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Globe and Mail
05-06-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Unsung art dealer Berthe Weill, the first to sell a Picasso, finally gets her due
In theory, it's important to support emerging artists. In practice, those who specialize in such support – a small press, an indie theatre, an early-career commercial art dealer – often find themselves abandoned by the most beautiful butterflies when they burst from the chrysalis. No hard feelings, but an artist will naturally seek the most prominent venue possible. The early 20th-century Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill seems to have suffered from this reality. To judge from an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts devoted to artists she sometimes represented or works that may have passed through her hands, Weill had a keen eye, a soft heart and not much of a head for business. She was the first dealer to sell a Picasso, when he was a mere 19 and a figurative painter, and she gave him one of his first shows, in 1902, but never represented his mature work. Matisse, whom she showed repeatedly over the years, said you couldn't make a living off what you sold through the Galerie B. Weill, a small cluttered shop in Montmartre that also offered antiques and books. Those artists who could do so needed to move on. And yet Weill lent her early support – aesthetic and financial – to some of the greatest names of 20th-century art, while also showing lesser-known figures of the same milieu. Reconstructing her career for the exhibition was a massive task for independent scholar Marianne Le Morvan, MMFA curator Anne Grace and colleagues at New York University's Grey Art Museum and the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. First of all, Weill did not keep proper business records of what she bought, exhibited and sold. To determine what paintings passed through her gallery, the scholars relied partly on her 1933 memoir Pan! dans l'oeil! (Pow! Right in the Eye!), partly on the existing research about the more famous artists she showed and partly on documents such as flyers and invitations. For example, in 1917 she organized a show for Amedeo Modigliani that included, among many other works, four nudes with visible body hair. When crowds gathered outside the gallery's windows to gawk, the local police chief intervened and Weill was forced to take the paintings down. Today, there are eight Modigliani nudes in existence that might fit this description: The MMFA has secured the loan of Nude with Coral Necklace from the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio. It may – or may not – have been shown by Weill, but you get the idea. The room devoted to the Fauves, the strongest in this exhibition, includes Raoul Dufy's familiar scene of a street in Le Havre decked out with French flags for Bastille Day, now in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It's a work with which Weill had a clear link: It was painted during a period when she was actually visiting Dufy's companion not far away in the town of Falaise, waiting for the artist to make enough sales to join them and, according to her memoir, delighted when he showed up with fresh paintings. Meanwhile, if the early Picasso room is so complete – including a fine still life executed at the age of 19 or 20 and such Blue Period classics as the Art Gallery of Ontario's Crouching Beggarwoman or The Blue Room from the Phillips Collection in Washington – it is because Picasso's art is so well tracked. (Both these latter pieces were included in the AGO's research-heavy Blue Period show in 2021.) Yet there is a certain sad irony in that room – or in the presence of a handful of early works by Matisse, including a late-afternoon view of Notre Dame, all executed a few years before that artist developed his signature style. With the benefit of hindsight, the visitor knows exactly what Weill missed out on when these artists took other work down the hill to Ambroise Vollard, the most recognized Parisian dealer of contemporary art before the First World War, or Paul Guillaume and the Rosenberg brothers, Paul and Léonce. Weill also exhibited artists who never made the big time – or remain lesser-known today. Several are women: Weill actively supported female artists, including Suzanne Valadon, whose work was championed by Degas and Renoir, for whom she had modelled, and the mercurial Émilie Charmy, represented here by several dramatic self-portraits. These seem a bit self-indulgent. Charmy's portrait of her great supporter, Weill herself, is stronger work, capturing a solid and intelligent figure with notable economy. The MMFA purchased the Weill portrait from the artist's grandson for this exhibition. In this unusual mix of the famous and not famous, the canonical and the forgotten, there are passages of weakness or regret – no mature Picasso, with Cubism represented by minor practitioners, and some fussier works from the gallery's last years in the 1930s – but there are also hidden gems. In that room with the early Matisse view of Notre Dame, the really impressive cityscape is by his less well-known friend Albert Marquet. Small Square with a Street Lamp, Paris is a beautifully balanced 1904 composition from the National Gallery of Canada, depicting an empty square at a spot where the countryside was giving way to the growing city, the new buildings casting long afternoon shadows. Later there is a remarkable Cubist street scene by none other than Diego Rivera, one of the expats Weill showed. The powerful painting is broken into overlapping rectangles, like a series of postcards, and shows a view down a narrow street that culminates in the Eiffel Tower as the Mexican artist grapples with both analytic Cubism and the civic architecture of Paris. It's a fascinating footnote of art history because after his early years championing Cubism, Rivera went on, as an illustrative muralist, to work in a very different style. That is the strength of this exhibition: It shows you the new Parisian art of 1900 to 1940 as it happened – the good, the bad and the indifferent. We are so used to seeing museum presentations of the canonical and the famous, it's worth remembering that, in the moment, few of us know what is fleeting and what will endure. After all, Ambroise Vollard himself gave up on Vincent van Gogh. Weill's best-known artists left for greener pastures, but the community did not abandon her. She was Jewish and was forced to close the gallery in 1941 during the occupation of France, a period when she managed to slip under the Nazis' radar, living in hiding in Paris. Immediately after the war, an art lovers' society organized a benefit auction to support her, recognizing her work encouraging emerging artists, and she was awarded the Légion d'honneur in 1948. It was only her due – like this exhibition. Berthe Weill, Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-garde continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to Sept. 7.
