Exhibition guide
Alice Pauli. Gallerist, Collector and Art Patron

In the late 1940s, Alice Pauli (Moutier, 1922–Lausanne, 2022) was active in the business world representing a watchmaking company when she developed an interest in art and art exhibitions. She made her first forays in the art market in 1954 and began dealing in the tapestry art of Jean Lurçat. With her husband Pierre, she then helped launch the Biennale internationale de la tapisserie of Lausanne (the Interna­ tional Tapestry Biennial of Lausanne).

In 1961, Alice Pauli opened an art gallery at 7 Avenue de Rumine in Lausanne. From the outset she wanted the gallery to reflect the international scope of contemporary art and dedicated one of her first shows to the lithographs of Sam Francis. Thanks in particular to the Salon international de galeries­pilotes, an international art fair for experimental galleries mounted by the Musée cantonal des Beaux­ Arts in Lausanne, she made a number of contacts that would bear fruit and allow her to show in her gallery work by foreign contemporary artists like Alicia Penalba, Mark Tobey, and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

Although she was to favour over the years an openness to the world, the gallery owner did not neglect the local art scene in Lausanne and the Canton of Vaud, making a point to exhibit artists like Jean Lecoultre and Juan Martínez. The projects she did with them gave artistic life in French-speaking Switzerland an exhilarating boost and contributed to the prominence of her gallery. Alice Pauli also took part in the major international art fairs, building her network and developing her gallery’s business. When her son, Olivier, joined the gallery in 1989, she decided to move and reopened at a new address in the Flon neigh­ bourhood of Lausanne, taking over a space that was better suited to showing large-format works of art.

Alice Pauli conserved in her personal collection of works by artists whose careers she had passionately followed, in some cases develop­ ing friendships that lasted years. Their works, hanging on the walls of her home and installed in her garden, were a reassuring presence throughout her day and helped her surmount life’s painful trials. In the early 1990s, Alice Pauli was among the very first and the most ac­ tive supporters of the project to construct a new fine arts museum in Lausanne. She followed up that enthusiastic commitment by contributing funding to the new building, which was inaugurated in 2019 on the Plateforme 10 site. She went further and donated a monumental sculpture by Giuseppe Penone to grace the new venue’s spacious atrium. And she regularly added to the museum’s collection of international contemporary art by donating major works by well­ known artists like Pierre Soulages, Anselm Kiefer, Louise Nevelson, and Rebecca Horn.

In her will, Alice Pauli made the State of Vaud her sole beneficiary with the Musée cantonal des Beaux­Arts as her ultimate legatee. This show is our way of paying tribute to her by recalling the life and work of an exceptional gallerist, collector, and patron of the arts.

Born on 13 January 1922, the second of four children, Alice Bucher grew up in Moutier in the Swiss Jura region. She began her professional career in April 1937 as a trainee and then office worker at the Louis Schwab watchmaking company. She was put in charge of the Lausanne sales office when it opened in 1943. Alice Bucher often had to travel abroad to meet with the firm’s international clients.

Alice Bucher later recalled that it was such visits to the United States, London, and Paris that led this young woman from a family milieu that was fairly indifferent to art to discover the pleasure of wander­ ing through museums. As for the mo­ ment that triggered her love of tapestry and textile art specifically, it is clouded by the mists of time; it may have occurred when taking in a London exhibition in 1947. It was above all emotionally and artis­ tically the coup de foudre she felt when she first met Pierre Pauli (whom she would marry in 1954) that convinced her to quit her job in February 1953 and join him in a cultural and commercial undertaking. After a time working to promote the French artist Jean Lurçat, Alice Pauli opened her own gallery in May 1961. The venue would only close years later, after her death on 15 July 2022.

The art historian and museum director Werner Schmalenbach, whom Alice Pauli met as part of a campaign promoting the work of Jean Lurçat, acquainted the galler­ist with the German art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. It was thanks to him that Alice Pauli discovered the work of the German painter Julius Bissier (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1893–Ascona, 1965), one of the artists whose work Schmalenbach had studied and knew well.

On 8 June 1965 Alice Pauli decided to write to Bissier to propose putting together a show featuring his work at her gallery, but by a tragic twist of fate her letter was to arrive just a few days before the painter passed away on 18 June. The artist’s widow, Lisbeth Bissier, responded several weeks later that any collaboration was impossible because the Beyeler Gallery in Basel was the painter’s exclusive representative in Switzerland. She suggest­ed, however, that Alice Pauli come and meet her in Ascona, where the artist had settled in 1961. Thanks to her skill as a negotiator, the gallery owner managed to convince the widow to authorise the gal­lery to show Bissier’s tapestries.

