“Make Way for Berthe Weill”
Make Way For Berthe Weill Exhibition Feature
Antiques And The Arts Weekly, September 16, 2024
by Laura Preston
Twenty-two years ago, the late curator Julie Saul was reading a copy of Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth Century Art (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1995), Michael C. Fitzgerald’s study of Picasso and the dealers, collectors and critics who supported his career. The dealers in Fitzgerald’s book were familiar to Saul, as they would be to any historian of the Twentieth Century Parisian avant-garde: Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Paul Rosenberg, among others. But another name caught Saul’s eye. Fitzgerald mentioned a dealer named Berthe Weill, whose tiny shop in Montmartre was crammed with antiques, prints and modern art. Despite Weill’s obscurity, her influence was enormous. She was the first dealer to sell Picasso, an early champion of the Fauves and the first and only dealer to exhibit Amadeo Modigliani in his lifetime.