Pow! Right in the Eye!: Thirty Years behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting (Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Collection)
by: Berthe Weill (0)
Berthe Weill, a formidable Parisian dealer, was born into a Jewish family of very modest means. One of the first female gallerists in the business, she first opened the Galerie B. Weill in the heart of Paris’s art gallery district in 1901, holding innumerable exhibitions over nearly forty years. Written out of art history for decades, Weill has only recently regained the recognition she deserves.
Under five feet tall and bespectacled, Weill was beloved by the artists she supported, and she rejected the exploitative business practices common among art dealers. Despite being a self-proclaimed “terrible businesswoman,” Weill kept her gallery open for four decades, defying the rising tide of antisemitism before Germany’s occupation of France. By the time of her death in 1951, Weill had promoted more than three hundred artists—including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, and Suzanne Valadon—many of whom were women and nearly all young and unknown when she first exhibited them.
Pow! Right in the Eye! makes Weill’s provocative 1933 memoir finally available to English readers, offering rare insights into the Parisian avant-garde and a lively inside account of the development of the modern art market.
The Reviews
A book more for art historians and other experts than the general reader. While Berthe Weill was an interesting woman and saw the start of many notable art careers, she was not a fluid writer. Nor was she one to present incisive comment on the painters or their works, in her memoir of life as a struggling art dealer in Paris during the first part of the last century.I was struck by the shear number of artists that Weill sold for or otherwise knew (23 pages for a glossary of names at book's end). Most have long faded away from any public fame and are now unknown except to their individual descendants and to serious art historians.As an aside, the translator, William Rodarmor, gets high marks for working through the complexities of this text.
