As we all know, or I hope we all know, women have long been excluded from the history books. The 1950 edition of E. H. Gombrich’s 650-page The Story of Art didn’t feature a single female artist, but that wasn’t uncommon—many of the important art history texts of the 20th Century failed to mention women. Female art collectors and gallerists were even more likely to be neglected, outside of Peggy Guggenheim and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and it’s worth pointing out that they were both exceedingly rich.
And so you can be forgiven for being unfamiliar with the name Berthe Weill (pronounced “Vay”). In 1901, she launched a gallery in Paris, showing works by Picasso, Matisse and other young artists. Rich, she was not; Weill’s father was a rag picker and her mother a dressmaker, and they had seven children. Born in 1865, Weill—who never married—was 36 when she opened the first of her three galleries using the dowry given to her by her mother. She never charged for the exhibitions, often selling her personal library, furniture and art to keep them afloat. She likewise refused the artists’ offers to pay.
Weill was the first gallerist to exhibit Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec, and she’s credited with selling the first Picasso in Paris. Suzanne Valadon’s debut exhibit was at Weill’s gallery. In her thirty years of showing work, Weill also exhibited the Fauves—Dufy and Derain, Utrillo, Diego Rivera, Marc Chagall, Émilie Charmy and Hermine David. She championed Cubism, including the work of Fernand Léger and so many other male and female artists. In 1917, she mounted the only solo show of Modigliani to be held during his lifetime. Not one painting sold.
The last of her three galleries closed in 1940 due to rising antisemitism and the war. A year later, after a serious accident, she was confined to her flat in Paris and lived in poverty. At this point, eighty-four of her artists rallied and donated their work to auction, providing her with financial support. At the age of 82, she was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur; she died three years later. That we have not heard of this indomitable woman, beloved by her artists and 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, there is a major exhibition of works Weill exhibited in her galleries. More than 100 paintings, drawings, illustrations, sculptures and archival documents showcase her incredible artistic vision and uncanny intuition. “Berthe Weill, Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-garde” is not just a visual feast but also a testimony to an extraordinary person who had to contend with being a woman, being Jewish and having little money. She had almost no interest in financial gain and once said, “We need new collectors who will come to modern painting on their own, without the spirit of lucre. And they will appear, I’m sure.”
Her early Picassos are full of openness and feeling, especially The Mother from 1901. Matisse’s 1902 A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon is washed in serene blue twilight. Raoul Dufy’s 1931 Thirty Years or La Vie en Rose is a rosy delight. The numerous excellent illustrations Weill exhibited were shown at a time when the medium of chromolithography sparked a poster mania that saw the public peeling large-format adverts off walls. She was a force in the Parisian art world, eccentric and powerful.
A standout of the exhibition is the work of painter Émilie Charmy. Weill exhibited her art in twenty-five exhibitions over a period of 30 years. The MMFA is showing five oil paintings by Charmy, and you can sense the painter’s independence of spirit and her pride in these paintings so luscious in color and gesture. Self-portrait, in a Prussian blue dress, with an ivory white complexion, crimson red rouge and lips, is a heavy impasto with a dark olive background. It’s elegant yet bold, especially considering it was painted in 1906.
Weill wrote a memoir in 1933, Pan! Dans l’œil! (Pow! Right in the Eye!), translated into English by Lynn Gumpert, and it’s because of this book that we have a record of what she thought and went through in opening and maintaining her galleries, the relationships she had with her artists and the public’s and critics’ reactions to her exhibits. Upon discussing an important exhibition that had neglected Suzanne Valadon and Charmy with the curator Louis Vauxcelles, she recalls his response: “I don’t like Valadon’s painting. Or Charmy’s, either.” She offered a counterpoint in her book: “Can you imagine a historian passing over the reign of Louis XI, for example, because they didn’t like that particular king?”
She wrote about showing the Matisses she was selling: “We met two Americans, the Stein brothers, and their sister Gertrude… They hesitated… and went on hesitating. They showed up at the Indépendants wearing truly individual get-ups. They were trying to get comfortable with this style of painting, which appealed to them. They often came to my gallery… Matisse interested them… But they didn’t dare. ‘Trust me, you should buy Matisses,’ I told them… They weren’t ready yet.”
Anne Grace, curator of modern art at MMFA, describes Weill as extremely generous yet caustic and fiercely independent in her belief in art. “It is important to think about her approach to art and to curating. She herself didn’t aspire to a high profile. She didn’t have exclusive contracts with her artists or artistic control—not a financial strategy. She put money back into the artists’ pockets. She was not a great businesswoman; this was not her focus. Matisse’s first sale was 130 francs, and she gave him 110 francs from it. She was extremely generous and always fed the artists if they were having a hard time.”
Frustratingly, Weill only documented the names of the artists who exhibited in her galleries, not the titles of their artworks. “It was difficult researching for this exhibit, so having her memoir was a valuable resource. She has been undervalued,” Grace says. “Due to the collaboration with Lynn Gumpert of the Gray Art Museum, NYU, and Sophie Elpy, attaché to the collection at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, we have been able to mount this exhibition of her extraordinary ambition and tenacity.”
Much has changed since The Story of Art first went to print. For the past several years, spending on art by women has outpaced spending by men, and it’s likely this trend will continue. Hopefully, Berthe Weill, through this and other exhibitions, will become an important inspiration and beacon for future gallerists and next-generation art collectors, ensuring her legacy.
“Berthe Weill, Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-garde” is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through September 7, 2025.
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