Jeanne Bucher confided to her friend Vieira da Silva in 1945: “I am showing a young painter, Nicolas de Staël, whose tendencies are abstract and not so very different from your own. His palette is like velvet.”

The first personal exhibition of Nicolas de Staël in April 1945 was one of the highlights of the post-war history of the gallery, two years before Jean-François Jaeger arrived at the gallery. Happy to benefit from the assistance and generous guidance of artists Jeanne Bucher had supported, Jean-François Jaeger made the rounds of their studios. One of these visits was to have a profound effect on him: the encounter with Nicolas de Staël and his “light that is irreducible to any other.”

A few minutes with the painter were enough to make him feel all the bitterness, restlessness and self-destructiveness of a man who wanted to impose his own laws on art and would soon break tragically with life. “I went to introduce myself to him shortly after my arrival at the gallery. I met him at his studio a giant, strapping fellow standing in front of an enormous canvas he had been working on with a knife the size of a trowel like a stonemason in the midst of the tools of his trade. This vision left me stunned, terror-stricken. Back on the street I reeled as if drunk, unable to confront the reality of this still formless work charged with unbearable energy.”

Shortly before his death the artist had confessed to Jean-François Jaeger his distress and despair of life, without however intimating that he intended to end it.

“When one day in the spring of 1955 he came to see me and said, “Jaeger, I am lost,” I couldn t believe my ears. How could I admit for a single moment that this soaring colossus of a man might be on the verge of collapse? I blame myself for having had nothing but kind words for the difficult phase he was going through, little suspecting that his last Parisian visit might be a final farewell.”

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From the 21st February to the 22nd March 1958, an ensemble of 43 charcoal, wash and China ink drawings from the 1940s “shook the walls” of the first floor of the gallery at 9 ter. The preface for the catalogue by Roger van Gindertaël evokes “these few examples of the abundant production in black and white that accompanied Staël s first great pictural period, the period during which he broke up the construction and rhythms of his compositions into numerous underlying layers of forms, which were so many direct and unrepeated creations in the fluidity of the lines traced on paper… On every page, painted with a thousand vibrations, the stroke of the brush, similar and dissimilar, a gesture, a weight….”

With the presence of Nicolas de Staël at the gallery, where he began his career supported by Jeanne Bucher, grew a feeling of belonging which became gradually more evident.

In the spring of 1979, there was a new presentation of 123 drawings from the period 1953-55. These included a series of landscapes (Agrigento, Fiesole, Briançon), nudes in felt-tip or China ink, boats observed on the Mediterranean, fruit drawn in ink, studies for a violin and a piano in felt-tip and a charcoal nude finished a few days before his death. A large crowd came to admire the drawings of a painter who did not aim to imitate the real but to suggest its structures, its lines of force and its movements. In the visitors book are to be found the signatures of Geneviève Asse, Henri Cartier Bresson, Zoran Music, President Valérie Giscard d Estaing, the Danish curator Haarvard Rostrup, Suzanne Tézenas and Alfred Pacquement.

Nicolas de Staël Nappe, pots et bouteilles, 1955, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Revoir Nicolas de Staël preceded by a few weeks the grand retrospective organised at the Grand Palais during the summer of 1981. It presented sixty oils covering the ten years, 1945-1955, when the artist was at the height of his powers. His daughter Anne wrote the preface for the catalogue, evoking the creative magic of her father: “He is conscious of what he bears within himself (is that pride?), he who

Nicolas de Staël Portrait de Anne de Staël, 1953, oil on canvas, 130 x 89 cm © Unterlinden Museum Colmar, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

in his humility announces to the world a new light and exhausts his forces against himself.”

While preparing a Catalogue Raisonné of his works and in order to encourage collectors to answer a questionnaire devised by Françoise de Staël, the gallery decided in 1985 to present at the FIAC, without any commercial aim, eleven masterpieces from de Staël s late period including: Figures, 1953; Figure à cheval, 1954; Le Pont Marie, 1954; Paysage de Sicile, 1954; Nature morte aux bocaux, 1955; Coin d atelier fond bleu, 1955; Ciel, 1955; Lanterne et pichet, 1955; Nappe, pots et bouteilles, 1955. The gallery s stand would be the main pole of attraction at the Grand Palais for twelve days.

Nicolas de Staël La Montaigne de Sainte Victoire, 1954, oil on canvas, 89 x 130 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/JeanneBucher, Paris, Photo : L. Joubert

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In 1993, the gallery supported the first travelling exhibition of de Staël in Japan in an effort to promote the artist abroad. Four years later, following the publication of a Catalogue Raisonné in 1997, there would be new exhibition at the gallery to mark the release of a book by his daughter Anne, Du trait à la couleur, published by the Imprimerie Nationale. The crowd that flocked to the gallery was so large that on some Saturdays it was impossible to gain entry.

More than 250 books were sold in the course of the last two months of the year, which ended with 4000 copies being sold in a few weeks—a rare occurrence for this kind of publication. The presence of the Portrait d Anne, 1953, on loan from the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar for the first time since its acquisition, symbolized the friendly bonds between the painter s daughter and Jean-François Jaeger. It was also testimony to his friendship with Gérard Cahn, President of the Schoengauer society in charge of the interests of the Alsatian museum which has enriched its collection through purchases from the gallery and donations by the gallery.

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Jean Dubuffet, Theâtres de mémoire.

Les Commentaires, 1978, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas paper, 140 x 204 cm © Foundation Jean Dubuffet Paris/ ADAGP Paris Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Jean Dubuffet Jean Dubuffet s earliest contacts with the Jeanne-Bucher Gallery go back to 1931. Visiting the Marcoussis exhibition in the rue du Cherche-Midi, the young Dubuffet, who was looking for a gallery to represent him, signed the visitors book with this premonitory sentence: “We will end up meeting one another somewhere one day or the other.” Unmoved by his work, Jeanne Bucher never exhibited Dubuffet, although she recognized his talent.

Thirty years later these words would take on their full significance when Daniel Cordier, then in charge of Dubuffet, closed down his gallery. Jean Planque urged his friend Dubuffet, whose reputation was by then well established, to let the Jeanne-Bucher Gallery represent him in partnership with the Swiss gallery of Ernst Beyeler (Planque had been asked by Beyeler to be on the lookout for new artists and new masterpieces). A contract was signed, but profitability was by no means assured after the rather mixed reception given to Dubuffet s cycle Hourloupe exhibited at Palazzo grassi, during the Venice Biennial, summer of 1964.

A bit like the passing of the baton in a footrace and no doubt fortuitously, the announcement of Bissière s death on the 2nd December preceded Dubuffet s arrival at the gallery on the 8th December 1964, celebrated without fanfare or preview.

