The Brooklyn Rail

Grey Art Museum's Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde is a welcome conspectus of the titular Parisian art dealer and gallerist. In comparison to her Montparnasse male counterparts, such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Ambroise Vollard, Weill’s promulgation of the nascent School of Paris (among other, unrelated and unaffiliated avant-gardists) during the early twentieth century has, hitherto, been neglected by curators and art historians alike. As the inaugural exhibition dedicated to Weill, this show deftly manages to balance Weill’s biography, captured via ephemera and archival material, with choice works by those artists she championed and exhibited from 1901 to 1941 at her peripatetic Paris gallery, Galerie B. Weill, which enjoyed four different locations before it was closed during the Third Reich’s occupation of France. The exhibition is thoroughly researched and, alongside the works displayed, ravels an object history threading photography, exhibition catalogues, bulletins, exhibition announcements, postcards, a 1933 hand-written letter from Weill addressed to a Dr. Coiffe, and even Weill’s idiosyncratic sloping golden spectacles (sans lenses).

The show deserves studious, unhurried viewing and is sure to please both those with a general interest in Post-Impressionism and specialists interested in the early twentieth-century modernist witness accounts. It begins with a portion of a gallery room dedicated to Weill’s early years, where, working with Catalan art dealer and Pablo Picasso’s confidant, Pedro Mañach, Weill converted the antique shop she had run in conjunction with her older brother, Marcellin, into a fine art gallery. Weill had already honed her eye during her decades working for the antiquarian, Salvator Mayerlearning, as Charles Dellheim writes in his 2021 book Belonging and Betrayal, “firsthand about a variety of objects ranging from bric-a-brac that was rarely suitable for the finest town houses or châteaux to genuine antiques.” As she had befriended then-emerging artists and dealers during her time with Mayer, Weill was, despite several bouts of financial tumult and intense struggles against other rue Laffitte dealers, able to maintain her gallery.

Make Way for Berthe Weill broadly proceeds chronologically, in accordance with Galerie B. Weill’s exhibition history. The gallery’s inaugural 1901 exhibition included terracotta figurines by Aristide Maillol, a bronze sculpture by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, jewelry by Paco Durrio and Paul Bocquet, and paintings by Pierre Girieud, Fabien Launay, and Raoul de Mathan. The exhibition pays homage to this maiden venture. A group of smelted silver pendants and belt buckles by Durrio figure alongside Fuller’s expressionist bronze sculpture, The Wretched (1901). These are joined by two works by Girieud—Portrait of Painter Émilie Charmy (1908) and Nu au bas noir (Nude with a black stocking) (1905)—alongside Mathan’s La Cour d’assise (The Assize Court) (1908) and Le Cirque (The Circus) (1909). The latter two canvases exactingly portray bleary, fogged, nameless crowds captured in the frenzied vivacity of a chromatic palette. Although Launay and Bocquet are notably absent, this grouping betrays Weill’s early support for what, in 1905, would coalesce as Fauvism, with which Girieud and Mathan became associated. Yet Weill’s inclusion of Fuller’s sculpture readily demonstrates both her eclecticism and her support for women artists, regardless of their movement or retinue-based affiliation. The Wretched, in its pooling, emaciated, agonized figures with limbs outpouring from an undulating pedestal, recalls Camille Claudel’s work from the late nineteenth century. An African American woman sculptor hailing from Philadelphia lauded as the successor to Edmonia Lewis, Fuller had travelled to Paris in 1899 to study sculpture and drawing at Filippo Colarossi’s academy, her term overlapping with Claudel’s. Fuller would remain in Paris until 1903, garnering laudation from Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Auguste Rodin, who is quoted in the March 1939 issue of the Negro History Bulletin, as praising Fuller’s command of “sense and form.” Weill, it seems, recognized this in advance and was prescient in her selection. Two years after showing with Weill, Fuller would exhibit The Wretched, alongside her newer sculpture, Le Mauvais Larron (1902), at the Paris Salon. This major work’s inclusion in the Grey Museum’s show is noteworthy in itself.

As the exhibition progresses, it remains anchored to those artists whom Weill unflaggingly supported. Weill’s business card was inscribed with a pithy though telling saying, the permutation of which is the exhibition’s namesake: “Place aux jeunes,” or “Make way for the young.” Indeed, Weill’s art historical notoriety is manifold, steeped in the dealer’s commitment to bolstering her “Jeunes,” as she so denominated those choice young artists whom she exhibited with verve. Weill’s accomplishments include having sold Picasso’s work in 1900 and shown his canvases prior to the artist’s exhibiting with other, better-known Parisian dealers. In 1902, Weill exhibited Henri Matisse before any other Parisian commercial gallery and spurred her gallery regulars, Gertrude, Leo, and Michael Stein, to collect works by “Jeunes” like Matisse. Weill also mounted Suzanne Valadon’s inaugural exhibition in 1913 and dedicated a solo exhibition to Diego Rivera in 1914—the Mexican painter’s first one-man show in Paris.

