Montreal’s fine-arts museum rediscovers Paris’s premiere talent spotter.

H aving covered exhibitions in Baltimore, Newark, and the Swamp in the last few weeks and walked a quarter mile of the Freedom Trail in Boston in 104-degree heat, I went to Montreal and Quebec City to cover two long-awaited, buoyant shows, and in cooler climes. Today I’ll write about Berthe Weill, Art Dealer of the Avant-Garde, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Weill (1865–1951) was the first to sell the work of the new, untested Picasso and, over the years, Matisse, Modigliani, and Chagall, among many others. She was picky, prickly, and dauntless, pushing into the hands of collectors her business card, which read, “Prepare for the young.” In her day, Weill was well respected in the Paris modern-art market and among its pioneers, but after her retirement, hastened by declining eyesight and the Nazis, and her death, her story was mostly lost to time, until now.

I love the Weill exhibition. It’s meaty, with a hundred objects, elegantly arranged, and it unfolds well but for two or three dips from which it recovers with a zestful bounce. Weill’s story appeals and impresses. And I was always learning something new. The first gallery is efficiently biographical. Weill’s father was a ragpicker, a living not without prospects, and her mother was a dressmaker. But with lots of children, the family means were modest. They were part of Paris’s mostly but not entirely downtrodden community of Jews.

As a teen and young woman, Weill worked for a cousin who owned a Paris antiques shop that sold a range of things for the bourgeois home, among them paintings and prints. After the cousin died in 1896, she opened her own small shop in then-seedy Montmartre, focusing on original art by Honoré Daumier, Jules Chéret, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Théophile Steinlen, and Jacques Villon that later developed into illustrations or sparkling, zesty posters. She displayed her art pegged like laundry on a clothesline. The collecting of this material — drafts of commercial art — was in its nascent but growing phase. Weill found a niche that suited her, for a time. She made a living. Displayed against a pretty lavender wall color are some of the things she sold.

By 1900, Weill, by then a confirmed spinster, conceived a bigger — and radical — plan. Montmartre was packed with edgy, new artists, nearly all living and working in hovels, outside the established art market, making art for what Weill knew, by instinct, was for a new era. She’d met many of them, and in her new niche she’d become their champion. Friends told her not to do it. Her mother told her that avant-garde art looked like “plates of spinach.” “What was the worst that could happen?” she asked herself. “Fail to hang on,” as she called it, was one option. “BUT I WILL HANG ON,” she wrote in her diary, and with that Gloria Gaynor vibe, she launched.

She picked Galerie B. Weill as its name. “B” rather than “Berthe” underplayed her gender. “Galerie,” with a flourished “G” on her branding, was a new word. “Picture dealer” was too commercial. A gallery was a place for sales, yes, but also for discovery, and a way to build an avant-garde community.

An exhibition is, on one level, a stage drama, with a storyline and visuals that engage us and develop. At Montreal, the curators understand this. In America, most don’t, preferring to pummel us with a single, and boring, point, over and over, like a campaign ad on TV. Weill, we’ve learned, is a strong, canny person. That her taste in art has spark is starting to become clear to us. The curators know it’s time for another big enchilada, and that’s the prodigy Picasso.

The curators slyly placed Picasso’s Moulin de la Galette, from 1900, which belongs to the Guggenheim in New York, on a wall close to the entrance to the show’s Picasso room so visitors don’t see it until they turn around, and most will gasp since it’s so famous, but it’s also still alluring and startling and primal. Weill sold it in 1901 to Arthur Huc, the editor in chief of a leading Toulouse newspaper who, she knew, collected Toulouse-Lautrec’s work. She judged Huc a risk-taker and thought he’d see Picasso as the artist’s aesthetic heir.

A few months earlier, in 1900, Weill, whose shop was near the low-end neighborhood where Catalan artists gathered, had visited the hovel of the 19-year-old Picasso, seen a series of small bullfighting pictures, gouache and pastel, and bought three of them. They’re the first works of art he sold through a gallery in Paris. By 1902, Weill had shown Picasso’s work in four group shows. His angular Paris squalor scene, Mother; the poised, saucy L’hétaire; The Blue Room; and a grand still life from the Picasso Museum in Barcelona are also in Art Dealer from the Avant Garde — all done in a single year, all shown and sold by Weill.