The Independent
30-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Joan Eardley Sketches of Glasgow street children to be sold at auction
Sketches depicting Glasgow street children by artist Joan Eardley will go on sale at auction next week. The 11 small pastel and charcoal drawings were selected from one of Eardley's sketchbooks which was given to a doctor after her death by her close friend Angus Neil, who died in 1992. Eardley is considered one of the great British artists of the 20th century and the collection is to be sold live online and in Edinburgh by auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull on June 5. The works depict studies of street children in Townhead for which she is best known, alongside sketches of Catterline on the north-east coast of Scotland where she lived with Mr Neil. The friends met at Scottish art school Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, Angus, in 1947 and Mr Neil would often stay in her Townhead studio for long periods of time. When Eardley moved to Catterline, he helped renovate her cottage and became a fixture around the small fishing village. After the war, Mr Neil struggled with his mental health and Eardley became a pivotal figure in his life, looking out for him and helping him financially. When Eardley died of cancer in 1963 aged 42, a distraught Mr Neil was admitted to the psychiatric hospital Sunnyside Royal near Montrose. The sketchbook was given by Mr Neil to a GP in Glasgow in the 1960s, who had provided him with room and board during a breakdown, and has been treasured by the family ever since. The auction also includes four large works by Eardley, including Fishing Nets, Catterline, which is valued at £30,000-£50,000. It featured in a major exhibition of Eardley's work in the National Galleries of Scotland in 2016-17. Jeannie, valued at £40,000-£60,000, depicts an elderly lady, Jeannie Kelso, who was befriended by Eardley during holidays to the Isle of Arran in the early 1940s. Blue Jersey, which depicts a child holding her baby brother, is estimated to fetch between £20,000 and £30,000. A rare example of an early Eardley painting, Street Scene, from the 1940s, has a valuation of £7,000-£10,000. Charlotte Riordan, senior specialist at Lyon & Turnbull, said: 'These sketches epitomise the intuitive mark-making and consummate skill of Joan Eardley. To me, they also speak volumes about the woman herself; they're direct – blunt even – but clever and charismatic. A total original.'
ABC News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Picasso: Series 1 Episode 1
Picasso NEW SERIES Arts Documentary History Watch Article share options Share this on Facebook Twitter Send this by Email Copy link WhatsApp Messenger When Pablo Picasso died in 1973, the world mourned a superstar, a revolutionary who turned the story of 20th century art on its head. This series opens the door on the paintings, places and people that he left behind.
