The Forgotten Dealer Who Discovered Picasso and Matisse

A show at the Grey Art Museum re-establishes Berthe Weill as a guiding light of the Parisian avant-garde. Her rediscovery has been led by women.

“A collection of paintings isn’t like a stock portfolio,” the Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill declared in her 1933 memoir, “Pow! Right in the Eye!” She was lamenting that novice collectors of the era were overly concerned about whether the value of her emerging artists would rise. “I was afraid they had neither confidence nor perseverance,” she wrote.

Weill often turned away clients she deemed insufficiently committed. But she did encourage others to make the leap, including Gertrude Stein and her brothers, Leo and Michael, who frequented Galerie B. Weill, which she opened in 1901 when no other dealer in Paris specialized in young artists. “‘Trust me, you should buy Matisses’, I told them,” Weill recounted, adding, “They weren’t ready yet.” In 1902, Weill was the first dealer in town to exhibit Henri Matisse. “They made up their minds soon enough, however, and started buying hand over fist (not from me).”

Such was the fortune of this prickly, forthright gallerist, barely five feet tall and a self-proclaimed “terrible businesswoman” with a “difficult personality” who nonetheless possessed the eye and gumption to go to bat for untested artists — and kept the doors of her shoestring gallery open for four decades. She was the first dealer to sell works by Pablo Picasso in 1900, the first to give Diego Rivera a solo show in Paris in 1914 and the only one to give Amedeo Modigliani a solo show in his lifetime, in 1917 — causing a scandal on opening night.

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