Together they show us how quickly Picasso developed — at the speed of light — and how discerning Weill’s eye was. L’hétaire, alas, had to be removed from the Weill show in late June after a climate kook doused it with pink paint. His plant-based beef was the wildfires in Manitoba so we know he’s low-octane in smarts. Picasso’s figure was, in ancient Greece, a sophisticated, erudite young woman who spent time with artists, more of a muse than a tart. Weill, though only five feet tall, wearing a lorgnette, and looking like a schoolmarm, would have kicked this climate loon’s Pajama Boy ass all the way to Nunavut, where he could build himself an igloo, grow turnips in the tundra, and commune with polar bears. She saw art as sacred, and certainly not to be vandalized. A Montreal court let the vandal go by the end of the day.

I would have added a few more details on Weill and Picasso in this section. Though Picasso had a good relationship with Weill for the rest of her career, he ditched her as soon as he became a Paris superstar, around 1905, using Kahnweiler and Vollard as his dealers. They were themselves big enchiladas, like the mega-dealers of our day. Nearly all the major artists Weill discovered did the same, defecting to bigger dealers. Weill, in her small shop, with limited contacts, and not in it for the money, could discover an artist but not make him rich. She knew this but didn’t blame her artists. She despised Vollard. He once wanted a picture she owned by Maurice Utrillo, another artist she discovered, bludgeoned her to get as good a bargain as he could, and then told Utrillo that Weill was selling him short and he could do much better.

Matisse isn’t my favorite artist in the world — he can’t draw — but Weill spied a dazzling future for him and exhibited his work in a 1902 group exhibition. First Orange Still Life, from 1899, is in the show, his first Paris sale from what was, for him, his first Paris show. He, too, decamped for Vollard before too long, though he adored Weill, who, in showing Matisse, also catapulted the movement called the “Fauves,” or “Wild Beasts.” The early work of André Derain, Raoul Dufy, and Albert Marquet — high on color, blotchy, and, after World War II, seeming touristical — was seen when Weill showed them as having a new look. Whenever I see their work, and Utrillo’s, I hear an accordion playing a schlocky version of “La vie en rose.”

A chunk of the Weill show explores the many women artists whose careers she started and promoted. The curators of Art Dealer of the Avant-Garde are all women, as are Lynn Gumpart, the former director of the Grey Art Museum, which organized the show with the Orangerie in Paris and Montreal, and the wonderful dealer Julie Saul, now dead, who pushed the concept when she realized how little the art world knew about Weill. Weill well knew the misogyny of the Paris art market. Still, artists such as Émilie Charmy, Béla Czobel, and Alice Halicka seem very secondhand to me, as much as I like Charmy’s Still Life with Pomegranates, from 1904. It holds the wall. Weill put Charmy’s work in 25 shows over 30 years, considered the artist her closest friend, and might have gotten carried away with herself. These artists fill a lot of space.

Suzanne Valadon is another story, though, a wonderful artist and a French parallel to Alice Neel, though more elegant than knackered. Nude with a Striped Blanket and Portrait of Madame Zamaron, both from 1922, are precise and austere but also hot. Valadon (1865–1938) was Weill’s contemporary, rebellious, born on the edge of poverty, a circus acrobat who was Toulouse-Lautrec’s lover and modeled for Renoir and Morisot. I’d call her a Symbolist but of a crypto variety, matter-of-fact, luscious, and strange. She uses heavy black outlines for her figures.

I would have made more of her — she was in 23 Weill shows — and ditched some of the second-tier Cubists and thinned the Fauves. The Pompidou Center just did a huge Valadon retrospective that went to Metz and Nantes, also in France, and Catalunya’s National Museum of Art, but it had no American venue. Too bad, since Americans don’t know her.

Weill managed her many cultural moments until 1917, when she gave Modigliani his first and only exhibition and had her first and only scandal. Modigliani had been living in Paris since 1914, selling his work privately through Paul Guillaume, a dealer and his patron. Weill had seen and liked his paintings, a new medium for Modigliani, as he’d mostly been making sculptures. She met him in her gallery. He was drunk, high — and not on life — and, to Weill, a great talent on the abyss. She gave him a 34-object survey show in her gallery, with four Modigliani nudes visible from the street. A crowd, mostly working-class, gathered, tempers combusted, gendarmes arrived, and Thermidor: The Sequel was in the air. Would the guillotine’s blade need to be sharpened?

