Make Way for Berthe Weill
Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde
Grey Art Museum, NYU, New York
October 1, 2024 – March 1, 2025
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
New York University’s Grey Art Museum presents Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde, featuring works by modern artists championed by a dealer who remains relatively unknown. Berthe Weill (pronounced “vay”) was the first dealer to purchase works by Pablo Picasso in 1901, and she promoted Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani, among many others. Yet her role in early 20th century modernism has been omitted from most historical accounts. This landmark exhibition sets the record straight. The groundbreaking show is the second at the museum’s new and expanded galleries at 18 Cooper Square.
Some 110 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture by modern giants such as Picasso, Matisse, Aristide Maillol, Fernand Léger, and Raoul Dufy are featured alongside works by less well-known artists. Together they create a compelling portrait of Berthe Weill (1865–1951), who operated her gallery for four decades in four different Parisian locations and was the first to promote work created exclusively by emerging artists. The exhibition highlights Berthe Weill’s influence and examines the sexism, antisemitism, and economic struggles she faced as she advocated for cutting-edge contemporary art in a competitive Parisian art market.
The Wretched, 1901
Bronze, 17 x 21 x 15 in. (43.2 x 53.3 x 38.1 cm)
Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, Washington
Gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, 1951.07.264
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
Paysage aux vaches (Landscape with cows), 1906
Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 24 in. (50 x 61 cm)
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Donation of Henry-Thomas, 1984, 2576
CC0 Paris Musées / Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Organized by NYU’s Grey Art Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, Make Way for Berthe Weill also features paintings by Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy, and Alice Halicka, to name a few among the many female artists Weill promoted. Also included are works by Marc Chagall, André Derain, and Diego Rivera, whose first solo show took place at the Galerie B. Weill.
“This exhibition spotlights the remarkable story of an indomitable woman who maintained a gallery in Paris, the art capital of the world, from 1901 to 1941,” says Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Museum and one of the curators of the exhibition. “Weill sought out unproven artists, some of whom became household names and some of whom didn’t. But all benefited from her creativity, ingenuity, and passion.”
Berthe Weill was born in 1865 in Paris to an Alsatian Jewish family of very modest means. In her teens, she began an apprenticeship with Salvator Mayer, a colorful print and antiques dealer whose shop was located in the heart of the Parisian gallery district and which attracted Impressionist artists such as Edgar Degas and collectors such as Isaac de Camondo. At age 36, after learning the trade for two decades, she opened the Galerie B. Weill just a few streets away. Her business card read “Place aux Jeunes,” which roughly translates to “make way for the young.” In addition to presenting exhibitions, Weill sold books, prints, and antiques to earn enough to stay open. Fearless and determined, she organized Modigliani’s only solo exhibition during his lifetime. The show was shut down by police on the opening night, as they judged the nudes to be “indecent.” Consequently, no works were sold; the impoverished artist died three years later.
Berthe Weill stood apart from her male counterparts, such as Ambroise Vollard, Paul Durand-Ruel, the Bernheim-Jeune brothers, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, not only in her class and gender, but in her willingness to gamble on unknown talent and in her disdain for contracts. Art lovers of her time recognized Weill’s achievements. In October 1931 a journal reported that she was writing her autobiography: “Mlle B. Weill, that extraordinary picture dealer . . . has a long memory and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. So gossip about the memoir by ‘the great and small’ Mlle Weill is buzzing from Saint-Tropez to Sanary by way of the terrasse of the Dôme, and some people are feeling nervous.” Weill’s memoir, Pan! dans l’oeil!, was published in 1933. Translated in 2022 as Pow! Right in the Eye!, it appears to be the first autobiography by an art dealer, followed by Vollard’s Recollections of a Picture Dealer in 1936.
Portrait of Madame Pascin (Hermine David), 1915–16
Oil on canvas, 21 x 24 in. (53.3 x 61 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1967-30-66
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art
Fille rousse (Girl with red hair), c. 1915
Oil on canvas, 16 x 14 3/8 in. (40.5 x 36.5 cm)
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
Jean Walter and Paul Guillame Collection, 1960.46
© Photo: Musée de l’Orangerie / Sophie Crépy
La Vierge attentive (The Attentive Virgin),
also known as La Vierge à l’étoile (Virgin with a star), 1939
Oil on canvas, 22 x 19 5/8 in. (56 x 50 cm)
Collection Guieu, Jouques, France
© Jean-Christophe Lohest
The exhibition includes archival documents—such as letters, exhibition catalogues, photographs, and journals—that reveal her deep relationships with a range of artists. A keen observer of contemporary art trends, she supported Matisse and showed the Fauves before they gained their moniker at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. She began promoting Cubism, noting in Pow! how difficult it was to convince the public of its importance. In the late 1910s and ’20s, she featured figurative paintings by School of Paris artists, before focusing on abstraction in the 1930s with shows by Otto Freundlich and Alfred Reth. In 1941, she was forced to close her Left Bank gallery on rue Saint-Dominique due to the “Aryanization” measures enacted under the Nazi occupation. Somehow avoiding deportation, Berthe Weill emerged impoverished and in poor health after the war. In December, 1946, artists and rival galleries donated artworks for a public auction, the proceeds of which went to Berthe Weill in recognition of her crucial early support.
The exhibition’s international curatorial team includes Lynn Gumpert, Marianne Le Morvan, founder of the Berthe Weill Archives in Paris, Anne Grace, curator of modern art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Sophie Eloy, collections administrator and coordinator of the Contrepoints Contemporains installations at the Musée de l’Orangerie.
An illustrated publication, Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde, accompanies the exhibition. Published by Flammarion, it illuminates the rich artistic period by spotlighting recently rediscovered artists and offering new insights into the era’s central figures. It includes an introductory essay by Le Morvan, a discussion of portraits of Weill by Grace, an essay on antisemitism in late 19th-century France by historian Charles Dellheim, an overview of collectors who frequented the Galerie B. Weill by researcher Robert McD. Parker, and entries on works by Eloy. It also features a chronology and selected bibliography.
Pow! Right in the Eye!
Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting
The University of Chicago Press, 2022
Also available is Berte Weill’s recently translated 1933 memoir, Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting, edited by Lynn Gumpert and translated by William Rodarmor, with foreword by: Julie Saul and Lynn Gumpert; introduction by Marianne Le Morvan; University of Chicago Press, 280 pages, ISBN: 9780226814360.
Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
The exhibition will tour to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts May 10 – September 7, 2025, and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris October 8, 2025 – January 25, 2026.
GREY ART GALLERY, New York University
18 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003
