NEW YORK, NY.- “A collection of paintings isn’t like a stock portfolio,” Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill declared in her 1933 memoir, “Pow! Right in the Eye!” She was lamenting that novice collectors of the era were overly concerned about whether the value of her emerging artists would rise. “I was afraid they had neither confidence nor perseverance,” she wrote.

Weill often turned away clients she deemed insufficiently committed. But she did encourage others to make the leap, including Gertrude Stein and her brothers, Leo and Michael, who frequented Galerie B. Weill, which she opened in 1901 when no other dealer in Paris specialized in young artists. “‘Trust me, you should buy Matisses’, I told them,” Weill recounted, adding, “They weren’t ready yet.” In 1902, Weill was the first dealer in town to exhibit Henri Matisse. “They made up their minds soon enough, however, and started buying hand over fist (not from me).”

Such was the fortune of this prickly, forthright gallerist, barely 5 feet tall and a self-proclaimed “terrible businesswoman” with a “difficult personality” who nonetheless possessed the eye and gumption to go to bat for untested artists — and kept the doors of her shoestring gallery open for four decades. She was the first dealer to sell works by Pablo Picasso in 1900, the first to give Diego Rivera a solo show in Paris in 1914 and the only one to give Amedeo Modigliani a solo show in his lifetime, in 1917 — causing a scandal on opening night.

Modigliani’s paintings of nude women with pubic hair, visible in the front window, stopped traffic and landed Weill in a face-off with the police commissioner who ordered her “to remove all that filth,” Weill wrote in her memoir. “Fortunately, some connoisseurs don’t share that opinion,” she retorted, before complying. One of those nudes, “Nu Couché (Sur le Côté Gauche),” sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2018 for more than $157 million.

Yet outside of passing mentions in studies of those artists and in Gertrude Stein’s “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (1933), Weill’s central role in championing radically new art in early 20th-century Paris has been almost completely overlooked by art history, even as her male competitors — including Ambroise Vollard, the Bernheim-Jeune brothers, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler — are storied (and lured many of the artists she discovered to their own better-financed galleries).

“Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde,” opening Tuesday at the Grey Art Museum at New York University, aims to restore the record and create a portrait of Weill (pronounced “Vay”) through the artists she took a chance on. It includes about 110 works by her stars — Picasso, Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger — as well as lesser-known names such as Suzanne Valadon and Émilie Charmy. (Of nearly 400 exhibitions mounted by Weill, almost one-third included female artists.)

Weill’s reintroduction to a broad public is the product of intrepid effort and collaboration among several women, including two of the exhibition’s curators, Grey director Lynn Gumpert and independent scholar Marianne Le Morvan, founder of the Berthe Weill Archives in Paris, as well as photography dealer Julie Saul, who died in 2022.

As a student in Paris some 15 years ago, Le Morvan stumbled on Weill’s unfamiliar name twice in one week — in Michael FitzGerald’s 1995 biography of Picasso and in a 1942 book on artists by Michel Georges-Michel, who wrote that Weill “hung wet paintings with clothes pins in the middle of her little shop,” Le Morvan recalled. Curious, she scoured libraries in Paris for Weill’s autobiography — cited in a footnote — eventually locating a copy on eBay. Le Morvan decided to devote her dissertation to Weill.

“When I started, nobody knew who she was — even very famous professors in the university,” said Le Morvan, who published the first biography on Weill in French in 2011.

Similarly, Saul, a New Yorker, became intrigued by the reference to Weill in FitzGerald’s book and tracked down the dealer’s memoir in MoMA’s library. Weill, whose father was a ragpicker and mother a seamstress, didn’t go to school past age 10. She wrote as she spoke and used French slang difficult for a nonnative to parse. Saul became determined to have her autobiography translated and republished in English, and, in 2014, she enlisted the help of Gumpert, who saw the potential for an exhibition, as well. The two colleagues soon joined forces with Le Morvan.

After approaching many museums to collaborate — and having no takers — Gumpert found a partner in 2019 in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where the show will travel. “I asked myself how it was possible that somebody who had really had an important impact on the development of modern art was so little known,” said Mary-Dailey Desmarais, the Montreal Museum’s chief curator. She flew to Paris in 2022 to make a personal plea to the Musée de l’Orangerie’s new director, Claire Bernardi, who signed on as the third venue after previous leadership had passed on the show.