To show himself worthy of the artist s confidence Jean-François Jaeger had carefully rehearsed the first interview, but to no avail: after a few sentences, Dubuffet interrupted him saying, “There is no point in trying to explain to me what I am trying to do at present. I don t know myself what that means.”

This was the beginning of a long and passionate collaboration that would result in seventeen monographic exhibitions from 1964 to the present day. The first cata-

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

logue presented seventeen works from Hourloupe, the longest cycle in Dubuffet s work and its exploration of the mental realm, born of his automatic doodling while talking on the telephone. Les Inconsistances was also presented at this exhibition. Despite its large format (130 x 780 cm), which ought to have discouraged any private collector, it was snatched up by the art lover Morris J. Pinto.

To give greater scope to the artist s explosive creativity and enable him to develop his skills, a company (Vacuart) was set up in Ivry sur Seine with the help of Gérard Singer and the Institut National Géographique. Equipped with a thermal compression press under vacuum the gallery could now print numerous serigraphic works

by Dubufffet.

In 1966 Jean-François Jaeger exhibited the monumental Nunc Stans (8.9 meters long), later shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam before being acquired by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it was hung next to a reduced version (now in the Siskernass Museum in Lund) and to Epokhê (now in the HenieOnstadt Kunstsenter in Norway). Charles Estienne prefaced the catalogue for this exhibition with a perceptive text entitled Le Ring et la salle comparing Dubuffet s grand spectacles to Tibetan ballets.

Jean Dubuffet, NuncStans Epokhê, Cycle de l Hourloupe.

1965. Gallery Jaeger Bucher / Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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The exhibitions organised in collaboration with the Beyeler Gallery, Ustensiles, demeures, escaliers (1967) and Fiston la Filoche, Peintures monumentées (1969), offered art lovers all over the world the chance to see new productions by this incomparable creator. The 1967 exhibition presented some outstanding works such as L Escalier funéraire pour Jacques Ullmann in homage to a faithful collec-

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Jean Dubuffet in his studio, Vence, 1967 Photo: Joubert, Archives Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

tor, the series Le Verre d eau next to Demeures, Tasses de thé and Ciseaux. For this exhibition Jean-François Jaeger had the fun and the challenge of presenting the works: “We were on the lookout for his arrival. As soon as the door opened Dubuffet stood there—stunned and amazed. He walked around the room and finally uttered a word of satisfaction, which was worth all the certificates of approval in the world.”

For Fiston la Filoche Jean-François Jaeger brought together a whole series of unusual objects: telephone, syringe, baroques chairs, tables, Amoncellement au pain, or Table porteuse d instances, d objets et de projets, “a whole world swarming with vitality on which the ensemble of black and blue elements, with the unity of their historiations, conferred a sort of “law and order”—if the expression “law and order” can be applied to someone who is constantly calling everything into question, above all his own approach to creation.”

From 1967 to 1970 the gallery continued its work of promoting Dubuffet by publishing several serigraphic editions, two of them in partnership with the Beyeler Gallery: Cerceaux sorcellent and Personnage mi-corps. Effigie paralogique (blue bust) and Parade funèbre pour Charles Estienne were realized by Vacuart. The year 1970 was dedicated to producing three new serigraphic editions: Le Tétrascopique, Arborescence I and Arborescence II co-edited with Beyeler Editions in Basel and the Pace Editions in New York.

Jean Dubuffet Site domestique (au fusil espadon) avec tête d Inca et petit fauteuil à droite; 1966, vinyle on canvas, 125 x 200 cm Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, photo: J-L Losi

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The contacts established by Jean-François Jaeger with the Pace Gallery in New York enabled Jean Dubuffet to find clients in the United States for his monumental epoxy sculptures at a time when there was no market for them in France and Europe. During these years the gallery had to give up its sponsorship of the artist—ten years without the demanding yet stimulating pressure of this extraordinary personality!

On the occasion of Dubuffet s return to the gallery in 1982, several new cycles were presented: Psycho-sites, a “histology” of the most secret layers of the un-

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Jean Dubuffet, Pulsions, 1984 Acrylic on paper, 100 x 134 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

conscious in which silhouette-witnesses, isolated and suspended in space, seem to be navigating in conceptual bubbles, mere ideograms suggesting a human presence—our presence; and Mires, a work in which all reference to human beings is abandoned.

After the presentation in May 1986 of works from 1953 to 1984 belonging to the Foundation, the last of the artist s series, Non-lieux, a sequence of canvases that “challenge the objective nature of being”, consisting of sheets of paper painted black often criss-crossed with large white gashes, was exhibited in the autumn of 1987 with a catalogue text by Daniel Dobbels, Le Grand Corps pathétiques des Non-Lieux.

On the occasion of the first edition of Art Paris in 2006, held under the prestigious glass roof of the Grand Palais, in homage to contemporary sculpture, Dubuffet occupied the place of honour. With the agreement of the Dubuffet Foundation, the gallery had one of the artist s most beautiful sculptures, Le Deviseur I, enlarged especially for the Salon. A veritable self-portrait of the artist, this royal personage seated on his throne greeted visitors at the entry of the exhibition from the height of his 3 metres. Matter and Memory is presenting the original sculpture of the Deviseur.

The history of a gallery has its share of anecdotes. In October 2007 the organisers of the FIAC granted the gallery a booth under the mezzanine without adequate lighting. The gallery met this challenge and this injustice by presenting the series Non-lieux. The press ran with the story and all the great collectors flocked to see Dubuffet s masterpiece.

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

In 2009 the rue de Seine gallery presented its sixteenth and seventeenth monographic exhibitions dedicated to Jean Dubuffet. The last painting of the series Non-lieux, entitled Pulsions by Dubuffet, is presented in the exhibition Matter and Memory: the Patriarch s Realm.

In the spring Cents dessins de 1964 to 1985, recalling the period of close collaboration between the gallery and the artist, enabled viewers to follow the artist s evolution in depth. In the autumn, Abstractions terrestres, a presentation of 17 works created between 1943 and 1960 with the aid of the Matisse Foundation in New York, approached different themes developed by Dubuffet in the 1940s and 1950s, from the insouciance of his early works to the extreme austerity of “Matériologie.”

An article in Connaissance des Arts in November 2009 described this presentation as an “exhibition of museum quality.”

Jean Dubuffet Le Deviseur II, 9 March 1969-May 1970 Painted in polyurthane 114 x 85 x 85 © Foundation Dubuffet, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

View of the exhibition Non-lieux, Jean Dubuffet, FIAC 2007 Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Sculpture by Jean Dubuffet Le Deviseur, during Art Paris, 2006 Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher Paris

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The Marais Space | 5 rue de Saintonge - Paris 3e Private opening Saturday 16th November 2013 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm

Artists Artists exhibited at important stages of their creation

GĂŠrard Singer in his exhibition at the gallery in 1966. Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Jean-Jacques Ceccarelli This self-taught artist was the subject of six exhibitions between 1990 and 2010.

