Pow! Right in the Eye!

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.  

Author Biography

Berthe Weill (1865-1951) was a French art dealer. Lynn Gumpert is director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. She is coeditor of Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s. William Rodarmor is a translator of books including Claudine Cohen’s The Fate of the Mammal: Fossil, Myth and History and Bernard Moitessier’s Tamata and the Alliance, which won the 1996 Lewis Galantiere Award from the American Translators Association.