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

Renée Green. Ongoing Becomings

Catalogue monographique bilingue (fr./en.), sous la direction de Nicole Schweizer, avec des textes inédits de Nora Alter, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kobena Mercer, Catherine Quéloz, Gloria Sutton, Elvan Zabunyan et une interview de Renée Green par Juliane Rebentisch. Zurich, JRP Ringier, 2009, 160 p.

CHF 60.-

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Aloïse Corbaz. La folie papivore

Essay by Catherine Lepdor, MCBA edition, Lausanne, 2021, Espace Focus series, no. 5, fr., 32 p.

CHF 5.–

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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.-

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