The lush exuberance of his works and their freedom of vision have the cocky humour (“gouaille”) of someone who grew up in the streets of Marseilles. An innate sense of composition, accompanied by a warm lyricism, gives his works on paper, whether they are watercolours or collages, a manifest tenderness for ordinary life as seen through the prism of poetry. Underlying them is a constant reflection on the moral value of every event, expressed with a deep seriousness and an awareness of human mortality.

Miodrag Dado The phantasmagorical dramaturgy of the painter, draughtsman and engraver Dado is “a sort of redemption through painting of his adolescent memories of the human tragedies and cruelties suffered in his native country.” After arriving in Paris from Montenegro in 1956, he first worked as a lithographer at the Atelier Patris where Jean Dubuffet (little inclined to take an interest in other artists productions), James Speyer and Daniel Cordier discovered him.

Between 1971 and 1975 the gallery presented a series of four exhibitions, the first of which, Galerie des ancêtres with a catalogue prefaced by Gaëtan Picon, was quite successful.

Jean-François Jaeger and Dado, 1974, Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Dado, Atlas de dermatologie, 1975 Collage on wood, 87 x 250 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/JeanneBucher, photo: J-L Losi

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The 1973 exhibition resulted in the sale of all the works presented. This was followed by a retrospective of 25 large-format paintings organised by the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam. Several weeks later the Dutch museum would complete its collection of Dubuffet, Vieira da Silva and Bissière with the acquisition of two works La Galerie des ancêtres I and La piscine, one of Dado s most powerful works.

In the review L œil Jean-François Jaeger paid homage to the artist: “A fabulous mastery of his means of expression—superb draughtsmanship, acuity of observation, masterful handling of colours, a complex sense of space enlivened by the beautiful softness of his light—confers on Dado s visions absolute reality. They snatch the viewer up on to the inclined plane of what seems to be a traditional geometry only to manipulate him through a perverse play of counter-perspectives sustained by subtle contrasts of light without shadows. Beyond the imagery that constitutes it, the painting intervenes by the insidious means of language.” (L œil, 26/09/1973).

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Pursuing its promotional activities outside France, an important exhibition for Dado was mounted at the New York Aberbach Gallery of Fine Arts in late 1974.

Dado s collaboration with the gallery came to an end several months later with his sojourn in the American megapolis.

Gérard Fromanger A prominent figure on the 1960s art scene, Gérard Fromanger became known for his involvement with Narrative Figuration and with the “new historical painting”. Indeed he was a painter who put his times on stage by bringing street life into his works, a very avant-garde theme of this period. The 1973 exhibition Annoncez la couleur was an attempt at answering the question of information: “Who is informed, how, and by whom?” A twelve-meter long painting, Faites vos jeux, had pride of place on one of the walls of the gallery. Made up of 9000 scraps of cloth of different colours and 16 different materials, all held together by the meshes of a net, it called attention to the randomness of colour choice in a way that had never been done before by any artist in such a spectacular way. This presentation was framed by 7 oils on large-format canvases on which the artist had painted streets the birthplace of images, images themselves.

Gérard Fromanger Florence, rue d Orchampt, 1975, oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

The 1975 exhibition, Le désir est partout, with a catalogue prefaced by his friend Michel Foucault, was a series of 32 photographic-paintings in oil on canvas. The theme of street life is present in such works as Rue de la savane, Rue de mon peuple, Rue de la saison des pluies, Florence, rue d Orchampt. The monumental En Chine, à Hu-Xian, a 200 x 300 canvas in memory of the first voyage of a French artist to China (sold to MNAM/CCI) is also emblematic of this theme. In a sense none of these paintings represent streets: they are streets, routes and highways across continents.

Fromanger s last presentation in 1977 entitled Treize peintures récentes: Questions, interrogates the relationship between representation and reality.

Michel Gérard Michel Gérard s trajectory in the universe of contemporary art is original. Better known for his activity as a sculptor, the artist has also been involved in exploring graphic forms that have their origin in his personal history. His iron sculptures and drawings, which retrace the decline of the industrial era and the emergence of a post-industrial society, were the subject of three exhibitions in 1980, 1981, and 1985.

They mark a crucial turning-point in the transition from postmodernism to postmodern art. Closely associating microcosm and macrocosm, Michel Gérard draws stars and planets that resemble microscopic cells. This knowingly cultivated ambiguity has for its origin the recurrent and thus eternal but also the ephemeral character of natural cycles.

Michel Gérard, Empilement de trois socles, 1979, wrought iron, stainless steel, painted wood, 225 x 30 x 30 cm © Michel Gérard, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Asger Jorn The arrival of this tall Danish Viking at the gallery dates from 1967 when Asger Jorn s reputation was already well established. He was considered a master by the many of the most important painters of the period such as Alechinsky and Saura and of course Jean Dubuffet.

His forceful and spontaneous works, imbued with “anti-aestheticism,” were presented on four occasions between 1967 and 1972. Following the exhibition La Luxure de l esthésie in 1971 the French state acquired the work Kiotosomorama an oil on canvas (114 x 162 cm). As Jean-François Jaeger wrote of Jorn: “Few artists have shown so much independence in their behaviour and so much intensity in their desire to live life to the fullest.”

Asger Jorn Une mine de rien (ou presque), 1967, oil on canvas 114 x 146 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, Photo: G. Poncet

Louis le Brocquy The Dubliner Louis le Brocquy, who has been exhibited by the gallery since 1979, was early on fascinated by the human head as described by the Celts. Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon, regular visitors to the gallery, often came to admire his head images, which are not portraits properly speaking but emanations from the canvas or paper, conjured up by the act of painting, elect presences whose internal structure and essential being are revealed by tensions and lights.

Louis le Brocquy in his studio, Photo: Perry Ogden Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

The travelling exhibition Etudes vers une image de William Shakespeare, which opened at the gallery in 1982 before moving on to Zürich, London, New York and Dublin, prompted this commentary by Jean-Marie Tasset (L Aurore, 13/10/82): “The portrait of others is his passion. After James Joyce, Beckett, Garcia Lorca, Bacon, Louis le Brocquy is exhibiting his extraordinary study of Shakespeare. The poetry of this work springs from a feeling of solitude and abandon, from some indescribable nostalgia for the fairground.

The unforgettable face of Shakespeare is beautiful like the return to life.”

In 2006, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Véronique Jaeger paid homage to the Irish artist (whose works are absent from our public collections) by presenting some of his oils from 1957 to 2005—in the hope that the artist s quest, indeed his obsessions, might be better understood and appreciated. The November 2006 issue of Connaissance des Arts concludes its review with these words, “No one is left indifferent by an encounter with this artist.”

