For the second exhibition at its new gallery space at 18 Cooper Square, the Grey Art Museum of New York University is uncovering a relatively unknown changemaker of Parisian avant-garde art. Make Way for Berthe Weill takes museumgoers on a biographical journey through the life and career of the Parisian art dealer, whose gallery, Galerie B. Weill, assisted in establishing the careers of some of the towering figures in modern art.
First located at 25 rue Victor-Massé in Paris, Galerie B. Weill was a hub for showing and selling the work of new artists, particularly fauvists and cubists. Upon meeting Weill, one would receive a business card from her with the motto “Place aux Jeunes,” translating to “a place for the young.”
Her successes include being the first to sell Picassos and Matisses in Paris, and holding the first exhibitions for Diego Rivera, Aristide Maillol, Jean Metzinger, and Raoul Dufy. The gallery was also the site of the only solo show given to Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani during his lifetime. The artist’s nudes were judged so obscene by the viewing public that the show was scuttled the same day it debuted.
Weill was also a champion of women artists and promoted the works of Polish cubist Alice Halicka, post-impressionist Suzanne Valadon, and fauvist Émilie Charmy, whose portrait of Weill, executed with the artist’s signature mottled brushwork, makes the cover of the catalogue that accompanies the Grey Art Museum’s exhibition. A selection of artworks by these artists and more are included in the show, many of which were originally exhibited at Galerie B. Weill.
Also included in the exhibition is archival material that highlights Weill’s fascinating life story. As one of a handful of European women art dealers, Weil grew up in a working-class Jewish family in Paris. She got her start in art as a teen apprentice for antiques dealer Salvator Mayer, a distant relation. She stayed at the firm for two decades until, in 1901, age thirty-six, she opened a gallery of her own.
Financial troubles were a constant companion to Weill, and alongside exhibiting and selling art, she sold books, antiques, and prints to help make ends meet. Despite being a self-described “terrible businesswoman,” Galerie B. Weill remained in business for forty years until Weill was forced to close by the Nazis in 1941. Although the gallery’s run did not end on her terms, she did have the opportunity to tell her life story in her 1933 memoir Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting, whose publication made her the first art dealer to release an autobiography.
