Paris,
In 1901, Berthe Weill opened a gallery in the Parisian neighborhood of Pigalle, at 25 rue Victor-Massé, where she wanted to exhibit artists of her time, favoring the development of their careers and contributing, in some cases, to their discovery. He did it with more enthusiasm than means for almost four decades, until this room closed in 1940, in the context of World War II and the persecution of the Jewish population (his family, Alsatian, was).
To a large extent, we can learn about his career thanks to his memoirs. Bread! Dans l’œilwhich he published in 1933, summarizing the history of his room in those first thirty years. She met and promoted some of the most prominent names of the French avant-garde, and also others today relegated, like herself after her death: when thinking about fundamental gallery owners of our neighboring country we will easily remember Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paul and Léonce Rosenberg, Ambroise Vollard or Paul Guillaume, but not Weill, the first female gallerist in Paris, who had time to receive the Legion of Honor in 1948, but has hardly been honored after dying in 1951.
They remember their efforts to favor the artists who shaped the isms the Gray Art Museum in New York, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal and the Orangerie Museum in Paris in an exhibition in the latter center that sheds light on its history.
Weill raised the shutters of his gallery with a 4,000-franc dowry – and a business card bearing the motto Make way for the young-, but even before doing so he was already helping to sell Picasso. Later, he would offer Modigliani the only individual exhibition in which he participated in his lifetime, in 1917, and contributed to the recognition of Fauvism by regularly presenting exhibitions by Gustave Moreau’s group of students gathered around Matisse.
Later, he joined forces with the Cubists and the artists of the School of Paris in their investigation of new forms; He also promoted many authors, without gender or school prejudices, from Émilie Charmy, whom he exhibited regularly from 1905 to 1933 and whom he considered a “lifelong friend”, to Jacqueline Marval, Hermine David and Suzanne Valadon, then in vogue.
In 1951, at the time of his death, he had shown the production of more than three hundred creators in the four successive locations of his gallery: 25 rue Victor-Massé, the first; 50 rue Taitbout, since 1917; 46 rue Laffitte, from 1920 to 1934; and finally, at number 27 rue Saint-Dominique. It organized hundreds of exhibitions until its final closure in 1940.
L’Orangerie’s proposal is part of a series of exhibitions, started in 2023 with “Modigliani, a painter and his dealer”, dedicated to the art market. This center, a companion to Orsay, seeks to shed light on the mechanisms that drove the emergence of the 20th century avant-garde and the personalities that shaped its functioning, also in terms of economies.
A hundred works are part of the tour—paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings and jewelry—that will evoke the exhibitions organized by Berthe Weill and the historical context in which they were developed. We can see works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Diego Rivera and Amedeo Modigliani alongside those of obscure figures such as Emilie Charmy, Pierre Girieud and Otto Freundlich, sometimes as they were exhibited at the Galerie B. Weill. The result is a portrait of a woman and her work.
Weill, born in Paris in a modest background, was apprenticed at a very young age to Salvator Mayer, a renowned print dealer, and in 1897 she partnered with one of her brothers to open an antiques and art store at 25 rue Victor-Massé in Pigalle, then the epicenter of Parisian nightlife, with its theaters and cabarets.
His premises were at the foot of Montmartre, where many avant-garde artists lived and worked, often in precarious circumstances. In the absence of significant financial resources, he diversified his gallery’s activities to find viable economic solutions: he sold books and exhibited artists’ prints alongside works by illustrators and caricaturists, such as Jules Chéret and Théophile Steinlen. She was beginning to make a name for herself, but she did not seem to be afraid of losing it and, when the Dreyfus case dangerously divided France, she boldly positioned herself by displaying original books and drawings in her window in support of the military man and Émile Zola.
In 1900 Pere Mañach, son of a Catalan industrialist, established himself as an art dealer in Paris, where he set out to promote a young generation of Spanish authors. He introduced Berthe Weill to Picasso, recently arrived from Barcelona, and from then on she began to buy works from him and discovered in his studio The Moulin de la Galettethe first large canvas that the painter, still aged twenty-one, made in France. He was able to sell it for a considerable price for such a young artist and that operation with the Spaniard was followed by another fifteen, even before the exhibition that Ambroise Vollard offered him the following year.
In 1901, at the age of thirty-six, Berthe Weill, with the help of Mañach, transformed her store, turning it into the B. Weill gallery we have been talking about; her first name was not mentioned, probably so that people would forget that she was a woman.
It was officially inaugurated on December 1 with an exhibition that brought together very recent pieces by Pierre Girieud, Fabien Launay and Raoul de Mathan, as well as terracotta sculptures by Aristide Maillol, who would soon achieve success with his bronzes. The art critic Gustave Coquiot wrote a preface to the first catalogue.
Weill, who detected emerging talents at the Salons, encouraged them to exhibit in her gallery, thus forging a solid reputation as a discoverer of new artists. As is known, the Salon d’Automne of 1905 brought together paintings by Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Albert Marquet and others; many critics considered them unacceptable for their abandonment of the rules of perspective and modeling in favor of the exaltation of pure colors and the simplification of forms, but she played an important role in the recognition of the Fauves by regularly presenting group exhibitions that praised their figures, even before Vauxcelles named them: since 1902.
When the scandal broke out in 1905, these painters had already shown stripes several times in their gallery. The previous year, Weill had asked the critic Roger Marx, a fervent defender of the group, to write the preface for a catalog of one of their exhibitions, thus working strategically to create the context and text necessary for the recognition that would eventually come. Likewise, he helped turn Raoul Dufy, with whom he had a close relationship, into a Fauvist artist, and he did so against the wishes of Matisse, who refused to welcome him into his circle.
As for Berthe Weill’s role in the presentation of Cubist works, this has also been practically forgotten, although she accompanied many artists from their beginnings. Thus, it exhibited the works of Jean Metzinger, whether neo-impressionist, fauvist or cubist, from 1903 to 1922, before a final exhibition in 1939, and André Lhote, Louis Marcoussis, Léopold Survage, Alice Halicka and Albert Gleizes also visited its room.
His curiosity led him to also give an opportunity to creators who did not follow any dogma, but rather their instinct. Without wavering before the prejudices and financial resources of other art dealers, often superior to his own, and at the request of the Polish poet Léopold Zborowski, he inaugurated that only individual exhibition dedicated to Modigliani during the Italian’s lifetime to which we refer. The writer Blaise Cendrars, a fervent admirer of the painter, prefaced the catalog with a short poem titled “On a Portrait of Modigliani.”
He compiled thirty-two works, mostly paintings, on rue Taitbout, including four nudes that would become iconic. The room was accused of outrage to decency and the exhibition was a resounding commercial failure, despite the five works that Weill herself acquired to support Modigliani, whose painting she genuinely admired.
In the last years of his firm’s life, he focused on abstract authors linked to collectives Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. In this spirit, in 1939 he decided to exhibit the works of Alfred Réth and those of Otto Freundlich in the gallery he had occupied since 1934 on rue Saint-Dominique, and which he would soon have to close due to the anti-Semitic measures adopted after 1940.
During the German occupation he was able to escape deportation, but he lived in great poverty, so much so that in 1946 an auction was organized to put an end to his financial difficulties in which more than eighty compositions donated by old friends, artists and gallery owners were put up for sale. Berthe Weill was then able to retire. Maybe now we won’t forget it.
“Berthe Weill. Galeriste d’avant-garde”
MUSEUM OF THE ORANGERIE
Tuileries Garden
Paris
From October 8, 2025 to January 26, 2026