The emblematic work presented in the exhibition Matter and Memory is the Image of Samuel Beckett (1982). This is one of a series of thirty-three portraits of friends as well as literary and artistic figures such as Francis Bacon, Seamus Heaney, Bono and Samuel Beckett done between 1975 and 2007. While working on this series,

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le Broquy came to realise that the portrait could no longer be the stable figure of Renaissance art since it no longer has visual finality. With the rise of photography and the cinema, as well as the advent of depth psychology, human beings could no longer be regarded static entities. Portraits would therefore have to integrate a sense of time into their conception.

Louis le Brocquy Image of Samuel Beckett, 1982, oil on canvas, 73 x 73 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Arthur Luiz Piza The Brazilian artist Arthur Luis Piza completes the list of South American artists— Segui and Guillermo Roux—with whom the gallery has collaborated. His works, which have been presented on three occasions—in 1999, 2005 and 2012—seek to resolve the conflict between two 20 th century traditions: constructivism and the informal.

By striking a balance between reason and emotion, subjectivity and objectivity, he seeks to restore the right to contemplation in an age of rampant consumerism.

Arthur Luiz Piza, Terre Mère, 1964, oil, sand and paper on jute canvas 100 x 80 cm, courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

The evolution of his art has taken him from multi-colour paper collages to sculptures made of unusual materials—metal trellis-works embellished with formal paper elements—and amalgamated compositions modelled by hand.

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Paul Rebeyrolle Paul Rebeyrolle s powerful, violent but generous works are a call to freedom, a revolt against injustice and the subjugation of man and nature. They are witnesses to our times, tracking down reality in the most sensorial and instinctive manner possible, seizing hold of matters, colours and conflicts of energy. Although the artist was totally forgotten, his works were shown on four occasions between 1999 and 2010.

The first of these at the FIAC in 1999, followed by a presentation at the gallery, exhibited works realised between 1996 and 1999. Le Monétarisme, prefaced by Jean-Louis Prat, repeated at the gallery, preceded by several weeks a retrospective at the Foundation Maeght in St Paul de Vence. In 2000, this successful encounter led to a new exhibition in October entitled Gérard Rondeau: Rebeyrolle ou le journal d un peintre, presenting forty portrait-photographs of the painter evoking the world and the personality of a first rank artist as seen by a renowned photographer.

Paul Rebeyrolle, La Vache rouge, 1998 Mixed technique on canvas, 146 x 114 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher Paris, photo: J-L Losi

The meeting of this remarkable photographer with an exceptional visual artist ensured the success of an exhibition seldom attempted at the gallery. The 2001 FIAC presented some of Rebeyrolle s recent works. A prestigious booth was set up to accommodate eighteen paintings of large dimensions. Unfortunately, the attack on the World Trade Centre the previous month was unfavourable to the success of this undertaking. The works dimensions and their cost did not correspond to the mood of the public, and the usual foreign visitors stayed away.

Felix Rozen Born in Moscow in 1938 of music loving parents, Felix Rozen moved to Warsaw with his family when he was ten years old. In 1966, sensing that political troubles were brewing, he exiled himself to Paris.

Both a painter and an engraver, he would extend his range of expression to sculpture, photography, typography, musical composition and short films. Naturalised a French citizen in 1974, he pursued various personal experiments on the relations between music and painting at IRCAM. The scholarship he obtained in the mid 1980s from the Centre for Musical Experiment in San Diego, followed by a stay in New York, oriented him towards experimentation with sounds, images and computers.

His works are a part of such public collections as the MNAM, the Tate Gallery of London, the Museum of Modern Art of Tokyo, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, the Pushkin Museum of Moscow, the MOMA, the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Felix Rozen s letters to Paul Klee, presented at the gallery in 2005, was addressed to the elder brother who managed to forge a destiny that reconciled his gift as a painter with natural inclination towards music. Each “letter” begins with a form of plainchant incantation on Japanese paper, recording the artist s initial “vertigo” in neumes. Left to their own devices, during a phase of “fermentation” imbued with contemplative silence, before being concealed by a transient pictorial veil, these first throes of inspiration unleash the underlying resonances that determine the orchestration of the second and final stage.

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Young artists discovered

by Jean-François Jaeger whose works are still being promoted By taste and by necessity, and in the tradition of Jeanne Bucher, Jean-François Jaeger sees the discovery of new talents as one of his missions. “Betting on a new painter means taking risks. A good painting may not give immediate pleasure. It is not like a poster. The painter lays bare his soul. A good painting hits you in the gut, it frightens, it hurts.”

Louis Nallard The young Nallard, a close friend of Bissière, Fiorini and Max-Pol Fouchet, was Jean-François Jaeger s contemporary, introduced to him by the young painter Bernard Lavergne whom Jean-François Jaeger knew from Algeria. Exhibited by the gallery in the early 1950s, he was a “painter of rural Burgundian stock, torn between a land heavy with secrets and the expansiveness of Algeria where he was born.”

His works, especially appreciated in Northern Europe, would be the subject of more than ten monographic exhibitions. From the 1970s on he was represented by the Boer Gallery in Amsterdam and the Riss Gallery in Oslo. He was the figurehead of Réalités Nouvelles.

Louis Nallard, La Rose de Kairouan, 1972, oil on canvas, 120 x 135 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/JeanneBucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Fermin Aguayo Fermin Aguayo was one of the first Spanish artists to embrace abstract art and was a founding member of the Grupo Portico of Saragossa, pioneers of abstract art in Spain. This may have been related to the cruelties he suffered in his adolescence at the hands of the Franco regime.

Steered towards the gallery by Louis Gabriel Clayeux (head of the Maeght Gallery), he appeared one day in 1953 in the rue de Seine with nothing but the clothes on his back. Without mentioning the tragic events of his youth or affirming (in his approximate French) his talent, “He stood there just as his self-portrait The Painter reveals him: a man of destiny.”

In late 1954, after seeing the large canvas series of the Corridas, Jean-François Jaeger took Aguayo under his wings and found him the studio of his dreams.

From this studio over the years came a number of powerful compositions. Slowly elaborated, then scraped and re-commenced as they neared completion so that no trace of the labour of their gestation would remain, the works of Aguayo appeal to all those who appreciate a certain timeless, traditional gravity in painting. The American expressionist Morris Graves and Ernst Beyeler were among the first buyers of Ayuao s works in December 1957.

In 1958 the gallery devoted the first of ten monographic exhibitions to him. Two years before his death, in 1974, the French state acquired Espagne 1936, a symbolic work and one of the painter s masterpieces.