Alice Pauli’s powers of persuasion even­tually won the artist’s widow over and in 1970 the Alice Pauli Gallery was also authorised to represent Bissier in Switzerland. The painter quickly became one of the principal names in the gallery’s roster of artists.

So successful was the gallery’s representa­tion that Lisbeth Bissier turned to Alice Pauli without hesitation and entrusted her with the sale of numerous works from her husband’s estate. Until 2015, the galler­ist would exhibit the painter many times (over 60 shows!), featuring his paintings and Indian ink drawings.

Over the winter of 1953-54, Alice and Pierre Pauli decided they would devote themselves to defending and promot­ ing modern tapestry. At the time, no one in Switzerland specifically followed the medium’s development or dealt in art tapestry. In April 1954, Alice Pauli was in Paris and met the French artist Jean Lurçat  (Bruyères,  1892–Saint-­Paul­-de­-Vence, 1966), who was the main force behind the revival of contemporary tapestry in France and the world over. She offered to sell his work in Switzerland and mount a major show in Lausanne. Her proposal became a reality in the autumn of 1954 in the galleries of Lausanne’s deco­rative arts museum, the Musée d’art décoratif, which was then located in the Palais de Rumine.

In the first half of the 1960s, sales of Lurçat’s work were strong. Alice Pauli regularly requested new pieces from the Aubusson tapestry workshop to make a broad range of subjects available to her clientele. Besides the small­ and medium­sized pieces, which she sold by the dozens, spe­cial wall hangings in very large formats were commissioned by major businesses in Switzerland and Germany like Bayer, Union de banques suisses, Nestlé, and Deutsche Bank. Thanks to the gallerist, Lurçat’s tapestries can be seen on the walls of the National Theatre of Mann­ heim, the Philharmonia of Cologne, and the Cultural Ministry of Stuttgart.

Pursuing one initiative after another, Alice Pauli mounted a series of shows featuring Lurçat’s tapestries in museums in Germany and Switzerland, notably at Zurich’s Kunsthaus in 1962. She was also very active in promoting and selling the artist’s work other than his textile art, including lithographs, ceramics, drawings, gouaches, and even jewellery in collabo­ration with Patek Philippe.

In March of 1963, Pierre Pauli and the Lausanne art critic André Kuenzi travelled around Poland to meet artists who worked in tapestry. At the time, many art­ists were exploring new ways forward despite the censorship imposed by the Communist regime. The power of their compositions and the material quality of some of their weavings differed from the classic approach to tapestry. These pieces were, moreover, produced by the artists themselves and not entrusted to a specialised workshop. Unable to obtain enough wool, some artists would make use of hemp threads, cotton string or sisal fibres to create their pieces. They reimagined the very definition of weav­ing, introducing materials like wood, met­al, and fur. This decisive trip was followed by others, in those cases with his wife, Alice. Their objective was to mount a major travelling show that would make stops in a number of European museums.

Pierre Pauli also passed on to Alice Pauli his interest in contemporary Polish painting and graphic arts. Polish artists’ contributions in the realm of theatre, literature, and poetry, as well as tapestry were such in those years that wide­spread recognition followed in Switzerland and internationally. Into the early 1980s the Alice Pauli Gallery contributed in its way to this growing fame by regularly mounting shows featuring innovative Polish artists.

In the 1960s, Alice Pauli, often accompanied by her husband, travelled extensively in other Eastern European countries, such as the former Yugoslavia, in search of artist who were little known, if at all, in Western Europe, including the sculptor Dušan Džamonja and the textile artist Jagoda Buić.

For Alice Pauli, the three iterations of the Salon international de galeries­-pilotes, which were held at the Musée cantonal des Beaux­-Arts of Lausanne in 1963, 1966, and 1970, were an opportunity to dis­cover the world of the international art market. That discovery also offered her the chance to create ties with the major gallery owners of the day and many artists. During the 1963 show, she met the Milan­ese Arturo Schwarz. Thanks to the works he placed in her care, Alice Pauli was able to put together exhibitions highlighting the Italian artists Roberto Crippa (Monza, 1921–Bresso, 1972) and Enrico Baj (Milan, 1924–Vergiate, 2003).

