Make Way for Berthe Weill: Exhibition Review
“Who Was Berthe Weill? The Story of the Audacious Parisian Dealer Who Launched Matisse and Modigliani”
Artnet News, October 3, 2024
“Make Way for Berthe Weill” at Grey Art Museum in New York brings to light the forgotten legacy of the cutting-edge Parisian dealer
By Karen Chernick
The paintings would sometimes still be wet when Berthe Weill rushed to show them at her little Parisian gallery. Why wait, she thought, hanging the fresh artworks from a clothesline with pins. Weill was famously fast and furious during the four decades she ran the Galerie B. Weill, showing only emerging modernist artists (often when they were complete nobodies). It’s no small irony, then, that it’s taken a full decade to retrace Weill’s swift steps and arrange a show about her and the iconic (and long-since dried) canvases that graced her walls.
“There’s never been an exhibition on Berthe,” says Lynn Gumpert, director of New York University’s Grey Art Museum, about the exhibition that hopes to set the record straight on Weill’s crucial role in early 20th-century modernism. The show’s title, “Make Way for Berthe Weill” is a play on the phrase she printed on her business cards—“Place aux Jeunes,” which means ‘make way for the young.’ After showing in New York it will travel to its institutional partners, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Weill’s Parisian hometown.
The exhibition reassembles some of the many artworks that passed through her gallery—110 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints by artists such as Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol, Fernand Léger, Raoul Dufy, Émilie Charmy, Suzanne Valadon, and others. It also includes materials such as her correspondence, exhibition catalogues, photographs, and journals.
Image: Émilie Charmy, Portrait de Berthe Weill (Portrait of Berthe Weill), 1910–14. Oil on canvas, 35 3/8 x 24 in. (90 x 61 cm). Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Purchase, Annie White Townsend Bequest, 113.2024 © Alberto Ricci. Photo: MMFA, Julie Ciot