Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In a photograph taken at a restaurant in Montmartre in 1920, a few dozen young artists laugh and preen and pose in mock surprise. Off to one side, an older woman in black, her frizzy hair pulled back in a bun, observes the festivities with a cool maternal eye. She is Berthe Weill, who spent the first half of the 20th century chaperoning the avant-garde. “Place aux jeunes!” (“Make way for the young!”) was her rallying cry, and she devoted herself to clearing that path. From a succession of cramped storefronts, she sold works so fresh that she sometimes hung them up to dry with clothes-pins.Weill didn’t just support Picasso before he was Picasso; she supported everyone before they were anyone: Matisse, Chagall, Braque, Redon, Dufy, Derain, Utrillo, Modigliani, Vlaminck, Diego Rivera, and a host of talented women including Suzanne Valadon and Émilie Charmy. For four decades, she sniffed out talent, took risks, and absorbed the losses that came with running ahead of the market. And then she slipped offstage into art history’s wings, her labours unappreciated, her name forgotten.Make Way for Berthe Weill, Grey Art Museum’s reputational rescue mission, finally does justice to a figure whose astute judgment, scrappy manner, sharp wit and financial haplessness placed her at the centre of the Parisian art world. The exhibition enjoys three complementary strengths: a good story, a rich protagonist and the pied beauty of the art she loved.Weill was there for her ‘jeunes’ when they needed it most. She got artists their first real money and kept the demon of demoralisation at bayWeill (pronounced “Vay”) was born in 1865 to an impoverished Jewish family and entered the art world through an apprenticeship in a relative’s print shop. In 1901, she met Pedro Mañach, a wealthy Catalan industrialist who introduced her to Picasso and helped her to open a space of her own, the Galerie B Weill. (The initial disguised her gender.)Her taste was so consistently prescient that a show of work from her stable now looks deceptively mainstream. Here’s Matisse’s silently dignified “Still Life with a Chocolate Pot” from around 1900; Georges Capon’s sombre dancer at the club “La Java” in 1925, with one hand resting on a cocked hip; and Dufy’s 1906 vista over a street patriotically decked with tricolours (“La rue pavoisée”). We get a single Modigliani, “Girl with Red Hair” (c1915), but unfortunately none of the “sumptuous nudes”, as Weill called them, whose hairy pudenda so rattled a police chief that he ordered the paintings banished from the gallery’s window.Weill owes her posthumous rebirth to three women who independently took up her cause: Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery, art historian Marianne Le Morvan and photography dealer Julie Saul, all of whom stumbled on traces of her existence and decided to investigate. (Saul died two years ago; Gumpert and Le Morvan co-curated the exhibition, with Anne Grace from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Sophie Eloy, from the Musée de l’Orangerie.)The character who emerges from their research is a tiny woman with pale blue eyes and a backbone of steel, a ragpicker’s daughter who dressed like a cross between a librarian and a priest, who stared down antisemites, and who had a soft spot for even the most ungratefully opportunistic clients. She regularly launched artists, then lost them to more prestigious and profitable galleries. In 1901, she bought three Picassos for 100 francs; 42 years later, she was begging him to remember her: “Just one word from you would please me. I don’t dare say a visit. That would be asking too much of you.” Weill didn’t always expect her loyalty to be reciprocated, but she was unstinting with it nevertheless. She promoted her friend Émilie Charmy with stoic persistence, exhibiting her work in 25 shows in almost 30 years. That campaign is bearing fruit only now, more than 70 years after the gallerist’s death and 50 after her protégée’s.And so we can finally savour Charmy’s 1906 self-portrait in a state of blissful oblivion, supine in a blue dress, eyes shut, face flushed, one pale breast exposed to the breeze. The subject has completely forgotten the presence of the artist, even though they’re the same person. Three self-portraits, a landscape and a touchingly frank portrait of Weill offer the surprise of an excellent and staunchly independent painter whose name should be far better known than it is.For Weill, pushing Charmy and Valadon meant standing up to the art world’s endemic and all-pervasive sexism. “A woman’s struggles are tough and it takes . . . exceptional strength of will to emerge almost unscathed from the mire,” she wrote in a 1917 journal entry. Weill was a fearless, swashbuckling chronicler of her own career, especially in the gleefully belligerent memoir aptly titled Pan! Dans l’oeil (“Pow! Right in the Eye”).Weill didn’t just support Picasso before he was Picasso; she supported everyone before they were anyone: Matisse, Chagall, Braque, Modigliani . . . In the book, she recounts a verbal showdown with the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who curated a grand group show but omitted Charmy and Valadon on the grounds of personal distaste. That erasure outraged Weill because she considered it a denial of fact rather than an assertion of connoisseurship. Women artists existed, after all. “Can you imagine a historian passing over the reign of Louis XI, for example, because they didn’t like that particular king?” she fulminated.It’s hard to know how crucial a role she played in shaping the history that eventually locked her out. Maybe her more celebrated discoveries would have mounted their revolutions without her. And for every future great she backed, there were others she believed in, but couldn’t get posterity to concur. She deemed Raoul de Mathan “a talented painter”, and she was right, at least judging by his 1908 “Assize Court”, in which a pale-yellow beam of light, like a theatre’s follow spot or a ray of divinity, angles down into the cold blue shadows of the courtroom. The scene synthesises an array of trends: Toulouse-Lautrec’s pastel hues, Degas’s and Seurat’s views over the shoulders of the crowd, and the impressionists’ fascination with the mechanics of modern life. But did you know de Mathan’s name? I didn’t.What matters even now is that Weill was there for her “jeunes” when they needed it most, when a shout of encouragement or a place on the wall meant the difference between being persistent and packing it in. She got artists their first real money and kept the demon of demoralisation at bay. Even more important, she helped create an artistic habitat in which the powerless could set the agenda. At least for a while, it wasn’t just official experts and wealthy collectors who determined what was good, but a little Jewish lady with no money, no family connections and no real weapon but her conviction.To March 1; greyartmuseum.nyu.eduFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
