{"id":1610,"date":"2022-07-18T13:35:39","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T05:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=1610"},"modified":"2022-07-18T13:36:47","modified_gmt":"2022-07-18T05:36:47","slug":"how-an-under-recognized-female-dealer-shaped-the-20th-century-french-art-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/how-an-under-recognized-female-dealer-shaped-the-20th-century-french-art-scene\/","title":{"rendered":"How an Under-Recognized Female Dealer Shaped the 20th-Century French Art Scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open admiration for the art market has always been a taboo within museums, but that has not stopped institutions across the world from staging exhibitions about the dealers who helped shape modern art. The Museum of Modern Art did a show about Ambroise Vollard back in the \u201970s; the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted one about Paul Durand-Ruel in 2015; the Centre Pompidou has honored Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler with a survey. Looking at all of these venerated dealers who boosted the Impressionists and the modernists after them, a certain picture emerges: the gallerist as a well-to-do white man who is suave, forward-thinking, good with money.<\/p>\n

All of which may explain why the French dealer\u00a0Berthe Weill<\/a>\u00a0may not have joined their ranks. She was a middle-class Jewish woman who never even tried to blend in with people like Vollard, whom she openly hated. She tended to show art that didn\u2019t sell, which consistently kept her one step away from financial ruin. Still, her Paris gallery offered Picasso some of his initial exposure, Diego Rivera his first exhibition in the City of Light, and women artists such as Sonia Lewitska a first chance at critical attention.<\/p>\n

It also may explain why, until this summer, there had never been an English translation of Weill\u2019s quirky memoir\u00a0Pow! Right in the Eye<\/em>. And what a good thing it is that this book has finally arrived.<\/p>\n

Weill, whose gallery operated from 1901 to 1941, was a polarizing figure during her lifetime, and she knew it. \u201cI\u2019m stiff-necked, forbidding, and I have a difficult personality,\u201d she writes. It\u2019s hard to argue with that, based on what she recounts in these memoirs, which were published during her lifetime for all to see.<\/p>\n

Throughout this book, Weill gets into tiffs with other dealers, fights back when tax officials go after her, and decries the taste of some of the colleagues whom she held close. She even included an appendix in which she portrays Vollard, the dealer who helped launch the careers of artists like Paul C\u00e9zanne and Vincent van Gogh, as a backroom swindler and a bumbling idiot. \u201cI\u2019m sure he will confirm that what I\u2019ve written is the exact truth,\u201d Weill sarcastically writes. \u201cBut I have to say that among dealers, he is one of the few who was never deceitful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the reason Weill could act as a truth teller in this way is because of her unusual position as a woman among a sea of male dealers. True to form, this translation is the work of another female dealer, Julie Saul, who\u00a0died this past February<\/a>. To see it into the world, Saul collaborated with Lynn Gumpert, the director of NYU\u2019s Grey Art Gallery, who is set to curating show about Weill that is due to open in 2024. Gumpert served as the book\u2019s editor, with Saul and Gumpert providing the book\u2019s foreword. William Rodarmor provided the vibrant translation from the French.<\/p>\n

A plucky, gimlet-eyed observer of all around her, Weill was unwilling to ignore the misogyny that was all around her. In 1925, when the Mus\u00e9e des Arts D\u00e9coratifs mounted a big survey of art since Impressionism, Suzanne Valadon, an artist who Weill wrote \u201cmatters today,\u201d was left out by the man who curated it. \u201cSo the history of painting by women depends on who the author likes\u00a0or feels is worthwhile; artists he doesn\u2019t like are stricken from the history of art,\u201d she concludes.<\/p>\n

Pow!<\/em>\u00a0begins with the death of a man, Salvator Mayer, whose Paris gallery was where Weill got her start. That was in 1896, and in the years afterward, Weill began selling posters and books\u2014and nearly going bankrupt constantly. She was never good with finances. \u201cIt\u2019s not like me to save up so I could finally have a little steak every day when I no longer had teeth to chew it,\u201d she writes. But she forged on, and in 1901 she opened Galerie B. Weill, which for most of its life was a money-draining operation.<\/p>\n