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lovers, haters, rivals and chums – Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists review
Standing in front of Frank Auerbach's quietly harrowing charcoal portrait of Leon Kossoff and Kossoff's own heavily textured, dour portrait of Auerbach, I felt as if I was caught between the gazes of the two artists. Caught in the balance of their stares, seeing the way each sees the other, I was both implicated and invisible. Moments like these are the most intimate and affecting in Pallant House's new exhibition of portraits of artists by artists. When a portrait of one artist by another is hung beside their portrait of the other, we find ourselves caught between them. There are many pairs of lovers featured, including Matthew Smith and his mistress Vera Cunningham or Lucian Freud and Celia Paul, as well as works by friends such as Auerbach and Kossoff or Nina Hamnett and Roger Fry. In some cases, such as the two paintings by Smith and Cunningham, it's easy to see how the two artists influenced each other as they found a shared visual language of heavy, impressionistic brushstrokes and a dark, jewel-like palette. In others, the aesthetic distinctness is what draws you in. There are also delightful little moments in which multiple paintings of the same artist are hung together, all painted by different people. The exhibition moves chronologically from the turn of the 20th century to the present, and there is a series of portraits of Walter Sickert at the start of the exhibition by three different women in his life: his friends Sylvia Gosse and Nina Hamnett, and one of his wives, Thérèse Lessore. Each portrays him entirely differently: Gosse shows him standing in profile, his middle-aged potbelly declaring his prosperity; Hamnett shows only his face, gazing directly at her from under the brim of his black hat; Lessore shows him from the back, the profile of his face hardly legible. The complexity of trying to convey a likeness in a portrait is profoundly evident when confronted with a group like this. If these women who knew Sickert so well each paint him so differently, what was he really like? Perhaps only via many representations can the real man begin to emerge. Moving from the bohemian London of early 20th century through pre-war modernism and eventually to pop art, the London School, the YBAs, and up to the present, this exhibition makes a compelling case for a story of British modern art that is communal and collaborative. The interlocking circles of portraits that emerge make it obvious that the avant garde movements that evolved in and out of existence throughout 20th-century Britain were as social as they were professional. Walking through the galleries feels like drifting through a cocktail party, going from group to group of interesting, chatty friends – much like the scene of a Slade tea party painted by Seóirse Macantisionnaigh. There is rivalry and darkness here, too – husband and wife John Bratby and Jean Cooke's portraits of each other are hung on either side of a doorway, which neatly emphasises the antagonism between them. Sickert's portrait of unhappily married couple Roald Kristian and Nina Hamnett oozes with their apathy for each other, and Cedric Morris's remarkably unflattering portrait of Barbara Hepworth can readily be read as a document of his dislike for her. The exhibition is the last in Pallant House's ambitious trilogy of exhibitions on modern British art – exploring first still life, then landscape and now portraits. There are moments when the exhibition feels like it belongs at the National Portrait Gallery, as it can feel it is tracing celebrity rather than aesthetic exchange. But for the most part, it triumphs in crafting a cohesive story of visual, and literal, conversations between artists on the canvas. I wanted it to be bigger, and kept thinking of artists who I felt were missing, which is a sign of how effective the curatorial construct is: it welcomes a way of considering the history of art via relationships, which is inherently expansive. There are always more artists to include. The contemporary section of the show is the biggest and most broad. It includes portraits of real-life friends, including a wonderful group of three iconic works by the artists Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough, who have been painting portraits of themselves together since their student days in Glasgow. It also includes portraits exploring relationships between artists of the present with those of the past. Gillian Wearing's photograph of herself as Georgia O'Keeffe, for example, or Caroline Coon's reimagined painting of the pop artist Pauline Boty, widen the notion of a relationship to include transhistorical, imagined but still intimate relationships between artists through time. The exhibition has a circular route, so it both opens and closes with Lubaina Himid's painted wooden figures of female artists from the past and present, including Élisabeth Vigée-le Brun, Frida Kahlo, Bridget Riley (represented entirely by stripes), and Himid's real-life friend, Claudette Johnson. The life-sized women are a fitting encapsulation of the exhibition's ethos: that artists see each other with profound depth, and that art itself is born out of intimacy and influence. Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 17 May to 2 November
Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Heiress: Sargent's American Portraits review — an old-style triumph
I share a birthday with John Singer Sargent: January 12. It's just a quirk of dates and means nothing. But for the kinds of inchoate human reasons that swirl about in the darker and stupider regions of the mind, it has always made him feel closer to me than other artists. Perhaps it is why I have been harsh with him in some reviews. With Sargent, it feels personal. Not that I am alone in mistrusting the talents of this flashy, quick-wristed, heiress-hunting society lapdog, who strolled about the fashionable salons of Europe in white linen sniffing out the money. For most of the 20th century Sargent (1856-1925) was looked down on by critics as a decadent presence. His pictorial talents were obvious. But so
