Jeanne Bucher, a divorced grandmother in her mid-sixties, did just that. Several galleries remained open under the Occupation to exploit the flourishing art market, but Bucher was alone in taking the decision that collaboration with the enemy did not have to be a condition of commercial survival. The Jeanne Bucher Gallery was the only gallery during the Occupation to show cubists and surrealists. She dared not advertise her shows so they were never hugely commercial, but she believed it was vital to ensure that cultural and artistic life was not completely controlled by the Germans. ‘It is more than my passion – my interest in art is my deepest reason to live,’ she wrote to her daughter, Sybille Cournand, then living in America. Jeanne Bucher was born in 1872 into a middle-class Catholic family in Alsace just as the Franco-Prussian War was ending. This informed her understanding of the political situation, as she grew up experiencing the tension of living between France and Germany. Speaking two languages and understanding two cultures enabled her, in the 1920s, to discover German avant-garde artists and promote them. She always tried to help young artists at the beginning of their careers and in this way learned about new movements such as cubism, surrealism, abstraction.
She had married, aged twenty-three, Fritz Blumer, a renowned pianist thirty years older, but the marriage was not happy and in 1901 she fell passionately in love with the poet Charles Guérin. But divorce seemed impossible as Blumer, discovering the liaison, made her choose between her passion and her daughters. She refused to make that choice, deciding instead to wait until her children had grown up and remain on good terms with her husband. But Guérin died tragically young, in 1907, and after that Jeanne continued outwardly to lead an ordinary life, doing the sort of volunteer work at hospitals expected of women of her class during the Great War. But in a letter that she wrote at the end of her life, she explained that the enormous love which Guérin had stirred in her and which she had been forced to suppress had in fact nourished another, more powerful love which she had directed towards art and artists.
After she had at last divorced her husband, Jeanne decided to dedicate her life to modern art and, reverting to her maiden name, moved to Paris. Aged fifty, without significant financial means, she nonetheless embraced a new career and in 1925 opened her first gallery in an annexe of the exhibition shop of Pierre Chareau, the architect and designer. Her first show that year presented works on paper by Jacques Lipchitz, the Lithuanian-born Jewish sculptor, and she soon earned a reputation as one of the key leaders pioneering modern art in Paris. She never had enough money to keep artists under contract but instead used her instinctive ability to spot talent among young artists, and her wisdom to help support them, and to build up as many works as her meagre funds would allow.
In 1936 she moved to a new gallery in the Boulevard du Montparnasse where she displayed works by more established artists in the Montmartre and Montparnasse communities, including Picasso, Joan Miró, Kandinsky, Lipchitz and Max Ernst, as well as the lesser-known. But in 1940, following the invasion, even she was forced to close down and leave Paris for a while. She returned at the end of 1940, reopened her gallery and from then on, defying the Germans in numerous ways, managed during the Occupation to organize at least twenty exhibitions. When the right-wing press attacked the Lipchitz sculpture Prometheus and the Vulture (which had been commissioned in 1937 by the French government for the Grand Palais) and demanded its destruction, she responded by organizing an exhibition of his preparatory sketches. Usually, she did not announce her exhibitions in advance so as not to endanger the artists by asking for the required authorizations. But nor could there be any press coverage for her shows while they were running, because many critics were reduced to silence and others dared not express any enthusiasm for modern art.
Bucher’s house soon became a centre for intellectual resistance in Paris, visited regularly by Picasso (who was forbidden by the Germans from exhibiting), by members of his circle of painters and by surrealists such as Paul Eluard and Michel Leiris. The gallery took up the first floor of the house, which was set back from the road with a small garden in the front. Georges Hugnet, the multi-talented surrealist poet and graphic artist whom Bucher had met in the course of her first show, took over the ground floor for his printing activities, not least making false papers for other artists in danger, documents which Bucher would hide behind tapestries and under rugs.