In 1917, Weill organized the first and only solo show for Amedeo Modigliani during the artist’s life. By this point, it was considered an honor to exhibit with Weill, as she had already shown the Fauves, Picasso, Maurice Utrillo, Kees van Dongen, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Jules Pascin. Although she only sold two Modigliani drawings, for thirty francs each, Weill’s exhibition included the now-infamous series of nudes in repose, which Modigliani had painted over the last year. The nudes, pocked by curling tufts of pubic hair, caused a scandal as Weill had prominently displayed them in the 50 Rue Taitbout gallery window, prompting the police to bar her exhibition on grounds of indecency. The episode, captured in Dellheim’s book, summarizes Weill’s tenacious belief in her artists: “When the police insisted that she [viz., Weill] take down an allegedly obscene Modigliani nude that was hanging in her gallery window, she refused—and let them drag her off instead.”

The Modigliani on show, Fille rousse (Girl with red hair) (ca. 1915)—a decidedly tamer work of a snub-chinned, rosy woman puckering her askew lips—indexes Weill’s support of the Italian artist. Although one rues the omission of Modigliani’s scandalizing nudes, the exclusion is demonstrative of Weill’s foresight: indeed, many of the works Weill sold and showed eventually went on to be owned by illustrious museums and today command exorbitant insurance fees. Nevertheless, this had prompted the show’s curators to locate original and lesser-seen examples among Weill’s “Jeune” coterie. André Derain’s early Fauvism is aptly betokened by Fishing Boats, Collioure (1905), which masterfully scatters bronzing sunlight across docked sailboats, their triangular mast set into dramatic contrast with the light lavender sea. La Répétition (The Rehearsal) (1933) is indicative of Derain’s more mature subject matter, hewing closer to genre painting than the Fauvism of his youth. One finds admirably tight and orderly brushwork in Robert Delaunay’s Paysage aux vaches (Landscape with cows) (1906), which precedes his discovery of Orphism by half a decade. Although the work was not included in Weill’s 1907 group show including Delaunay, it is demonstrative of the artist’s style during the time that he showed with her.

There are too many showpieces—by what are, today, names so vaunted that one can hardly contrive their relative notoriety—to thoroughly review them all. Émilie Charmy’s canvases, however, are exceptional and, as evidenced by Girieud’s portrait, Charmy serves as one of the focal points in the exhibition. Although Weill advanced several women painters, including Valadon, Jacqueline Marval, and Alice Halicka, she was particularly taken by Charmy’s work after seeing it mounted in the 1905 Salon d’Automne. Weill’s kinship with Charmy lasted until the former’s passing in 1951. Weill also clearly regarded Charmy as a commendable though overlooked talent, evinced in a characteristically acerbic testimony from Weill’s recently translated autobiography, Pow! Right in the Eye!:

A very important exhibition was organized at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs: fifty years of painting, from Impressionism to the present. But the museum neglected to invite Suzanne Valadon, who I think matters today, and also Charmy. Oh, that’s right; they weren’t hot properties yet…When I remarked on this to [Louis] Vauxcelles, who curated the show, he said “I don’t like Valadon’s painting. Or Charmy’s, either.” Later, he wrote a book about painting by women. Needless to say, he again “forgot” them. So 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.

Weill endeavored to correct this oversight. It is in no small part thanks to her that Charmy is today lauded for her depictions of the domestic bourgeois Parisian women from the first half of the twentieth century. Although Charmy is frequently associated with Matisse and van Dongen’s scintillating colorism, the five exhibited works make pellucid that her palettes are comparatively muted and ungraduated, emphatically trekking in oyster blues, powdered silvers, and rusted yellow-browns. The exhibition boasts an undulating verdure landscape, Piana Corsica (1906), reminiscent of Paul Cézanne's pastoral Lac D’Annecy studies from the mid-1890s. Charmy’s Autoportrait (Self-Portrait) (ca.1906), however, is the artist’s most exceptional work on view. It finds Charmy donned in an ultramarine robe that folds outward at her chest, revealing a lone pale breast. Charmy’s eyes are tightly closed and her maroon lips furrow into the lineaments of a slight smile. Charmy’s light skin and garment are subtended by a sickly fir background. Unlike much of her work from this period, the foreground is not set off by strong boundaries. The sofa-cum-pedestal, upon which Charmy reclines, fades at its edges, every ministration of light overtaken and beclouded by hazy strokes of multi-tone green. The work is exemplary of what Arthur Jerome Eddy, in his 1914 account, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, deemed the “transition state from Virile-Impressionism to Post-Impressionism.”

Alongside Charmy’s portrait, the exhibition is also punctuated by portraits of Weill by Édouard Goerg and Georges Kar. Each is characterized by Weill’s black cloak, tightly bound hair, and trademark fishbowl spectacles. In Kar’s Dans le salon de peinture (In the painting salon) (1933), Weill is depicted amidst a mound of stacked canvases. The work speaks to Weill’s unfaltering vim, which was neither motivated by nor awarded with handsome riches the likes of which were accrued by her peers, including the Gaston and Joseph Bernheim-Jeune, Paul Durand-Ruel, Paul Rosenberg, Clovis Sagot, and Vollard. Consequently, Weill’s legacy has lapsed into relative obscurity. This eruditely researched and duly informative exhibition is a propitious undertaking that, one hopes, will inspire further such efforts—both scholarly and curatorial.