Make Way for Berthe Weill: Feature
“The dealer who launched Picasso”
Apollo, September 30, 2024
The devotion of the gallerist Berthe Weill, who was a champion of Picasso and Modigliani, to the cause of modern art is finding belated – and well deserved – recognition.
By Tom Stammers
If in English, the genre of memoirs by art dealers probably begins with William Buchanan in 1824, it was another century before the first account was published in French. Pan! Dans l’oeil…ou trente ans dans les coulisses de la peinture contemporaine appeared in 1933, and its author was a woman. At five foot tall, Berthe Weill (1865–1951) was short of stature, but enjoyed an outsized reputation, once being described by Paul Rosenberg – a fellow dealer in the position to know – as ‘the mother of modern art’. Recently translated as Pow! Right in the Eye! (University of Chicago Press), Weill’s autobiography was clearly intended as a provocation. ‘Mlle Weill has a long memory and doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ one newspaper warned in 1931. In a chronicle of her struggles in the art world over the past three decades, Weill pays tribute to the friendships that sustained her and the artists she loved – while also taking aim at the many who had betrayed and underestimated her. Above all, it exuded her spirit of determination, summed up in her credo: ‘I WILL HANG ON!’
Image: Berthe Weill painted in 1933 by the Czech artist Georges Kars in her gallery in Paris. Photo: Maxime Champion [Global Art & Image]