Early on, there were some big successes, including a Picasso show staged the year that the gallery was founded. That show included\u00a0Le Moulin de la Galette<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(ca. 1900), a key early work that is now owned by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She sold it to the newspaper publisher Alfred Huc for 250 francs. \u201cAt least there were collectors (so few!) interested in emerging painters,\u201d she writes. (The term \u201cemerging\u201d is an anachronism\u2014it didn\u2019t exist until recently\u2014but it is a useful one here, since Weill\u2019s prose style was so idiosyncratic.)<\/p>\n

Not all of the \u201cJeunes,\u201d as Weill called them, took off in quite the same way as Picasso.\u00a0Pow!<\/em>\u00a0is filled with the names of many artists whose names will be unfamiliar to most, since she enumerates virtually every show she did and does so by relying solely on people\u2019s last names. (The book\u2019s editors have put together a nearly 500-person glossary, but paging back and forth proves to be of little use.) This way of cataloguing information can be a bit cumbersome, but it\u2019s leavened by Weill\u2019s digressions into shoptalk about the Paris art scene.<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

Weill may very well have been the best gossip of the French art scene of the early 20th century, as\u00a0Pow!<\/em>\u00a0goes to show. It\u2019s filled with memorable barbs and spats, including one revolving around allegations of a crumbling friendship between Andr\u00e9 Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, two leading painters of the Fauvist movement. \u201cWeren\u2019t those two friends?\u201d Weill asks. \u201cThey were . . . or used to be.\u201d She then claims she one time hid in Vlaminck\u2019s home and listened in as an unidentified person upbraided the painter using insults as vibrant as the colors of his canvases. She reproduces this apparent conversation in full, noting every time that Vlaminck stuttered his way through his responses.<\/p>\n

Sprinkled amid all the hearsay are accounts of some landmark events in art history, such as Weill\u2019s infamous 1917 Amedeo Modigliani show, the only solo exhibition the artist had during his lifetime. At the time, Weill\u2019s gallery was situated near a police station, and a commissaire was not pleased with Modigliani\u2019s paintings of sprawled-out nude women because these odalisques had pubic hair. The commissaire threatened to send a squad of cops to remove the paintings\u2014\u201cA pastoral image . . . each cop in the squad carrying a Modigliani nude in his arms . . . cinema,\u201d Weill writes\u2014but they never had to because she closed the show mid-opening and de-installed the works herself. She ended up having to buy the paintings to compensate Modigliani\u2019s primary dealer. Today, similar works to those paintings sell for more than $100 million each.<\/p>\n

The overall message of\u00a0Pow!<\/em>\u00a0is one of resistance in the face of an elitist, male-dominated art world. That\u2019s partly because it closes out in 1926, 15 years before Weill\u2019s gallery folded amid pressure from the Nazis, who had by then occupied France. Weill could not have known this would happen when she compiled this book in 1933, and so\u00a0Pow!<\/em>\u00a0strikes a positive note in its final pages.<\/p>\n

Closing out, Weill writes that financial success is not the same as having actual talent, and naturally, this means that some of her artists had yet to find recognition. As if to accidentally prove her point, some of the artists Weill discusses whose work sold well\u2014Andr\u00e9 Lhote, for example\u2014are now basically nobodies. By contrast, some of the characters who exist at the margins here\u2014Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller<\/a>, a sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance whose work is in the Venice Biennale right now, to name just one\u2014are of greater note in some quarters.<\/p>\n

Now as then, betting big on stars who burn bright is often a losing game, art historically speaking. It leads to short-term financial dividends and little else beyond momentary fame, so Weill might ask: Why even bother?\u00a0Writing of the speculators, Weill says, \u201cA few may have played along with this dangerous game, and unfortunately are now its biggest victims. The lesson is a hard one, but it will be profitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Source\uff1a https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Open admiration for the art market has always been a taboo within museums, but that has not stopped institutions across the world from staging exhibitions about the dealers who helped shape modern art. The Museum of Modern Art did a show about Ambroise Vollard back in the \u201970s; the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news"},"yoast_head":"\nHow an Under-Recognized Female Dealer Shaped the 20th-Century French Art Scene - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Open admiration for the art market has always been a taboo within museums, but that has not stopped institutions across the world from staging exhibitions about the dealers who helped shape modern art.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/how-an-under-recognized-female-dealer-shaped-the-20th-century-french-art-scene\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How an Under-Recognized Female Dealer Shaped the 20th-Century French Art Scene - 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