30 January 2023
Henry Martin, National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Ireland
Weill, Berthe, William Rodarmor, Lynn Gumpert, Marianne Le Morvan, and Julie Saul. Pow! Right in the Eye!: Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022)
‘I’m stiff-necked, forbidding, and I have a difficult personality’, writes the art dealer Berthe Weill (1865–1951) in her 1933 memoir, published in English this year for the first time in a translation by William Rodarmor for Chicago University Press. [1] Weill’s bark may be worse than her bite, however, for this spritely chronicle also reveals someone sensitive, humble, generous-to-a-fault and humorous. Like the Cubist portraits Weill hoped to sell, this art dealer had many sides and layers.
After twenty years working in her cousin’s Paris antiques shop, Weill opened her ‘cubbyhole’ gallery in 1901, exhibiting a new and young wave of experimental artists—Cubists, Fauves, Post-Impressionists—such as Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin and Pablo Picasso, risking penury and arrest to do so. For example, her 1917 exhibition of Amedeo Modigliani (the only solo exhibition by the artist in his lifetime) was forcefully closed by the police because the paintings depicted pubic hair on Modigliani’s female nudes. [2]
Figure 1. Cover, Exposition des peintures et des dessins de Modigliani, exhibition catalog (Paris: Galerie B. Weill, 1917). Courtesy of Marianne Le Morvan, Archives Berthe Weill, Paris.
Weill named her enterprise Galerie B. Weill, a gender neutral moniker that would not alienate prospective customers. At the outset of her operations, possibly because she had spent twenty years working in antiques, Weill decided to support the Jeunes artists operating in an experimental mode. The list of names she supported with solo shows or within group shows is impressive, ranging from the African American artist Meta Warrick Fuller to Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger, Diego Rivera and Kees van Dongen. In her introduction to this volume, ‘The Marvel of Montmartre’, historian Marianne Le Morvan summarises Weill’s achievements as adventurous programming, shaping collectors’ attitudes, creating a new market for emerging artists, and championing women artists. This Weill did in the face of anti-semitism (in 1943 she was the subject of a two-page anti-semitic profile), gender inequality, Fascism (a number of her artists were executed during WWII) and penury.
Fig. 2. Georges Kars, Portrait of Berthe Weill, 1933. Oil on canvas, 56 x 46 cm. Private collection © Maxime Champion: Delorme & Collin du Bocage.
This welcome publication, handily digestible in its trim size, includes a number of useful sections and contextual aids to shepherd the reader through the colourful and subjective reality of Weill’s Paris. In addition to Le Morvan’s introduction, these include a foreword by the late art dealer, Julie Saul, and the director of NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, Lynn Gumpert; Rodarmor’s translator’s note and his 500-person glossary of characters; a brief chronology; and appendices published in previous editions. Taken collectively, these contextual resources are useful for those new to the 20th Century Parisian avant-garde, as well as students looking for under-researched artists to investigate.
Weill’s memoir is also significant as a primary document describing gender dynamics in a nascent modern art market. ‘You’re a feminist, I suppose,’ the boxer Arthur Craven challenged her during an argument. ‘I certainly am!’ she replied, before laying into him, figuratively. [3] As one of the first (perhaps the first) female art dealers selling modernist works—followed by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitey in the US in 1914 and Johanna Ey in Düsseldorf in 1916—Weill’s observations on gender inequality and double standards are of historic interest, and precede the work of recent activists such as the Guerrilla Girls (founded 1985). Using just one example here, Weill was critical of the power that male critics and dealers wielded on both the market and the art historical canon. After challenging the critic Louis Vauxcelles on the absence of the artists Suzanne Valadon and Émilie Charmy in his 1925 Musée des Arts Décoratifs exhibition, Weill observes the history of painting by women depends on who the author likes or feels is worthwhile; artists he doesn’t like are stricken from the history of art. [4] Weill’s observation is strikingly relevant. Not only do we live in this gendered legacy, but today artists are even more at the mercy of writers and dealers than they were in Weill’s lifetime owing to the increased professionalisation of the art market as well as competition.
Weill’s use of the male pronoun, above, is also intentional here. Despite the centrality of women to modernism (e.g. Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach), men had a stranglehold on art-historical publishing until Second-wave Feminism ushered in a generation of researchers to challenge that narrative, e.g. Linda Nochlin, Carol Duncan, Avis Berman, Griselda Pollock, and Janet Wolff. The work taken up by the latter continues today, and the publication of Pow! in English provides solid proof of how (not to mention, when) erasure occurs. In doing so, it also implicitly asks that modern women artists be re-inserted into the narrative. Some of the women artists Weill exhibited included Émilie Charmy, Alice Halicka, Sonia Lewitska, Jacqueline Marval, Suzanne Valadon, Irène Reno, Irene Lagut, Hermine David, Odette des Garets and Claire Bertrand. That most of these artists will be unfamiliar to undergraduate art students today, demonstrates the profound and prolonged impact of bias, which remained ingrained in modernism, however forward-looking the milieu might appear to present-day eyes.