A recent retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid consecrated the artist in his home country. It was followed in 2012 by a retrospective organised in the two spaces of the gallery, rue de Seine and rue de Saintonge, regrouping sixty works from both the abstract and figurative periods of the artist.

Fermin Aguayo, Infante Margarita en rose, 1960-61, oil on canvas, 195 x 130 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher

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Wilfrid Moser, Les Cageots de la Méduse I, 1976, oil on canvas 81x 120 cm, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Wilfrid Moser Brought to the gallery by his friend and rival Nallard, the Zurich artist Wilfrid Moser was first exhibited in 1952 along with Fiorini and Nallard. A few months later he participated in the October Paris Salon.

A man of strong character and lively imagination whose leftist convictions led him to fight in the Spanish Civil War—somewhat surprisingly for a Swiss,—he was active throughout the 1950s in the Ecole de Paris. Aside from his involvement with tachism, he remained a loner: innovative, experimental, avant-gardist in his expressionistic, dreamlike depictions of scenes from daily life. “For as long as I have known this exceptional man, his fertile, delirious imagination has been making up stories, systematically mingling reality and fiction in his paintings.”

His expressionist works depicting everyday life have never been affected by any lack of energy neither in his gesture nor in his vivid imagination.

François Mathey, a great admirer of the painter, wrote: “Moser s slowly elaborated works are wholly driven by the impulse to give visible form to the secret quiverings of life, conjuring up an image of the human condition as he dreams it.”

The painter has been the subject of 13 monographic exhibitions at the gallery.

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic’Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Public Art The Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher Gallery was alone in France, and indeed in the world, in positioning itself on the question of the place of art in urbanism. It has been actively involved in the promotion of several future-oriented projects by artists outside the commercial mainstream.

The first exhibition took place in November 1966, Picasso et le béton, around the edification of a sculpture by Picasso, illustrating the works of the Norwegian Carl Nesjar. The brief catalogue for this exhibition, financed by a donation from Lafarge (a cement company), proposed that a work in cement be commissioned by the city of Paris and installed near the Porte Dauphine. Although the project was passionately defended and backed by a disinterested sponsor it was rejected in the end by Paris town councillors.

The policy of creating new cities begun in 1965 in France would provide an opportunity for the gallery to develop ambitious projects with artists attracted by new perspectives.

Gérard Singer The gallery s collaboration with Gérard Singer, an innovator of the first rank, began in 1968 with the presentation of a monumental sculpture (6 x 9 x 2.70 m.) occupying the whole space of the gallery. The making of this “sculpture-space”, an “architecturesculpture-painting” unlike anything ever seen before, sent shockwaves through the art world. After its presentation the work would be shown at ARC, the Paris Museum of Modern Art, Middleheim-Anvers and the Capitol gardens in Toulouse before being installed finally in Vitry-sur-Seine.

Gérard Singer in his exhibition at the gallery in 1966 Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/JeanneBucher, Paris

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Collaboration with Singer continued with seven more presentations up to the grand retrospective of 1995. For the spectacular 1983 exhibition, Permutant, dispositif paysagé”, the gallery was once again transformed into a landscape in which the public could walk around, sit down and contemplate the different elements of the sculpture made of coloured ferro-cement. An exhibition with the artists Dani Karavan and Jean-Pierre Raynaud in 1986, Questions d urbanité, raised questions with authorities about the “concretisation” of three large-scale urban renewal projects. It consisted of a series of drawings, plans and models of Singer s Canyoneaustrate, Karavan s L Axe majeur de Cergy-Pontoise, and Raynaud s Réhabilitation des Minguettes.

The model for Canyoneaustrate is on display in the exhibition. This 296 square-metre reflecting pool was cast from negative moulds using contour lines and polystyrene burnt into shape by a blowtorch. Made of white concrete, opening on to a sunken sculpture overflowing with cascades of water along its inner walls, it has adorned the gardens of Paris-Bercy since 1988.

Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Dani Karavan L Axe majeur by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan, two models of which are on display, is one of the oldest and largest public art projects in the world. It was started in 1980 and is still ongoing. Situated thirty kilometres from Paris in Cergy-Pontoise and stretching 3.2 kilometres in an urban landscape, it is sculpted from white concrete.

A symbol of purity and peace and of the communion between art and nature, this work won the Grand Prix National du Paysage in 2009 and an invitation to the artist to attend a celebration marking the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great architect and landscape artist Le Nôtre at the Château de Versailles.

The gallery gave its unstinting support to the Axe majeur project: in 1999 for a presentation of the work in progress, in 2002 and 2005 at the FIAC and in 2011 for the publication of La Saga de l Axe Majeur de Dani Karavan by Claude Mollard. When Karavan won the Praemium Impériale in 1999 the gallery presented a photographic retrospective of his principal works, which brought together a number of admirers of this visionary artist passionately devoted to world peace and to sustainable development, among them: Bram Hammacher, Simone Veil, Pierre Restany, Germaine Viatte, François Barré, Wim Wenders, Arturo Schwarz…

The exhibition Matter and Memory is an opportunity to display two models for L Axe Majeur, one in plastilline first shown in 1986 for our exhibition Questions d Urbanité; the other giving a more recent picture of the largest public art sculpture in the world linking the new city of Cergy-Pontoise to La Défense, the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre.

Dani Karavan, model of L Axe Majeur, 1981 104 x 42.5 x 4 cm plasticine, copyright Studio Karavan, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Perspective on L Axe Majeur (here before 2008 and the realisation of the Footbridge, the Pond and the Amphitheatre) turned towards the capital Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic’Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Jean Amado, Le Doute et la pierre, 1985, 200 x 335 x 122 cm © Jean Amado Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, Photo: J-L Losi

Jean Amado The Aix-en-Provence artist Jean Amado strongly recommended by Dubuffet who called his work “a world in genesis for the memory of the future”, represents a very different aesthetic. His basalt sand and cement sculptures evoking the forms of boats or prehistoric animals were regularly exhibited between 1970 and 1989. Following the first exhibition the French state acquired La Tatoue démolie.

The singularity and the fabulous precision of his concrete creations fascinated Bernd Krimmel to such an extent that he organised an exhibition of them in 1979 in Darmstadt under the title Amados, ein modernner Dadaisos in the mysterious and transparent depths of the Mathildenhöhe. The task of mounting this exhibition of forty sculptures, most of them monumental in size, fell to Jean-François Jaeger, who was the only person competent to do so in the absence of the artist. The exhibition was a tour de force and would be remembered as exemplary.

The masterpieces of the exhibition Rosenberg (fired concrete, 186 x 391 x 118 cm) and Par la mer, le passage (tinted basalt cement, 134 x 230 x 104 cm) would be acquired the following year, the first by the Darmstadt Museum, the second by the KröllerMüller. The subsequent exhibition in the rue de Seine would draw the attention of numerous collectors, including Elysée Palace, which would acquire Maman for the palace gardens.