In August of 1964, Alice and Pierre Pauli and their son, Olivier, were staying for a few days on the Italian Riviera, not far from Genoa. This seaside holiday was above all the occasion for her to visit artists in Albisola who were doing experimental work in ceramics. There she met with Crippa and Baj again, but the major encounter that year was with Lucio Fontana (Rosario, 1899–Comabbio, 1968). She left with two pieces by the artist, which she marked out for one of her closest collectors. She later mentioned having been once again in touch with Fontana in 1968, who offered to exhibit works from his Venezie series. These large-format canvases are covered with a thick layer of oil paint in which he often embedded shards of Murano glass.

Unsure of the success of such an exhibi­tion with her clientele, Alice Pauli decided to talk it over first with her husband be­fore definitively committing to Fontana. Her hesitation was to cost her. The artist passed away before getting her answer and the project never came to fruition.

It was most likely in 1966, at the 2nd Salon international de galeries-­pilotes in Lausanne, that Alice Pauli first encountered the sculpture of Alicia Penalba (San Pedro, Argentina, 1913–Dax, France, 1982) at the stand hosted by Claude Bernard’s Parisian gallery. She would later offer the artist two solo exhibitions (1967 and 1971) and would include her work in some 30 group shows. Although the limits of her gallery in Lausanne forced her to select only small and medium-­sized sculptures, Alice Pauli did display the monumental pieces outdoors in Vernier and St Gallen in 1980.

Penalba’s art is known especially for its simplicity and power. She created her first abstract sculptures in 1951. She began producing in 1953 a series of vertical bronze pieces that look like solemn tree trunks. The sculptor subsequently de­veloped several series in which the forms withdraw into themselves or conversely burst outward, their angles and undulations establishing rhythms and generating plays of light. Her works of the 1960s express the liveliness of an ascending movement, poised in an unstable balance and formed from horizontal and oblique volumes.

Along with her output of both monumental and small­scale sculptures, Penalba also pushed her artistic experimentation into a range of other mediums, i.e., prints, tex­tile art, ceramics, and jewellery.

In 1963 at the 1st Salon international de galeries­pilotes in Lausanne, Alice Pauli discovered the work of both the Portuguese born French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (Lisbon, 1908–Paris, 1992) and the American Mark Tobey (Centerville, Wisconsin, 1890–Basel, 1976). The two artists were being shown by the Paris­ based Jeanne Bucher Gallery.

Alice Pauli offered Vieira da Silva a solo show in 1964 and would include her work in over 40 group exhibitions. After the artist’s death in 1992, Olivier Pauli, who had been close to her, wanted very much to put together an exhibition in her memory. That show highlighted a career stamped by her endless questioning of urban transformations, perspective, and the musical­ity of brushwork.

Alice Pauli exhibited works by Tobey for the first time in 1965. This began a friend­ship and professional relationship that would last until the artist’s death in 1976. The gallery owner featured the American artist’s work in four solo exhibitions and would include it over the years in more than 60 group shows. Alice Pauli delight­ ed in his art, which reveals a range of influences, from Chinese painting to Arabic script to Persian calligraphy. She also saw herself in a person always eager to travel as well as a keen lover of music—for Tobey, to the point of studying piano and musical theory.

The Alice Pauli Gallery was one of the first to champion the singular art of Magdalena Abakanowicz (Falenty, 1930–Warsaw, 2017) beyond Poland’s borders. Starting in 1964, Pierre and Alice Pauli, and later Alice alone, launched a major campaign, aimed at museums and private collections, to pro­mote the Polish artist’s textiles. Alice Pauli had no qualms about showing very large formats in her gallery. Because of these pieces’ dimensions, she would pho­tograph them outdoors in order to illustrate the catalogues she published. She was also a constant presence for the artist in the actual making of specially commissioned works for a Swiss and foreign clientele. In 1968, Abakanowicz produced her first three­dimensional woven forms, her Abakans. These soft individual sculptures, freely hanging in space, were made using sisal fibre.

Starting in 1965, the Croatian artist Jagoda Buić (Split, 1930–Venice, 2022) saw her monumental textile works generating enormous interest on the art scene internationally thanks to the International Lausanne Tapestry Biennial, the brain child of several art world figures, amongst them Pierre Pauli. When Pierre died in December of 1970, the artist gave a new title to her pro­ject for the 5th Biennial, Hommage à Pierre Pauli [Tribute to Pierre Pauli]. The installation’s arrangement of soft strips in a semi­circle and alternating empty and full spaces reveal a strong structural and theatrical character in the piece.

