Make Way For Berthe Weill Feature:
“Make Way for Berthe Weill”
Antiques And The Arts Weekly, September 16, 2024
By Laura Preston
NEW YORK CITY — 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. How was it that such a key figure of modernity was now forgotten? Saul’s search for answers led her to the MoMA PS1 library, which held a copy of Weill’s self-published memoir Pan! Dans l’oeil (POW! Right in the Eye!). Weill’s words leapt off the page. Here was a woman of high ideals and unwavering resolve, full of intensity, humor and grit. “I started out with just 50 francs in hand and went into debt to pay the costs involved in opening a shop…” she wrote. “What was the worst that could happen? Not being able to hang on? I will hang on!!!”
Image: Émilie Charmy, Piana Corsica, 1906. Oil on canvas mounted on board, 21 1/8 x 25 3/8 in. (53.5 x 64.5 cm). Galerie Bernard Bouche, Paris © Alberto Ricci