Amado s monumental sculpture Le Doute et la pierre is a major work that was shown in a 1985 exhibition at the Musée des arts décoratifs and was the subject of a film featuring the journalist Pierre Daix. It is now on display at the gallery for this exhibition.

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Mark di Suvero, Racine du Naos, 1996, steel, 327 x 400 x 431 cm Courtesy Galerie Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, photo: Morain

Mark di Suvero Jean-François Jaeger first made the acquaintance of the China-born American sculpture Mark di Suvero thanks to Marcel Evrard s extraordinary work with CRACAP in Creusot. For many years this regional organisation had enabled artists in residence to develop their practices and creations.

Mark di Suvero, in protest against the Vietnam War, had exiled himself to France in 1970. It was with him that the gallery would organise its largest urban art exhibition in the city of Paris. An earlier exhibition of his works, entitled Sculptures du Naos, was held at the gallery s stand 1996 FIAC stand. One of the works, Racine du Naos, weighing several tons, sat in the middle of the stand and would later be presented in front of UNESCO on the Place Fontenoy. It would be part of a unique project organised the following year, Sculptures de la Ville.

With the assistance of the Office of the Mayor and thanks to the sponsorship of a number of enterprises, the Committee of the Friends of Mark di Suvero headquartered at the gallery (with François Trèves as President and Jean-Francois Jaeger as general Secretary) realised a dream: to install nine monumental sculptures by Suvero in nine emblematic Parisian sites, something that up to then had never been done in Paris. This new adventure, entrusted to the exhibition organiser Daniel Marchesseau, succeeded beyond the wildest hopes. It cost the city nothing and gave Parisians the chance to enter into a truthful dialogue with the artist s mobile steel structures.

Mark di Suvero, Mozart s birthday, 1989, 7.70 x 10.80 x 14.30 m, 12 tonnes, steel colour rust, Esplanade des Invalides Courtesy Galerie Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, photo: P. Plattier

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic’Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

This exemplary, non-commercial exhibition and its good reputation raised essential questions for Jean-François Jaeger and proved once again his capacity for realising unconventional projects. This exhibition-event marked his jubilee anniversary (50 years) at the gallery.

Unfortunately, the gallery was unable to carry out another one of Mark di Suvero proposals: to install on the Seine a sculpture animated by the river s current.

This would have been a world premier and would have been a fitting conclusion to the exhibition.

Jean-Paul Philippe Born in France in 1944, Jean-Paul Philippe turned towards sculpture in 1973, the preferred medium of his inward looking free creations that adhere to no school or system while adapting themselves to the constraints of monumentality and public spaces.

Influenced by Egyptian and pre-Columbian statuary, Jean-Paul Philippe s works set up a silent dialogue with space; they narrate the movement of thought between emptiness and fullness, absence and presence, aspiration and meditation. They have been shown on seven occasions between 1981 and 2012.

Jean-Paul Philippe Marelle (detail), 2013, terra cotta, mirror, lead and corten steel 317 x 290 cm. © Jean-Paul Philippe Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Jean-Paul Philippe Marelle, 2013, terra cotta, mirror, lead and corten steel 317 x 290 cm. © Jean-Paul Philippe Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

His sixth exhibition in the spring of 2000 entitled Marelles, Mémoires et Miroirs was the first in a series devoted to this thematic. The monumental work bearing the title of the exhibition would be installed the following year in the International Park in Cairo, Egypt. A wool tapestry, Marelles-Mnemos (4.30 x 2.30 m.) of 2001 would enter the collection of the Gobelins Museum in Paris.

Matter and Memory will be presenting a work by the artist that has never been exhibited before—a terra cotta model for the realisation of a monumental sculpture planned for the Museum of Europe in Brussels entitled Marelle des marelles that will integrate everything the artist wants to put into it.

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic’Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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The Historical Space | 53 rue de Seine - Paris 6e Private opening Saturday16th November 2013 from 2:30 to 5pm

A Contemporary Heritage Primitive Arts/Espace en Demeure (Space in Dwelling)/ The Attraction of the Orient

View of the exhibition Sculptures from Oceania, 1962 Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Primitive Arts In late 1961 and for the first time at any gallery, an instructive exhibition of twenty monumental sculptures from New Guinea and the New Hebrides took place in the rue de Seine. It was organised with the precious assistance of Marcel Evrard who had just brought back several large sculptures from an expedition in the Pacific.

Jean-François Jaeger wrote of them: “At first we regarded these huge wooden and fern effigies as marvellous sculptures. They bewitched us.”

Spread out around the gallery, wooden sculptures from the Sepik river valley dialogued with rooftops made of tree-like fern roots from the New Hebrides.

Pierre Loeb agreed to lend a masterpiece from the Sentani Lake, brought back for him by Jacques Viot in 1929, as well as a Kanigara figure from the Middle Sepik region. This presentation caught the attention of a vast number of art lovers unused to seeing primitive artworks displayed as masterpieces in a gallery. Giacometti, an enthusiastic visitor to the exhibition, exclaimed in front of a head from the New Hebrides: “That is what I always wanted to reach and I am unable to do so.” The synthesis of a whole body and a face in plant form left him wonderstruck.

Other memorable visitors: Bram Hammacher, at the time director of Kröller Muller Museum, was so fascinated by a drum from Ambryn that he bought it on the spot; Robert Goldwater, first curator of the New York Museum of Primitive Art and his wife Louise Bourgeois, settled for a hut post. Evrard, Christiane Zervos, Pierre Loeb, and Tristan Tzara wrote texts for the catalogue of the exhibition, hailed by Connaissance des Arts as “one of the twenty outstanding cultural events of 1962.”

Two other exhibitions on the theme of primitive art would follow: the first in 1963, Ancient Mexican Stone Sculptures, with a catalogue by Bram Hammacher and Jean-Clarence Lambert, later shown at the Kröller Müller Museum (which bought several of them); the second in 1966, Mayan Sculptures, with a text by José Luis Franco. These two presentations revealed to a vast and curious public “steles and bas-reliefs once used in the daily rituals of ancient Mexico, death masks in which life is concentrated whose realism and plastic abstraction move us.” Alexander Watt was prompted by this exhibition to comment in Art in America that “M. Jaeger has an exceptional talent for putting on sensational shows of sculpture.”

