Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde at New York University’s Grey Art Museum Is a Revelation
Georges Kars “Dan le salon de peinture” 1933. Photo by Natalya Terk.
In December 1901, just after her thirty-sixth birthday, Berthe Weill used her modest dowry of 4,000 francs to fund her aesthetic passion and opened a gallery dedicated solely to modern art. In the decades to come, she would become a champion for then-unknown artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Galerie B. Weill would host the first exhibition of Diego Rivera in Paris, the only exhibition of Amedeo Modigliani during his lifetime, and would be the first to show the art of Fauvism and Cubism to the public. So, how come Berthe Weill's name and accomplishments disappeared from art history? The new exhibition at the Grey Museum is set to explain and correct this injustice.
Co-curated by Grey’s Director Lynn Gumpert, Marianne Le Morvan, founder of the Berthe Weill Archives in Paris, Anne Grace, curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Sophie Eloy, coordinator at the Musée de l’Orangeriethe in Paris, the exhibition brings together over 100 objects, including paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture—many of which were shown at Weill’s gallery during the first four decades of the 20th century.
“Berthe Weill was entirely dedicated to modern painting. It was a form of passion,” says Marianne Le Morvan. The list of artists she championed goes extraordinarily on, full of hundreds of names. Everybody who was anybody in modern art of the early 20th century had passed through her gallery. She, in a way, created the contemporary art market at the time by continuously exhibiting and promoting young and emerging artists. Self-proclaimed “terrible businesswoman,” she wasn’t driven by a monetary motive but by her relentless commitment to make space for new generations of artists. Her business card proudly had “Place aux Jeunes!” (“Make way for the young!”) printed on it.
One of the exhibition's highlights is Picasso’s La Misereuse accroupie (Crouching Beggarwoman) from 1902. It was likely included in a group exhibition that opened the same year it was created on November 15. It is difficult to say for sure because Weill didn’t keep good inventory records. In 1902, Picasso was 21 years old and still living in Spain. The painting is from his Blue Period (1901-1904), which didn’t make much noise at the time. Today, of course, the artworks from that period are highly sought after by prominent collectors and museums, selling at auctions for tens of millions of dollars. His art even became too pricy to exhibit. In fact, one Picasso painting that Weill sold to a collector in 1900 for 250 francs and is now in the collection of New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was too costly to borrow for the exhibition about her. The Grey Art Museum couldn’t afford the insurance for the loan.
Being an independent woman herself, Weill also supported women artists who have historically been sidelined. Of nearly 400 exhibitions held by Galerie B. Weill, almost one-third included female artists. Many of them, like Suzanne Valadon and Emilie Charmy, would become her lifelong friends. There’s a wonderful portrait of Weill by Charmy circa 1910-1914 depicting the gallerist at the peak of her career. She stands proudly, dressed in black from the neck down, with her hair pulled back, a pair of round glasses on her nose, and her head tilted with a piercing gaze.
Her circle of artists was almost a family affair. She represented a married couple, Jules Pascin and Hermine David. When Suzanne Valadon’s son Maurice Utrillo started to paint, Weill also took him in. In addition, she represented many immigrant artists who were coming to Paris from all around the world, including Marc Chagall, Diego Rivera, and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. Knowing well what it’s like to be an outsider, she would become almost a mother figure to them. They called her “Mère Weill,” or “Mother Weill,” an affectionate play on words — in French, “Mère Weill” pronounces the same with merveille, or “marvel.”
A separate section of the exhibition is dedicated to the Dreyfus affair and the antisemitism that it sparked. In her memoir, Weill recalls a moment when she had to stand in front of a raging crown that threatened to shatter her shop window. The outrage was caused by a painting by Henry de Croix on display there. Both De Croix and Weill believed that Dreyfus was innocent, the artist painted a paean to one of Dreyfus’s most celebrated defendants, Emile Zola.
It’s hard to say what led to Berthe Weill’s obscurity. There were so many obstacles. As an unmarried businesswoman, she was fighting sexism, just a reminder that at the beginning of the 20th century in France, a single woman coudn’t open a bank account in her name. As a Jew, she was fighting antisemitism. She had financial troubles throughout her career and was often on the brink of bankruptcy. And finally, as she admitted in her memoir she had a “difficult personality” that caused feuds with key art figures, Ambroise Vollard among them. The influential art dealer refused to include her in his prominent 1936 memoir because she openly criticized him several years earlier.
The last years of Berthe Weill’s life were shadowed by World War II, during which she had to hide in order to escape persecution. In 1946, an auction was held in her honor. Over 80 artists donated their work, raising the equivalent of about $130,000, which sustained Weill until her death in 1951.
The exhibition reminded me why I like modern art history so much. Even after years of studying it and thinking that you‘ve read and seen it all, there’s always a mystery and a possibility of making a surprising discovery. I encourage everyone to visit the show and learn about this exceptional woman or even go further and get a copy of her autobiography “Pow! Right in the Eye!” which was only recently translated into English.