As we all know, or I hope we all know, women have long been excluded from history books. EH Gombrich’s 650 pages 1950 edition The story of art Not a female artist, but it is not uncommon – in the important art history texts of the 20th century, there is no mention of women. Beyond Peggy Guggenheim and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, female art collectors and gallerists are even more likely to be overlooked, and it is worth pointing out that they are both very wealthy.
So, you can forgive you for not being familiar with the name Berthe Weill (pronounced “Vay”). In 1901, she opened a gallery in Paris that displays the works of Picasso, Matisse and other young artists. She is rich, not. Will’s father was the excerpt of the rag, and her mother was a tailor, and they had seven children. Weill was born in 1865 and he never married, the first of his three galleries opened at the age of 36 using the dowry his mother gave her. She never charges exhibitions and often sells her personal libraries, furniture and artworks to keep it floating. She also rejected the artist’s payment request.
Weill is the first gallery to showcase Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec, who is famous for selling the first Picasso in Paris. Suzanne Valadon’s debut exhibition at Weill’s Gallery. In her thirty years of presentation, Weil also showed Fauves -Dufy and Derain, Utrillo, Diego Rivera, Marc Chagall, Émilie Charmy and Hermine David. She advocated Cubism, including the works of Fernand Léger and many other male and female artists. In 1917, she took the solo performance of Modigliani in his life. No painting is for sale.
The last of her three galleries closed down due to the rise of anti-Semitism and the war. A year later, after a serious accident, she was confined to her apartment in Paris and lived in poverty. At this point, her eighty-four artists gathered and donated their works to auction, thus providing her with financial support. At the age of 82, she was appointed as Légiond’Honneur’s body movement. She died three years later. We have not heard of this tenacious woman, loved by her artists, full of insight and generosity, is indeed a serious omission in the art world and history books.
Currently, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Weill’s main exhibitions are on display in her gallery. Over 100 paintings, paintings, illustrations, sculptures and archival documents showcase her incredible artistic vision and incredible intuition. “Berthe Weill, a Parisian avant-garde art dealer, was not only a visual feast” but also a testimony of an extraordinary man who had to resist being a woman, Jewish, and rarely rich. She had almost no interest in the financial interests and once said, “We need new collectors who will draw on their own modern painting without the spirit of Lucre. I’m sure they will show up.”
Her early Picassos was full of openness and feeling, especially Mother Starting from 1901. Matisse’s 1902 A glimpse of Notre Dame Cathedral in late afternoon Wash with quiet blue twilight. Raoul Dufy’s 1931 Thirty Years or Los Rose It’s a kind of fun. At a time when the dyed stone medium sparked poster frenzy, the numerous excellent illustrations on display by Vail show the public peeling off large advertisements on the walls. She is a powerful force in the Paris art world, quirky and powerful.
The best in the exhibition is the work of painter Émilie Charmy. Weill has exhibited her art in twenty-five exhibitions over a 30-year period. MMFA shows five oil paintings by Charmy, and you can feel the artist’s spiritual independence and her pride in paintings that are so sweet with these colors and gestures. Self-portraitwearing a Prussian blue dress with an ivory white complexion, a crimson red rouge and lips, is a heavy dent on a thick olive background. It’s elegant and bold, especially considering that it was drawn in 1906.
Will wrote a memoir in 1933. Pan! dans l’ -il! (POW! Just in your eyes!)translated into English by Lynn Gumpert, is precisely because of this book that we have a record of her thoughts and experiences when opening up and maintaining our own galleries, relationships with artists, and the public and critics’ reactions to her exhibitions. After discussing an important exhibition, she ignored Suzanne Valadon and Charmy with curators Louis Vauxcelles, who recalled his answer: “I don’t like Valadon’s paintings. She raises an opposite in the book: “For example, can you imagine a historian who was ruled by Louis X because they didn’t like that particular king? ”
She wrote about Matisses who sold to her: “We met two Americans, the Stein brothers and their sister Gertrude… They hesitated… and continued to hesitate. They showed up in Indépenders who were wearing real personal wake up. They were trying to be comfortable with this painting, and they were very attractive to my gallery. Not ready yet.”
MMFA modern art curator Anne Grace describes Weill as having an extremely generous but demanding belief in art and very independent. “It’s important to consider her own art and curation. She doesn’t crave high visibility. She doesn’t have an exclusive contract with artists or art controls, not a financial strategy. She puts the money back into the artist’s pocket. She’s not a great businessman. It’s not her focus; it’s not her first sale. Tough times.”
Frustratingly, Will only record the names of the artists exhibited in the gallery, not the title of the artwork. “It’s hard to study for this exhibition, so making her memoirs is a valuable resource. She’s underrated,” Grace said. “We’ve been able to hold exhibitions of her extraordinary ambitions and tenacity in the collection of the Musé del’Orangeries in Paris, thanks to a collaboration with Lynn Gumpert and Sophie Elpy of the Museum of Gray Art at NYU.S. The collection of the Musé del’Orangeries in Paris.”
A lot has changed since then The story of art Print first. Over the past few years, women spend more on art than men, and this trend is likely to continue. Hopefully through this and other exhibitions, Berthe Weill will be an important inspiration and beacon for future galleries and the next generation of art collectors to secure her legacy.
“Berthe Weill, avant-garde art dealer in Paris“As of September 7, 2025, it is located in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
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