The gallery had taken up the Jeanne-Bucher gallery of his grand-aunt, supporting artists like Maria Helena Vieira da Silva or Jean Dubuffet, organizing exhibitions that did date.
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For some, the direction of an art gallery is coming from combat sport. For others, endurance race: Jean-François Jaeger, who participated three times at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and presided over the Jeanne-Bucher Gallery, in Paris, since 1947, was of those. He died of COVID suites in Marminiac (Lot) on December 29, at the age of 98.
Born November 3, 1923 in Strasbourg, he had taken the succession of his grand-aunt, Jeanne Bucher, after the death of this one in 1946. The Jeanne-Bucher Gallery was already mythical. Founded in 1925, she had exhibited, among others, Arp, Braque, Chirico, Ernst, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Klee, Light, Lipchitz, Lurçat, Masson, Mirrian, Picabia … then had been interested in young young, Nicolas de Stael and Vieira da Silva, but also Mark Tobey or Robert Motherwell, discovered during a trip to the United States.
Not to succeed him was not easy. Jean-François Jaeger had succeeded, no doubt because of the particular quality of the links he sutted with the artists and their beneficiaries. We are thinking in particular at Roger Biseiure, of which he helped to revive the career, in Maria Helena Vieira da Silva who was, with his husband Arpad Szenes, his fetish painters, and Françoise de Stael, the widow of Nicolas, which he has Supported for the three decades that it has made the reasoned catalog of the work of its husband. It is also thought to Jean Dubuffet, a man with a shady, but found in Jean-François Jaeger a courteous interlocutor and an extremely professional merchant. Thus, during an FIAC where his booth was very badly located, he had made a necessity virtue by dedicating him entirely to the “non-places” of Dubuffet, transforming a relegation into a huge public success. The man was affable, but could become fierce when we doubted the quality of his program or his artists.
A campaign for public art
This attention, this fidelity in friendship, he also wore it to the collectors – he participated in the constitution of one of the most important private collections of modern art of France, that of a great Bordeaux winemaker with which he shared the love of the Bottle Dive -, to the brokers like Jean Planque, who advised the balese Ernst Beyeler in his Parisian purchases, but also to the Conservatives of museums and the Commissioners of exhibitions, many to be indebted to him of obtaining Loans of works, even some critics that he appreciated, if not the eye, at least the company, most often around a table.
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