The forgotten art dealer who paved the way for Picasso | Financial Times, December 21, 2024

by Ariella Budick

In a photograph taken at a restaurant in Montmartre in 1920, a few dozen young artists laugh and preen and pose in mock surprise. Off to one side, an older woman in black, her frizzy hair pulled back in a bun, observes the festivities with a cool maternal eye. She is Berthe Weill, who spent the first half of the 20th century chaperoning the avant-garde. “Place aux jeunes!”(“Make way for the young!”) was her rallying cry, and she devoted herself to clearing that path. From a succession of cramped storefronts, she sold works so fresh that she sometimes hung them up to dry with clothes-pins.

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