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| The Hétaïre — also known as “The Courtesan with a Jewelled Collar” , oil on canvas, Picasso 1901. |
FRANÇAIS app de traduction à gauche
In a city that often forgets the women who shaped it, make way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is both revelation and reckoning. Curated with the rigor and heart of an art-historical resurrection, this landmark exhibition gives long-overdue recognition to Berthe Weill (1865–1951), a daring gallerist who, in defiance of every social convention of her time, championed the fledgling voices of modern art.
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| The Mother, oil on cardboard, Picasso 1901 |
Walking through the nearly 100 works displayed—many from Europe’s and North America’s most revered institutions—one steps into the pulsing vortex of early 20th-century Paris. These are not just paintings and sculptures; they are the tectonic shifts of a world in aesthetic upheaval. Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Dufy, Chagall, Rivera—the titans are here. But so too are the overlooked, particularly the women Weill so steadfastly exhibited: Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy, Alice Halicka, among others. Their inclusion isn’t tokenism. It’s testament. Nearly a third of Weill’s 400 exhibitions were devoted to women—a statistic that, even by today’s standards, stings with its rarity.
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| Nude with Coral Necklace, oil on canvas, Amedeo Modigliani, 1917 |
The exhibition is curated by a transatlantic team, but it is Marianne Le Morvan, founder of the Berthe Weill Archives, whose presence is most keenly felt. Her deep connection to Weill’s life, sparked by serendipity and sealed by a curatorial calling, lends the show its soul. Le Morvan recounts discovering fragments of Weill’s world unexpectedly, like the fact that Weill's would have paintings drying on clotheslines stretched out in her gallery, that in an art market unwelcoming to women, she showcased their brilliant work—and now, she is piecing together a narrative too long untold. Her devotion mirrors Weill’s own: intuitive, tireless, and radically committed.
Weill’s story is not one of comfortable success. Born into a Jewish family in Paris, she opened Galerie B. Weill in 1901 in the bohemian Pigalle district, opting to represent the untested over the established. She bore ridicule and ruin for it. Yet she persisted. Her lone business card read “Place aux Jeunes”—Make way for the young—a phrase that now highlights the spirit of this exhibition with rightful pride.
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| Eiffel Tower, oil on canvas, Diego Rivera, 1914 |
One cannot help but long for the Paris of that time—a café table with Modigliani, a passing conversation with Picasso, perhaps an argument with Matisse over color. That sense of immersion, of sitting on the edge of a creative eruption, is what this exhibition conjures so vividly. But it also makes clear that those moments, magical as they were, did not happen by accident. They were enabled—by vision, by space, by someone like Weill.
This exhibition is not merely retrospective. It is corrective. It challenges the patriarchal scaffolding of art history and suggests that without
Berthe Weill, our modern canon might look very different. With its richly illustrated bilingual catalogue and newly acquired portraits anchoring the narrative,
Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde is as much about remembering as it is about re-seeing.History almost forgot Berthe Weill. This exhibition ensures we do not.
Credits and curatorial team
An exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Grey Art Museum, New York University, and the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.
The exhibition is curated by Anne Grace, Curator of Modern Art at the MMFA; Marianne Le Morvan, guest curator and founder of the Berthe Weill Archives; Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Museum, New York University, from 1997 to 2025; and Sophie Eloy, Attache to the Collection at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.
LENA GHIO
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Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025
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| The Divan Japonais, lithography, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893 |
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