When Jewish art dealer Berthe Weill was forced to close her Parisian gallery and go into hiding during the Occupation of France, she had already helped build the careers of artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Diego Rivera, as well as female including painter Suzanne Valadon, African-American sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and Émilie Charmy, known for her portraits. While Weill survived the war and continued to champion the avant-garde to her death, her influence on 20th-century art as one of the first female art dealers who showed some 300 artists has only recently been re-appreciated.
Born in 1865, Weill came from an Alsasian-Jewish family that worked in the textile industry. While she stopped attending school at age 10, she began apprenticing at an antique shop, where she met art critic Claude Roger-Marx, who sparked her interest in emerging artists. Weill opened a gallery in Pigalle, near Montmartre (a hub for artists at the time), with her brother in 1897. The scrappy Weill had to get creative to make a living, selling books and prints alongside artworks, but not hiding her political commitment. Despite the antisemitism of the era, as seen in the national debate around the Alfred Dreyfus affair, Weill displayed books and illustrations that supported the Jewish military captain on trial for treason and writer Emile Zola, a vocal advocate. In her early exhibits, she featured the paintings of Raoul de Mathan, who captured Dreyfus’s second trial on canvas.
One of her most significant relationships began when she met Picasso in the fall of 1900 through Catalan dealer Pedro Manãch. She was particularly drawn to Le Moulin de la Galette, his first large-scale work featuring the Parisian nightlife, and facilitated the Spanish painter’s first sales in Paris to prominent collectors. After seeing fresh works from his blue period that Weill put on display, art critic Charles Morice described Picasso as “a young God who wants to remake the world.” The then 36-year-old Weill started her own gallery on the same street in 1901, hosting a show that was a confrontation between Picasso and Louis Bernard-Lemaire in 1902. Funded with her dowry, the Galerie B. Weill was a “place for the young,” as she put it, showcasing members of the nascent Fauvist and Cubist movements, including Henri Matisse, in fact making his first sale through a dealer; Georges Braque; and André Derain. Weill was not afraid of going against the grain: She already portrayed Fauvist artists before the infamous 1905 Salon d’Automne (featuring artists including Derain, Matisse, Albert Marquet and Maurice de Vlaminck), which so “broke” established ideas of prospective and modeling that the works were called “fauves,” or wild beasts, giving name to the movement.
From these early years, she also gave women a rare space to exhibit: 29 of the 149 solo shows at the Galerie were dedicated to women. She noted that “the struggle for women is harsh and requires (…) exceptional strength of will to escape the quagmire relatively unscathed.” In her inaugural exhibit, “First exhibition of 20th-century modern art in a private gallery,” she included self-taught painter Jacqueline Marval, whose modern interpretation of the goddess Minerva is particularly striking. She also featured a sculpture called “The Wretched” by Harlem Renaissance member Meta Vaux Warrick, the first African-American sculpture to study in France and who worked under Auguste Rodin. In the 1920s, she featured the work of Polish painter Alice Halicka, known for her cubist work, in four exhibitions.
Notably, Weill extensively exhibited Suzanne Valadon, the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, representing her from 1913 and 1932 and hosting three personal retrospectives. While Valadon, known for her innovative representations of women, had already been working for 20 years, it was Weill who brought her work to a broader audience. Reflecting on “Valadon’s ascendance,” Weill wrote, “But she had so many detractors! To her great credit, she never made any concessions.”
There was also Émilie Charmy, who became particularly known for her bold nudes. Weill saw her work at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants and was particularly impressed by the fact that she did not belong to “any movement.” She ended up including Charmy’s work in some 30 exhibitions. She was also one of multiple artists, including Picasso and Georges Kars, who captured Weill’s unique look in a portrait. She stood out from other women of her time, given her androgynous style, wearing all black and always sporting small, round glasses. (Weill was the only woman art dealer famously caricatured by painter César Abin, sitting front and center and larger than her male contemporaries.)
While she did much to define the category of French art, foreign artists who often faced additional challenges were also of particular interest for Weill. She hosted the only solo exhibition Mexican muralist Diego Rivera had during his decade living in Paris. She also put on the only solo show for the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani during his short life, in 1917, featuring 32 works. Infamously, she refused a police commissioner’s demand that she remove nude portraits by Modigliani that featured pubic hair. While the exhibition was a failure commercially, Weill believed in Modigliani, who would become one of the most celebrated artists of his era. She brought five of his works and described his style as “sumptuous nudes, angular figures, ravishing portraits.”
Weill also turned to writing. She devoted part of the gallery space to selling books and produced Le Bousilleur, a journal for the gallery, from 1923. The next year, she also shifted her exhibition focus to revolve around specific themes. The first was “The Flower” and featured almost 70 artists. It proved to be both a critical and commercial success, with future editions dedicated to topics like children, views of Paris and birds, which likely featured The Birdcage by Marc Chagall, a painting that plays with ideas of freedom. The 1931 exhibit was particularly memorable as it marked 30 years of the gallery; its theme was “The Joy of Life.” For this occasion, French painter Raoul Dufy painted Trente Ans ou La Vie en Rose, an appropriately rosy still life of a pink room and flowers. The work inspired Gertrude Stein, one of Weill’s clients, to comment, “Dufy is pleasure.”
In 1933, Weill wrote her memoir, Pan ! dans l’œil… (Pow! Right in the eye!), becoming one of the first dealers to document the evolution of the art world. Ahead of her time, she was already cautious about collectors viewing their acquisitions purely through a commercial and not aesthetic lens, writing that a “collection of paintings isn’t like a stock portfolio.” Despite firmly establishing her status, Weill could not escape the rising antisemitism of the 1930s and was targeted in the press, with a 1943 article in an antisemitic newspaper saying she shared the “Jewish race’s total lack of aesthetics.” She stopped publishing bulletins after 1935, instead writing her thoughts on exhibit invitation cards. In 1940, she was forced to close her gallery. (Ironically, the art market flourished during the war years, with pilfered works lining the pockets of Nazi officials.) And she eventually went into hiding in Charmy’s studio. Other Jewish members of the art world weren’t so lucky. German painter Otto Freundlich, an early practitioner of abstract work and who Weill displayed, was declared a “degenerative artist” by the Nazis, sent to a concentration camp and murdered.
After the war, Weill, who was now in her 70s and in ill health, was never able to regain her status in the art world. Some of the biggest talents she showed moved on to more established, and male, dealers like Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Ambroise Vollard. But she never lost the support of the artists she’d brought to the limelight. She was supported by the proceeds from a 1946 auction of donated artworks, from both friends and competing galleries. She died at age 85 in 1951. Sadly, while the profile of Weill’s male artists has only grown since her death, her influence in their rise has been largely overlooked — a biography of her wasn’t written until 2011. Luckily, a number of museums (including the Grey Art Museum in New York and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris) in recent years have hosted exhibitions dedicated to Weill, highlighting not only the paintings, sculptures and other objects that passed through her galleries but also her role as a curator always looking for the newest and innovative artists, wherever they may come from. And her story continues to inspire. In an interview about the Grey Art Museum exhibit, which she curated, Marianne Le Morvan, the author of the 2011 Weill biography and founder of the Berthe Weill Archives in Paris, said, “As a researcher: I believe that you do better work if you love it passionately, and that the best way to achieve this is to carve out your own space. She taught me that being curious is a great quality, and her tenacity was very inspiring.”
