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.

"Now published in English for the first time, Weill’s fast-paced and punchy account of her gallery’s first 25 years of exhibitions is a who’s who of emerging artists in early-twentieth century Paris, the collectors who bought their work, and how much they paid. . . .She paints a clear portrait of how modern masters like Metzinger and Matisse, alongside lesser known painters like Émilie Charmy, shook up modern art and modern culture even before there was a market for their work." - Booklist

"Recently translated as Pow! Right in the Eye!, Weill’s autobiography was clearly intended as a provocation. ‘Mlle Weill has a long memory and doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ one newspaper warned in 1931. In a chronicle of her struggles in the art world over the past three decades, Weill pays tribute to the friendships that sustained her and the artists she loved – while also taking aim at the many who had betrayed and underestimated her. Above all, it exuded her spirit of determination, summed up in her credo: ‘I WILL HANG ON!’ . . . Pow! is also indispensable because the archives of the Galerie Weill have all been lost. . . . Pow! offers many vignettes of dealers, collectors and especially the artists for whom Weill was an early champion. It was quite a roll-call: the sandal-wearing lothario Kees van Dongen; Diego Rivera, who strutted into Paris like ‘Gulliver among the Lilliputians’ and quickly made enemies (‘I could easily imagine him putting out a fire by pissing on it’); and cheery, sincere Raoul Dufy, who restored her faith in ‘the painters of tomorrow’." - Apollo

"“'A collection of paintings isn’t like a stock portfolio,' the 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."" - New York Times

"The overall message of Pow! is one of resistance in the face of an elitist, male-dominated art world." - ARTnews

"This welcome publication, handily digestible in its trim size, includes a number of useful sections and contextual aids to shepherd the reader through the colourful and subjective reality of Weill’s Paris. . . . Written in French punny slang, and admirably translated by Rodarmor . . . one is reminded that translators have an important, and under-explored, role to play in current art market studies, introducing narratives and historical characters to wider, critical audiences, and thereby enabling an enriched pan-European and trans-Atlantic narrative. . . . What Weill was good at was making history, and Pow! admirably demonstrates how." - Modernist Review

"This is a charming, lovingly produced book that makes it clear that
despite the 'aesthetic revolution of eye-catching splendor' that defied
the ordinary, the fickleness of art, 'too subject to the whims of
speculation,' took years to make a dent in." - Enchanted Prose