Stealing All the Blue is a collection of ekphrastic poems inspired by the original words of ten 19th and 20th century women. The poems highlight the contribution of deliberate yet ignored lives. These women: from Sylvia Beach to Berthe Weill spent their careers preserving, managing and promoting the works of the artists and characters they loved (and at times, resented). They well understood that publicly working on behalf of a legacy larger than themselves was their portal to a more interesting life, often it was the only choice. Yet for all their efforts and life work, popular lecturers like Mable Loomis Todd and Isabella Burton ended up as tiny fonted footnotes in the lives of the artists they tirelessly promoted. This tendency to ignore half the team is only now being recognized. Other art-producing teams include: Wordsworth, Nabokov, Carlyle, and Dick Francis. The arts aren’t the only category, many ignored women have created, explored and invented with their work either subsumed by marriage or simply stolen by competitive colleagues.
Perhaps my ladies are smarter than me, and carry a wiser, more encompassing message. Perhaps the service is the creativity and the service to others was exactly the excuse they needed to get out of the house.
I don’t mean this to be cranky but to say, let’s continue to pay attention to the “typists”, the “lab assistants”, the domestic partners, and their own words.
Berthe Weill (1865 – 1951)
As a young woman, Berthe Weill flaunted expectations and chose to not “share her dowry with a man” but rather, escape to Paris in 1901 to open an art gallery. Doesn’t everyone?
Weill needed thick glasses but was blessed with an amazing eye for great art, she was focused, tenacious, and never gave up on her artists, an attitude that would serve her all her life.
Because of Weill’s vision, we know artists like Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, Braque, Edrain, Picabia, Delaunay, and Diego Rivera (husband of Frieda Kahlo). To her credit, she also supported the female artists of the era: Marie Laurencin, Suzanne Valadon, Emilie Charmy, and Alice Halicka. Women were more celebrated as muses than recognized as artists in their own right.
Early in her gallery career, Weill tried to convince the Stein siblings to purchase works from a new artist, Matisse. But Gertrude wouldn’t buy from Weill, and only purchased Matisse after his work moved to another gallery (a common thing for artists to do). One of Weill’s biographers speculated that despite having much in common: both short, both determined, both Jewish, they did not take to one another. One could also speculate that Gertrude did appreciate that Weill knew more about art than she.
In 1917, Weill’s gallery exhibited Modigliani’s first and only show. It was such a hit that it attracted the attention of the local police, who claimed the paintings (many of them female nudes) were offensive and ordered Weill to disassemble the show. She refused and was duly arrested for her trouble.
“Berthe Weill was entirely dedicated to modern painting. It was a form of passion,” said Marianne Le Morvan, a leading Weill scholar. “She was the only one to expose unknowns and so many unfamiliar artists, it was a very risky commercial bet.”
Weill had to close the gallery in 1941, it was too difficult to be a Jewish art dealer in Occupied Paris. But by then “Practically everybody who later became famous had sold their first little picture to her.” Even Gertrude Stein admitted that much.
Weill is only now receiving scholarly recognition for her work. Scholar Julie Saul speculates that “people don’t want to know about her (Weill) because she wasn’t a big success. She never made a lot of money.”
Weil wrote, “To struggle! To defend oneself! That is the story of my life!”
Words by Berthe Weill – Pow! Right in the Eye 1
Cubists again
Reckoned books like a nephew
Or rich collector
Expand on tortured homes
And child eyes
Many frequent groups supported
By daring and agreed talent
In train time
I have influence