“There are so many aspects of what it means to be a woman dealer in a male-dominated profession and the reality of trying to promote unproven artists that still ring true,” said Gumpert, who succeeded in getting the translation of “Pow! Right in the Eye!” published in 2022 by the University of Chicago Press.

Saul felt a “kinship” with Weill, according to Maira Kalman, a celebrated author and illustrator of more than 30 books, whom Saul represented for 20 years even though Kalman’s work lay outside the dealer’s specialty of photography.

“Julie was really indomitable so when she discovered something of interest, she didn’t let it go,” Kalman said. “Berthe had the same kind of integrity of who she championed.” Kalman’s 2019 illustration “Berthe Weill and a Friend” shows the dealer in her trademark mannish attire with necktie and oval glasses perched on her nose.

Born in Paris in 1865, the fifth of seven children in a Jewish family of very modest means, Weill went to work in her teens for the eccentric dealer Salvator Mayer. She learned the art trade during two decades in Mayer’s antiques and prints shop, where impressionist artists often congregated, along with Vollard, Weill’s contemporary from a well-connected bourgeois family, who opened his gallery in 1890 and made a fortune selling Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.

After Mayer’s death in 1896, with a small loan from his widow, Weill opened her own antiques shop and immediately went into debt. In 1900, a Catalan agent named Pere Mañach started bringing Weill works by young Spanish artists, including three canvases from a bullfighting series by a 19-year-old Picasso that Weill bought for 100 francs and quickly resold for 150 francs. Soon after, she sold Picasso’s “Le Moulin de la Galette” from 1900 — now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, where it was the subject of a recent restoration and show — for 250 francs. (The painting will be included in the Montreal stop of the exhibition.)

Mañach persuaded Weill to convert her shop to a proper art gallery, which she inaugurated in December 1901 with the business card “Place aux Jeunes!” (“Make way for the young!”) and a group show including terra-cotta figurines by Aristide Maillol. “I won’t surprise anyone when I say that nothing was sold,” Weill wrote. “Nonetheless, that first exhibition made a big splash.”

Weill fielded big egos with the firm hand and good humor of a preschool teacher. When Dufy asked to exhibit at the gallery alongside Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, after they had earned the moniker “fauves” (or wild beasts) at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, Weill agreed. According to her autobiography, this caused Matisse to shout, “No! That boy just wants to infiltrate our group, and we don’t want that.” (She wound up giving Dufy a solo show in an adjacent room.)

If Weill excelled at identifying and promoting new talents, she just as consistently lost her finds to more established dealers offering bigger platforms. (Vollard was quick to swoop in on Picasso.) Yet he and others, including Dufy, Francis Picabia and Marc Chagall, continued to provide works for her annual thematic exhibitions. And in 1946, when Weill emerged from the war destitute and in ill health, they were among some 80 artists who donated their art to an auction for her benefit, raising the equivalent today of about $130,000 that sustained Weill until her death in 1951.

Weill frequently bemoaned her need to make quick sales to pay bills rather than keep inventory until it had appreciated in value, as her male counterparts did. “Why can’t I earn a little money?” she wrote. “Why the others, and not me? It was because they held on to it, and only bought when it was a sure thing.”

That scenario hits the “nail on the head of the success and failure of each of us art dealers,” said Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, founder of Salon 94. “The art dealers who hold on to whatever they can in the end create their own wealth and the dealers that are not able to do that end up kind of hand-to-mouth.”

In graduate school, Greenberg Rohatyn had learned of Weill’s infamous Modigliani exhibition, but never knew anything else about the dealer until reading her translated memoir. “I think today’s art world can learn some positive notions of what it is to be a dealer from Berthe,” she said. “It’s not just a commercial venture.”

Weill’s initial erasure from art history may stem from a scathing parody of Vollard she published in 1916 (and reprinted in her 1933 memoir), rebutting a dismissive article he wrote about Jewish collector Isaac de Camondo that had an antisemitic undercurrent. When Vollard published his influential memoir “Recollections of a Picture Dealer” in 1936, Gumpert said, “his revenge was not to mention her at all.”

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‘Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde’

Opens Tuesday through March 1 at the Grey Art Museum, 18 Cooper Square, Manhattan, 212-998-6780; greyartmuseum.nyu.edu.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.