Maya head in stucco, Maya civilisation, Mexico, State of Campeche H33 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Faîte de case New-Hebrides, Mallicolo, Amok, fern root H93 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Spurred on by the success of these exhibitions several grand exhibitions were undertaken outside the gallery under the aegis of the Association of the Friends of the Musée de l Homme and a committee organised by the Baroness de Rothschild with the participation of Marcel Evrard and Jean-François Jaeger: Les chefs d oeuvre du Musée de l Homme in 1965; Arts Connus et Méconnus de l Afrique noire Collection Paul Tishman in 1966; L Art primitif dans les collections d artistes in 1967; and Chefs d œuvre des arts indiens et esquimaux du Canada, in a 1969 presentation worthy of the Museum of Primitive Art of New York.

The immense success of these exhibitions, which for the first time conferred the status of artworks on primitive arts taken out of their ethnographic magma, proved that it is possible to awaken curiosity, passion, admiration and respect for civilisations remote from our own.

Matter and Memory: the Patriarch s Realm will present several of the major masterpieces from exhibitions of this period.

Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Preparation for the exhibition of Louise Nevelson, 1969 Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/JeanneBucher, Paris

Espace en Demeure (Space in Dwelling) Portrait of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

From early on the thematic of creation by women artists was of particular concern to Jean-François. In 1949, at a time when French tapestry was being revived, he put together an exhibition of tapestries by five women artists—Hermine David, Hélène Détroyat, Marguerite Louppe, Pauline Peugniez and Valentine Prax—as well as ceramics by Guidette Carbonnel.

Nearly thirty years later this thematic would re-surface. The 1978 exhibition Space in dwelling in the rue de Seine brought together powerful works by three women artists of international repute in three specific domains: paintings by Vieira da Silva, black wood sculptures by Louise Nevelson and sisal weavings by Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Jean-François Jaeger evokes the difficulties these artists faced when they were starting out: “All three had to impose their personalities in a predominantly male milieu: in the peculiar climate of pre-war and post-war Paris, in the even more peculiar climate of New York on its way to artistic hegemony and in the climate of an undeveloped and isolated Warsaw lacking even in materials for artists.”

This thematic is once again being treated in the exhibition Matter and Memory and broadened with the arrival of two new women artists, Fabienne Verdier and Zarina Hashmi, artists of international reputation who have worked with the gallery since 2008.

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic’Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan Lady, 1970-1980 Vegetable fibre, 300 x 280 cm © Magdalena Abakanowicz Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Louise Nevelson Shadow and Reflection I, 1966, wood painted black 273.5 x 430 x 65 cm Photograph, © Museum of Grenoble Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Fabienne Verdier, L'Homme en prière II. Hommage au Chanoine van der Paele, 2010 ink and pigments on canvas, 181 x 121 cm © Fabienne Verdier, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris.

Photo: Inès Dieleman

Zarina Hashmi, Weaving Memory, 2006, block of engraved wood on BFK Light paper with bands woven of computer text printed on Kozo paper, 101.60 x 104.14 cm © Zarina Hashmi, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris.

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic’Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

The Attraction of the Orient Jean-François Jaeger s interest in the most remote forms of art dates, as we have seen, from his passion for Primitive Arts in the early sixties. Having promoted Mark Tobey, a bridge between East and West, Jean-François Jaeger would experience the attraction for Eastern Cultures in several forms.

Two exhibitions in Japan featuring Bissière in 1973 and Nicolas de Staël twenty years later would inaugurate the relation between the gallery and Japanese museums. The second would also offer Jean-François Jaeger the opportunity to discover, in intimate contact with nature, some of the essential sites of Japan, which would be sources of lasting emotions and unforgettable initiations.

In 1977 the gallery organised an exhibition of the great Chinese master Chen Yung-Shen, who presented his Fu, a transcription by the gods of the primordial signs preceding the creation of the universe in early Chinese cosmological speculations. The Fu is a kind of prose poem with a very rich vocabulary written in a style characteristic of the Han dynasty. The presentation of the first Taoist authorised to leave his country to visit the West since the 13th century was made possible by the intervention of Kristofer Schipper of the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes and Secretary of the Association of Chinese Studies. Chen Yung-Shen brought to the gallery testimony of the permanence of popular and non-official traditions in China. As part of the exhibition there was a memorable Tea Ceremony with a décor built to measure, an event that would long remain in the annals of the gallery.

Portrait of Yang Jiechang in his studio Archives Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

The presentations of the Japanese Kunihiko, a close friend of Gaëton Picon, for his first personal exhibition in 1986 and the first of his monographic exhibitions, opened up new horizons for the gallery. Applying the traditional Yusen silk painting method to works on paper, this man—the 117th National Treasure of Japan—creates a synergy between traditional Japanese techniques and mathematical reflection.

Another Japanese artist presented by the gallery in 1983 was the young Tokyoite Wakako, who had been a pupil in Louis Nallard s studio at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Her mystical temperament, inspired by shintoism, is powerfully lyrical and explosive, expressing itself with the natural energy of the volcanoes, waterfalls, typhoons and earthquakes of her native country. All these elements confer on her painting, “in quest of clairvoyance through colour,” a striking dynamism. Her works would be presented at the gallery until the early 2000s.

Master Chen during the Tea Ceremony at the Gallery in 1977.

Archives 196 Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

A long association with the young Chinese artist Yang Jiechang, who had been invited by Jean-Hubert Martin for a memorable exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Les Magiciens de la terre in 1989, began at the gallery with the presentation of his works at the March 1990 Salon in association with African sculptures. This was followed several months later by a showing of his Hundred Layers of Ink (Peintures à 100 couches d encre), large luminous formats in China ink on rice paper mounted on frames.

After a classical education in Chinese Art schools, he taught traditional painting techniques and after a journey to a Taoist monastery, he finally found the essence of his spiritual research.

On the occasion of his 1992 exhibition Philippe Dagen of Le Monde wrote: “It takes a while to observe the variations of intensity and brightness these paintings reveal when daylight falls on their flakes and cracks.” (Le Monde, 8th May, 1992). After a period of intense interiorisation, his work would evolve in the 2000s towards a period of exteriorisation, more figurative and open both to events in the world and in his own life.

Portrait of Kunihiko Moriguchi at the gallery Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

In 2006 the gallery had its first exhibition for the Japanese artist Susumu Shingu, Sculptures du respire, a series of sculptures conceived for the indoors and governed by the air. Organised by Véronique Jaeger the exhibition was twinned with several other events: Un coup de dés, a choreography by Jiri Kilian presented at the Opéra Garnier around a sculpture by the artist; the publication of his illustrated book, Les petits oiseaux, by Gallimard and of a monograph by Cercle d Art. In late 2006 Susumu Shingu s work would be presented again on the occasion of an exhibition entitled La Tentation de l Orient, a gathering of fifteen works by modern and contemporary artists, Asian and European, from Masson and Tobey to Michael Biberstein and Yang Jiechang, illustrating the diversity of approaches of different artists of dissimilar temperaments to the confrontation between East and West: some, the spiritualists, seeking knowledge and universality; others, the aesthetes, fascinated by techniques and eager to adapt them to their own needs; still others, remaining at the level of images, illustrating political and philosophical positions.