Weill’s memoir also captures the precarity of business in contemporary art, where subjects and styles alienated or infuriated audiences. Many of her observations will resonate with artists and art dealers today. ‘Ah, modern art! What profits lie ahead!’ she jests throughout, because for many years the only way she made ends meet was by selling antiques on the side (even on her holidays).[5] For many years these antiques were her unacknowledged ‘silent business partners’. [6]
Fig. 3. Promotional card for Galerie B. Weill, designed by Alméry Lobel-Riche, 1900–1901. Courtesy of Marianne Le Morvan, Archives Berthe Weill, Paris.
Weill distrusted, and perhaps was jealous of, her competitors for their successes, in particular Ambroise Vollard, with whom she had public disputes. Given that she opened her business in 1901 and published her memoir in 1933, she was ideally positioned to note the radical change in the relationship between artists and dealers in that short period. Toward the end of her memoir, never one to pull punches, she criticises her own profession:
‘Every day, some new painter was being “launched.” The art world’s big shots, the fat-cat capitalists, conferred every year to decide who they would devour this time, which Jeune [youth] to place their bets on. The lucky winner was the most trusting one’. [7]
To this biting commentary, she later added ‘The dealer had made him (the artist), invented him, so much so that you sometimes wondered which of the two was the more gifted’. [8] Today, we live in the aftermath of the system that Weill and her peers established amidst the figurative ruins of the Salon and Academy systems; an art world synonymous with, and sustained by, PR and marketing, celebrity, and fashion, now with unimaginable sums of money in the mix.
It is worth briefly comparing Weill’s memoir with that of her contemporaries, the collector-author Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and collector-art dealer Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979). Stein’s inventive dual-biography The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) was first published in English the same year as Weill’s memoir was published in French, bestowing on the American the literary success and celebrity she had long craved. [9] Published much later, Guggenheim’s Art of This Century (1946) was a confessional. [10] In many ways, Stein and Guggenheim’s memoirs— while great character studies—are light on information that many art historians might crave, and while Weill’s book is more useful as a chronicle of the art world, it often lacks some of the intimacy (though not character) of Stein and Guggenheim’s works. This comparison also draws out Weill’s ‘feminist’ bona fides, particularly her avowed respect for other women, a respect not always manifest in the writings of either Stein or Guggenheim. [11]
Pow! introduces Weill to a new English-speaking audience ahead of a 2024 exhibition on the dealer at the NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Written in French punny slang, and admirably translated by Rodarmor—e.g. ‘Everyone was there, the Cubists, the sub-Cubists, and the . . . subcutaneous’–one is reminded that translators have an important, and under-explored, role to play in current art market studies, introducing narratives and historical characters to wider, critical audiences, and thereby enabling an enriched pan-European and trans-Atlantic narrative. [12] For it remains uncommon, even in academia, to read comparative studies of art dealers across different regions. Increasing translations of art dealers’ archives and diaries into English (or from English into other languages) creates a richer field for scholars interested in exhibition history, provenance research, and global modernisms.
When Weill refused to entertain marriage as a viable life choice, her mother denigrated the artworks she sold, shouting, ‘You’ll never be good for anything except selling your plates of spinach!’ [13]. Weill’s mother was wrong. The dealer was not very successful at selling paintings and the market for the work was not established enough to support Weill or her artists. What Weill was good at was making history, and Pow! admirably demonstrates how.
Fig. 4. César Abin, “Leurs figures”: 56 portraits d’artistes, critiques et marchands d’aujourd’hui avec un commentaire de Maurice Raynal (Paris: Imprimerie Muller, 1932). Printed on vellum, edition of 250. From top left to right: Marc Chagall, Berthe Weill, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and Fernand Léger.
Sources
[1] Weill, Berthe, William Rodarmor, Lynn Gumpert, Marianne Le Morvan, and Julie Saul, Pow! Right in the Eye!: Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), p. 38.
[2] Weill, p. 10.
[3] Weill, p. 78.
[4] Weill. p. 139. My emphasis.
[5] Weill, p. 10.
[6] Weill. p. 45.
[7] Weill. p. 146.
[8] Weill. p. 168.
[9] Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Penguin, 2001)
[10] Guggenheim, Peggy, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (London: Andre Deutsch, 2018)
[11] Weill. p. 78.
[12] Weill. p. 79.
[13] Weill. p. 13.
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