Gustave Bollag & Léon Bollag
In 1912, after their return from America, the Bollag brothers Gustave (1873–1953) and Léon (1876–1958) founded their gallery, the Salon Bollag, in Zurich (>www.kunstarchiv.at). Theirs was one of the first galleries in Switzerland and probably the first one that held auction sales.

Léon gathered his first experiences with the well-known gallerist Max Moos in Geneva, who worked together with his sister, Betty Moos. She later became Léon’s wife. Max Moos was one of the first to exhibit works by Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland. His father, Heinrich Moos, had been running a gallery in Karlsruhe since 1899, with his children Iwan, Betty and Friedrich. He had been an artist (etchings, watercolours) and innkeeper in Randegg, a small German village on the Swiss border. (>www.gallerymoos.com)

The Bollag brothers specialized in Swiss artists: such as Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli), Jacques-Laurent Agasse and Frank Buchser, whose works they purchased abroad - realizing their importance for Swiss art. Max Moos procured them with paintings by Ferdinand Hodler. Their sister, Lucy Bollag, was friendly with Berthe Weill in Paris, one of the first galleries (>www.kunstarchiv) to buy works from Pablo Picasso, and the first to exhibit Amadeo Modigliani (see Berthe Weill, Autobiography: «Pan dans l'oeil») Through Berthe Weill, the Bollags got to know Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, André Derain, Jules Pascin and other artists.

Already in 1917, Gustave Bollag bought paintings und water colors directly from Picasso. Their contacts to other artists and art dealers of the first part of the 20th century, such as Vollard, Kahnweiler and others, date back to this period. Thus, - apart from the artists mentioned above - one can find in the catalogs of Salon Bollag many works by Renoir, Manet and others, which were bravely introduced to the still too cautious Swiss public. Paintings that fetch barely affordable prices nowadays often yielded very bad results in auctions back then. For the most important Swiss collectors, however, Salon Bollag was a household name. As early as 1920 the Bollags dealt with works by Pablo Picasso.

At a later stage, the Bollag brothers had a gallery in their private home. Gustave Bollag, a talented magician and charming host, and his brother Léon, a true gentleman from head to toe, supported by his kind wife Betty, continued to cultivate good contacts with various artists. Later in life, Léon Bollag took up painting himself, and proved to be a talented - albeit unknown - Swiss impressionist. Since he did not want to compete with his artists, it was nearly impossible to bring him to exhibit his own paintings. Many of them are today in the possession of his son, Max G. Bollag.

After Léon Bollag’s death in 1958, Mary Levin Goldschmidt, Max G. Bollag’s twin sister and wife of the philosopher Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, continued with the Salon Bollag for a few years. (>www.dialogik.org) Two of Léon Bollag’s children became gallerists/art dealers themselves: Max G. Bollag (*1913) and his sister Suzanne Bollag (*1917–1995). Today Max G. Bollag’s gallery is run under the name Bollag Galleries by his daughter, Arlette Bollag and her husband Toni Hutmacher, showing works, among others, from Salon Bollag and the collections of both Max G. and Suzanne Bollag.