Freed from the wall, the composition drops to the floor like a theatre curtain whose volumes have been designed with care. The piece amply displays its grounding in popular tradition. The materials she employs—wool, sisal, goat­hair rope, gold wire, gilded paper—are borrowed from the crafts of Slavic artisanal folklore, a heritage that Buić sought to cultivate in her work.

What Alice Pauli chose to exhibit over the years proved varied and cosmopolitan. She regularly brought together in her gal­lery paintings and sculptures, as well as graphic and textile art, done by artists whose aesthetic sensibilities and inter­ests ran the gamut. Her aim was to generate a dialogue between the artworks and see them interacting in the same space. The following sections of the show, whilst grouping the featured artists according to a thematic approach, reflect the plurality the gallerist enjoyed and encouraged.

Through a smart balancing of personal tastes, clients’ expectations, and financial resources, Alice Pauli managed to bring in and bond with well­known artists and take risks with young talents. The gallerist was indeed focused on the international scene first and foremost, and over time would stress openness to the greater world, but for all that she did not overlook the local scene in Lausanne and the Vaud re­gion. Olivier Pauli readily spoke of ‘great trees’ and ‘young shoots’, comparing the Alice Pauli Gallery to ‘a forest’. When mother and son ran the business together from April 1989 to late 1993, Alice took care of the ‘great trees’ that included Pierre Soulages, Louise Nevelson, Jim Dine, and Frank Stella, whereas Olivier set off across the landscape in search of young artists like Jean­Pierre Pincemin, Philippe Cognée, and Émilienne Farny.

In 1970, Alice Pauli exhibited for the first time a painting by the French artist Pierre Soulages (Rodez, 1919–Nîmes, 2022). It would only be in 1987, however, that the gallerist, encouraged by her son, Olivier, would decide to contact Soulages with the idea of putting together a show. Although they were eventually meeting regularly, the painter was reluctant to exhibit at the gallery’s initial address on Avenue de Rumine in an upper­middle­class flat. When Alice Pauli was forced to move in 1989, Soulages, together with Olivier, worked to convince her to take over a more contemporary space in Le Flon, a different neighbourhood in Lausanne. On 4 May 1990, the new gallery was inaugu­rated with the display of works selected for Soulages’s first solo show in Switzerland, a major event. The exhibition was a success both critically and commercially. The 20 works on view quickly found buyers. Alice Pauli was to mount three more solo shows featuring Soulages in 2000, 2012, and 2019­-20.

Like his mother, Olivier Pauli was fascinated by Soulages’s painting, once writing to the painter that ‘…your work awakens the eye as much as it questions it. There is that black, a life­-giving black, which wouldn’t be if it weren’t full of all the colours that have gone before it and haunted it. They continue to slip and slide beneath its gaps, like the grid of past time and a sign of a memory lurking there, still to be invented and constructed. Then I think, the close connection maintained with Soulages the painter must always be begun anew, like your canvas­es, where light and shadows, the opposite and its double, create a dialogue in their metamorphosis, synergy, and duality.’ (Olivier Pauli in a letter to Pierre Soulages, 19 December 1989)

Alice Pauli discovered the work of Giuseppe Penone (*Garessio, Italy, 1952) in 1982 at “documenta 7”, the contemporary and modern art show that takes place in Kassel, Germany. It was only in 1997, however, that she sought to get in touch with the artist to invite him to show in her gallery. Reluctant to begin collaborating with a gallery owner whose work in the arts was unknown to him, he never replied.

A seasoned negotiator, Alice Pauli came up with a clever plan to approach the Italian artist. She offered to make a deal with the French filmmaker and collec­tor Claude Berri, a friend of Penone’s who visited the gallery in May 1999. She would agree to sell Berri a drawing by the Swiss artist Louis Soutter that she absolutely did not want to part with and, in return, Berri would get Penone to agree to contact the gallerist and at least entertain the idea of working with her. To show her determination and ability to defend the artist’s work, she obtained a commission for
the lobby of the UBS building on Place Saint­-François in Lausanne.

Alice Pauli and Penone’s professional and personal connection was to last for over 20 years, during which the gallery owner exhibited his work in 30 group shows and featured him in five solo exhibitions.

Reflecting the strong ties that bound her to both the artist and the Musée cantonal des Beaux-­Arts of Lausanne, for the opening of the museum’s new building, she donated to the institution the crown­ing glory of her sculpture garden, Luce e ombra [Light and Shade] (2011), that has graced the museum’s atrium ever since. She commissioned for its inau­gural exhibition a special work of art, A occhi chiusi [With Eyes Closed] (2018), currently on view on the second floor of the collection’s presentation.