Library

Hours and consultation

Summer closure

  • From 4.8.2025 to 24.8.2025 included

Winter closure

  • From 22.12.2025 to 4.1.2026 included

Tuesday-Friday: 2pm – 6pm (Except public holidays)

On-site consultation, on request:

Free access:

  • A selection of books about artists represented in the collection, in connection with current exhibitions or about a museum’s life and activities; periodicals about fine arts.

Contact

Bibliothèque du Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts
Place de la Gare 16
1003 Lausanne
bibliotheque.mcba@plateforme10.ch
+41 21 318 44 50

Art history, artists, museology, the art market, cultural mediation, conservation, private collections…

The MCBA library offers a specialised collection of materials on the visual arts from the 19th century to today. The collection covers painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, video, and new media, with special emphasis on the artists who are part of the museum’s collections, artists from Vaud and the arts in the canton. Some 40,000 items (exhibition and museum catalogues, monographs on artists, specialised periodicals, auction house catalogues) are available for on-site consultation.

The library also conserves the archives of both MCBA and the Association des Amis du musée. It maintains as well the Balthus Archives, which are on long-term loan to the museum, and the library of the Toms Pauli Foundation.

To download (in french)

Resources

The complete catalogue of the MCBA's library: search here

Links

Searching the archives...

1989: Pierre Kuenzi requests access to the MCBA library

MCBA Publications

Guide to the Collection

A presentation of more than two hundred artworks gives a glimpse of the museum’s holdings.

Texts by Bernard Fibicher, Catherine Lepdor, Camille Lévêque‑Claudet, Laurence Schmidlin, Nicole Schweizer and Camille de Alencastro.

A coedition by the Musée cantonal des Beaux‑Arts de Lausanne and Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, 2020.

(separate French and English editions). 248 pp., 226 colour illustrations.

CHF 25.-

Order

Comment peut-on être (du village d’à côté) persan (martien) ?

Jill Gasparina (ed.) With texts by Jill Gasparina and Olivier Vadrot, and a collection of notes written by the featured artists on the question of scene, landscape, group practices and those of the visual arts economy. Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 2021. Coll. Jardin d’Hiver, n. 1, fr., 32 p., 1 ill.

CHF 5.–

Order

Immersion. Les origines: 1949 – 1969

Choghakate Kazarian and Camille Lévêque-Claudet (ed.), Immersion. Les origines/The Origins: 1949-1969, Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Hazan, 2023, fr./eng., 152 p., 106 ill.

CHF 60.90

Order