Pow! Right in the Eye!: Thirty Years behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting

"This is the colorful memoir of the brilliant, eccentric Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill (1865-1951), who championed many of the emerging masters of modern art in the first part of the twentieth century. In this, she was radical and pioneering. She madethe first sales in Paris for Picasso and Matisse, and she gave Modigliani the only solo show in his lifetime. Weill also promoted the work of women artists, and her salty memoir (originally published in 1933) details her struggles against sexism and anti-Semitism in the Parisian art world. This text has long been mined by historians for details about the Paris art scene at the turn of the twentieth century, but beyond that, Weill is little known because she was too poor to publish lavish catalogues or invest enormous sums in grooming artists and purchasing their work-which is how most art dealers operated. At the same time, she appears over and over in numerous artist biographies depicted as a colorful figure with an uncanny nose for sniffing out talent"--
Memoir of a provocative Parisian art dealer at the heart of the 20th-century art world, available in English for the first time.    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.