Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts

The Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts (French: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, MCBA) is an art museum in Lausanne, in the Swiss canton of Vaud. Founded in 1841 through private initiative, it is one of the oldest museums of its kind in Switzerland. The museum holds a collection of more than 10,000 works and has been located since October 2019 at Plateforme 10, a cultural complex near Lausanne's main railway station. Its reputation rests on five major monographic collections, particularly the world's largest holding of works by the Swiss-French artist Félix Vallotton.

The origins of Lausanne's art collection date to 1808, when the Vaudois watercolorist Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros proposed creating a drawing school and offered his private collection of Italian works from the 17th and 18th centuries, along with his own watercolors, as study material. The project failed to materialize before his death in 1810, but the canton acquired his collection in 1816, forming the first nucleus of what would become the museum's holdings.

The museum itself was founded in 1841 by the painter Marc-Louis Arlaud, who commissioned architect Louis Wenger to build the Musée vaudois des Beaux-Arts near Place de la Riponne. Arlaud served as its first curator, and the institution bore his name until 1906. In that year, it moved to the Palais de Rumine, a Florentine Renaissance-style building constructed from a bequest by Gabriel de Rumine to house the University of Lausanne. Designed by architect Gaspard André, the Palais de Rumine was inaugurated on 17 July 1906 and remained the museum's home for over a century.

By the early 2000s, the Palais de Rumine had become inadequate. A first proposal to relocate to Bellerive, on the shores of Lake Geneva, was rejected by cantonal voters on 30 November 2008. The State Council then selected a site near Lausanne railway station on 30 September 2009. Following an international architectural competition won in 2011 by the Barcelona-based firm Estudio Barozzi Veiga, construction began with a groundbreaking in May 2016. The museum closed its exhibition spaces at the Palais de Rumine in 2018 and reopened at Plateforme 10 in October 2019 after a multi-day celebration.

The museum's collections have grown through purchases, donations, bequests, and long-term loans from cantonal and national bodies including the Société Vaudoise des Beaux-Arts, the Association du Musée des arts et sciences de Sainte-Croix, the Gottfried Keller-Stiftung, and the Swiss Confederation. Private initiative has remained essential to the museum's development since its founding.

The holdings provide an overview of general art history from ancient Egypt onward, but the greatest strength lies in art from the late 18th century to Post-Impressionism, with notable Cubist and Vaudois abstract works. The modern and contemporary collections encompass artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Rolf Iseli, Tadeusz Kantor, Charles Rollier, Daniel Spoerri, and Maria Elena Vieira da Silva. Expressive figuration is extensively represented by Günter Brus, Luciano Castelli, Miriam Cahn, Martin Disler, Leiko Ikemura, Arnulf Rainer, Klaudia Schifferle, and Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, among others.

Between 1990 and 2010, the museum focused on acquiring major works by international artists including Christian Boltanski, Tom Burr, Sophie Calle, Alfredo Jaar, Nalini Malani, Bruce Nauman, and Jim Shaw, while also supporting local artists such as Jean-Luc Manz, Edmond Jean de Pury, Alain Huck, Silvie Defraoui, Didier Rittener, Denis Savary, and Anne-Julie Raccoursier.

The museum's international reputation rests on five great monographic collections linked to artists from Lausanne or its surroundings: Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros (1748-1810), Charles Gleyre (1806-1874), Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923), Félix Vallotton (1865-1925), and Louis Soutter (1871-1942). The Félix Vallotton collection is the largest of its kind worldwide. The museum also holds the most significant collection of Alberto Giacometti in western Switzerland, following the donation of 17 sculptures as permanent loans in 2025. In the late 18th-century holdings, Ducros specialized in views of ancient monuments and picturesque sites in Rome, while the Vaudois artist Jacques Henri Sablet produced group portraits in the open air and scenes of popular life. Charles Gleyre's work forms another major 19th-century strength.

The current building at Plateforme 10 is a three-story monumental structure measuring 145 meters long, 22 meters high, and 21 meters deep, positioned at the southern edge of the site. The south-facing front along the railway tracks is accentuated by an annex, a remnant of the former locomotive depot. On the east facade, an outline traces the form of the former depot, while the north facade is structured by louvers.

The new building provides nearly triple the exhibition space of the Palais de Rumine. The two upper levels are entirely dedicated to artworks: one wing houses the permanent collection on 1,700 square meters, while the other accommodates temporary exhibitions on 1,300 square meters. These spaces include rooms with ceiling heights of 4.5 and 5.5 meters, with both zenithal and lateral lighting. The building also hosts the collection and staff of the Fondation Toms Pauli, as well as the archives and offices of the Fondation Félix Vallotton.

On 1 October 2019, the monumental public artwork La Crocodile was unveiled on the plaza before the building. This dark green painted metal sculpture by artists Xavier Veilhan and Olivier Mosset reproduces the dimensions of the legendary 17-meter-long SBB Ce 6/8 "Crocodile" electric locomotive, commemorating the site's railway history.

The Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts is located at Plateforme 10, immediately adjacent to the Lausanne, Geneva railway line and near Lausanne's main railway station, on the site of the former locomotive depot. The museum is operated by the Fondation du MCBA, a public-law foundation established in 2014 through legislation that took effect in 2018. The foundation is responsible for the use, development, organization, and administration of the museum, and the state transferred to it the use of movable cultural assets and associated intellectual property rights. The museum receives subsidies from the canton of Vaud and is supported by the Association des Amis du Musée. Plateforme 10 functions as a museum quarter for the visual arts. Besides the MCBA, it houses Photo Elysée (formerly Musée de l'Elysée), which moved in 2022 to a building by Aires Mateus, and the Musée de design et d'arts appliqués contemporains (mudac).