Obviously, an exhibition of this sort could not hope to exhaust such a vast subject of reflexion, but it was instructive for all concerned. For the gallery it was an occasion for a judicious and subtle confrontation between artists. We place this debate under the tutelary presence of a remarkable “Pierre de Rêve” (Dream Stone) from the collection of Roger Caillois.

Connaissance des Arts echoed the public s delight: “The seven sculptures of Respir float in silence in the air—solitary, elegant, poetic without gravity, awakening in us the desire for a precise, coherent and just world.”

An exhibition in the rue de Saintonge in 2009, Planet of Wind and Water and another one in 2012, Au-delà du temps, drew large crowds who fell under the charm of his delicate mobiles that capture the energy surrounding them and become consciousness of space. Jiri Kilian and Renzo Piano came as friends and admirers, in particularly of the diaroma of the major work the artist presented for the first time to the public: Breathing Earth. A self-sufficient village based on natural energies from the earth: wind, water and sun.

This debate is contextualised with a remarkable stone “Pierre de Rêve” (Dream Stone), acquired from the great collector of stones Roger Caillois, which creates a natural space of infinite poetry.

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic’Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Visuals available for the press Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan Lady, 1970-1980, vegetable fibre, 300 x 280 cm © Magdalena Abakanowicz Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Jean Amado, Le Doute et la pierre, 1985 200 x 335 x 122 cm © Jean Amado. Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris.

Roger Bissière, Oiseau, 1950, egg tempera on canvas, 42 x 34 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Roger Bissière, Le Chat, la Maison, 1951 egg tempera on canvas,81 x 65 cm © Roger Bissière. Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris.

Photo: Fajour

Roger Bissière, Soleil levant, 1960, oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Photo: J-L Losi

Dani Karavan, model of l Axe Majeur, 1981, 104 x 42,5 x 4 cm, plastiline © Atelier Karavan. Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Jean Dubuffet, Mire G 177 Boléro, 1983 acryle on paper mounted on canvas, 134 x 200 cm. Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Jean Dubuffet, Théâtres de mémoire Les Commentaires, 1978, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 140 x 204 cm © Foundation Jean Dubuffet Paris/ ADAGP Paris Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Jean Dubuffet, Site domestique (au fusil espadon) avec tête d Inca et petit fauteuil à droite; 1966, vinyle on canvas, 125 x 200 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, photo: J-L Losi

Jean Dubuffet, Pulsions, 1984, acrylic on canvas paper, 100 x 134 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Jean-Paul Philippe, Marelle, 2013, terra cotta, mirror, lead and corten steel, 317 x 290 cm. © Jean-Paul Philippe. Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Nicolas de Staël, La Montaigne de Sainte Victoire, 1954, oil on canvas, 89 x 130 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, Photo : L. Joubert

Nicolas de Staël, Le Pont Marie, 1954, oil on canvas, 73 x 100 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, Photo: Hyde

Nicolas de Staël, Jour de Fête, 1947, oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher / Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Nicolas de Staël, Portrait d Anne de Staël, 1953, oil on canvas, 130 x 89 cm © Musée Unterlinden, Colmar.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Louise Nevelson, Shadow and Reflection I, 1966, wood painted black, 273.5 x 430 x 65 cm Photograph, © Museum of Grenoble Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Hans Reichel, Poisson rouge dans la mousse, 1927 oil on cardboard, 22 x 31 cm.

Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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Press Kit | Jean-François Jaeger 90th birthday and 66 years as gallery owner

Hans Reichel, Lettre d amour avec cœur, 1958, watercolor on paper, 29.5 x 24 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Hans Reichel, Mirage soleil ardent, 1939, watercolor on paper 24 x 19 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Mark Tobey, Messengers, 1965, tempera on paper mounted on canvas, 105 x 69 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris. Photo: J-L Losi

Mark Tobey, Animal Totem, 1944, tempera on cardboard, 37 x 17.5 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher Paris, Photo: J-L Losi

Mark Tobey, Rive Gauche, 1955, tempera on paper, 61 x 91 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher Paris, Photo: J-L Losi

Mark Tobey, Escape from Static, 1968, tempera on paper mounted on board 67 x 48.5 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva La Scala ou les yeux, 1937, oil on canvas, 60 x 92 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Photo: J-L Losi

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Le Souterrain, 1948, oil and graphite on canvas, 81 x 100 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Photo: J-L Losi

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Composition aux damiers bleus, 1949, oil on canvas, 46 x 62 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Photo: J-L Losi

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Press Kit | Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva Mémoire, 1966-1967, oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Photo: J-L Losi

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva Ariane, 1988, oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Photo: J-L Losi

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Stèle, 1964, tempera on canvas, 195 x 114 cm © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/ Philippe Migeat. © Adagp Paris 2013

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva La Forêt des erreurs, 1941, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher/ Jeanne-Bucher, Paris

Press Contact | Mélanie Monforte, Communic Art mmonforte@communicart.fr | +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01

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Pr atic al Information

Matter and Memory: The Patriarch s Realm November 19th 2013 – January 25th 2014

Galerie Jaeger Bucher 5 & 7 rue de Saintonge, Paris 3e www.galeriejaegerbucher.com From Tuesday to Saturday 11am – 7pm

Galerie Jeanne-Bucher 53 rue de Seine, Paris 6e www.jeanne-bucher.com From Tuesday to Friday: 9:30am – 1pm and 2pm – 6:30pm Saturday: 10am – 12:30am and 2:30pm – 6pm

Private opening Saturday 16th November 2013 • 2:30pm – 5pm 53 rue de Seine • 5:30pm – 7:30pm 5 & 7 rue de Saintonge Exhibition opening Tuesday 19th November 2013 For press enquiries Mélanie Monforte Tel. + 33 (0)1 71 19 48 01 Mob. + 33 (0)6 26 54 01 49 11 rue Léopold Robert – 75014 Paris www.communicart.fr

Cover, Jean-François Jaeger in front of the Gallery rue de Seine, Courtesy Gallery Jaeger Bucher / Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Photo: J-L Losi Véronique and Jean-François Jaeger in front of the Gallery rue de Seine, 2011 Archives, Gallery Jaeger Bucher/JeanneBucher, Paris, Photo: D. Bordes

Galerie Jaeger Bucher

Galerie Jeanne-Bucher

5 & 7 rue de Saintonge, Paris 3e www.galeriejaegerbucher.com

53 rue de Seine, Paris 6e www.jeanne-bucher.com

Press Contact Mélanie Monforte – Communic Art mmonforte@communicart.fr +33 (0)1 71 19 48 01