July 6th: Pepe Karmel and Lynn Gumpert on Berthe Weill
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Pepe Karmel and Lynn Gumpert will discuss the new translation of Berthe Weill’s Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Wednesday, July 6th at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards.
Berthe Weill — Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting —Edited by Lynn Gumpert, translated by William Rodarmor, with an introduction by Marianne Le Morvan
(Published by University of Chicago Press, 2022).
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.
Pepe Karmel teaches in the Department of Art History, New York University. Karmel is the author of two books, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (2003) and Abstract Art: A Global History (2020), and he has written widely on modern and contemporary art for museum catalogues, as well as the New York Times, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. He has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Robert Morris: Felt Works (Grey Art Gallery, New York, 1989), Jackson Pollock (MoMA, New York, 1998), and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020).
Lynn Gumpert is director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Previously she was an independent curator, consultant, and writer; from 1980 to 1988 she served as curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. She is coeditor of Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s.