Modigliani’s Nude with a Coral Necklace, from 1917, is in the show, lent by the Oberlin College museum. For this and the other nudes, Weill got a ride on the paddy wagon. It was the pubic hair that did it, and prigs might say she’s masturbating. Weill didn’t remove the offending nudes, as the commissaire ordered, telling him to “aller se faire voir,” or pound sand, but she got lots of bad publicity, and nothing sold. The Modigliani, by the by, looks great against a light-blue wall, making the figure’s terra-cotta skin pop.

One of the many reasons I like this exhibition is the centrality of courage. The artists had courage, but most were young and poor. Weill had courage, too, not swagger or confidence but the courage of her convictions. As a Jew, she understood travail and saw young, experimental artists as their own brand of Chosen People. She was provocative. Degas, who was very established by 1900, hated Jews and walked by her shop every day on the way to his studio. During the end of the long Dreyfus Affair, she displayed Henri de Groux’s Mocking of Zola, a painting from 1898, in her window. It’s a pro-Dreyfus scene, and it would have mocked Degas, too — he, like Zola, wanted Dreyfus in prison. Snarky reviews of her artists’ works were not met with a snarky response in kind from Weill. She knew there was a cabal of high-end dealers and art critics, and she refused to play the game.

She abhorred contracts with artists, which meant risks. She let buyers pay over time and survived through her eye and her grit, in contrast to dealers such as Bernheim or Paul Rosenberg, who inherited their businesses and were part of the “haute bourgeoisie,” the buyer base for new art. She hated the price manipulation and speculation distorting the market in the 1920s. “A collection of paintings is not like a stock portfolio,” she wrote in her 1933 memoir, titled Pan! dans l’oeil! That means “Pow! Right in the Eye!” She had a knack for barbs but also truth.

It took our era for Weill to be rediscovered and have a show surrounding her career, and in Montreal, New York, and Paris. Why? As a woman, she was likely to be overlooked or trivialized by art historians, now mostly if not nearly all women, but that’s recent. When I was a student, men still controlled the narrative. As I learned in the catalogue, she was on a tough rung on the market ladder, and that’s the bottom rung. She spotted new talents, civilized them in the market’s basics, sold their work for very low prices, making little for herself, and voilà, as soon as big-shot dealers spotted them, they’d leave, so these dealers, not Weill, got the profits from her work as a spotter and mentor. Weill admitted she didn’t have either the skills or interest to expand her business, moving onto higher rungs. She liked finding fresh, young talent.

Galerie B. Weill was well placed circa 1900 but less so in the Teens — the First World War — or the 1920s, which were a low spot in French avant-garde art, or the 1930s — depressions are depressing. Then the clippety-clop of goose-steps filled Montmartre. She did few gallery shows after the late 1920s because she couldn’t afford them. She closed the gallery in 1941 and lay low during the war, never destitute, never reviving the family ragpicking business, but close to broke. In 1946, a group of her artists, among them Picasso, Matisse, Dufy, Marquet, Chagall, and Francis Picabia as well as some dealers organized an auction to raise money for her support. At $180,000, the take guaranteed that she lived the rest of her life in dignity.

Art Dealer of the Avant-Garde is a rich, complex show. Coming and going also are artists Odilon Redon, Diego Rivera, who got his first Paris show from Weill, and Chagall, whose work she showed during his early Paris years. The catalogue, at a little over 100 pages, is very good and well-illustrated. It’s a seamless union of biography, art history, and market history. The show is in Montreal until September 7 and then moves to the Orangerie in Paris.

I visit Montreal every couple of years since the Museum of Fine Arts often does incisive, unusual exhibitions. And it’s an elegant, spicy French city a four-hour drive from my house. I wanted to go to McGill University for college. My family and I went to Expo 67 in Montreal, and I liked it for the geodesic dome housing the American Pavilion and for The Supremes’ performance of “The Happening” for the Ed Sullivan Show, filmed at Expo 67.

Not profound reasons for selecting a school, I know, but, a few years later, I wanted to do something outré, and something that charmed me. That was McGill. In ye olde North Haven in Connecticut, I might as well have picked Pluto. Doing “something outré” got the Washington Monument–size, black Sharpie veto pen. Ah, what could have been! But what would have been lost!