POWarts and Pen + Brush are pleased to invite Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery and editor of Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting,  a memoir of the provocative Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill at the heart of the 20th-century art world, to have a discussion with Veronique Burke, Co-Founder of Women Art Dealers Digital Archives.

The event will be hosted at Pen + Brush, located at 29 East 22nd Street, New York, NY. Pow! Right in the Eye! is now available in English for the first time and will be available for purchase at the event, provided by The University of Chicago Press.

About the book:

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. 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.

About the speakers:

Lynn Gumpert has been Director of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s fine arts museum, since 1997. Among the more than seventy-five exhibitions she has overseen at the Grey are Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017). She previously worked as a writer, consultant, and independent curator, organizing shows in New York, Japan, and France and as senior curator at the New Museum, New York. In 1999, she was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Veronique Burke is an independent scholar and the Co-Founder of WADDA [Women Art Dealers Digital Archives]. Throughout her career, Véronique Chagnon-Burke has taught a wide range of subjects in art market studies and art history at Queens College, Parsons School of Design, and Hunter College, among other institutions. Her museum and research positions have included work at the Museum of Modern Art and the College Art Association, and she has also worked at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. From 2002 to 2021, she was the Director of Christie’s Education in New York, where she taught the history of the art market and art history, more specifically classes on French art and on women artists. A specialist in the history of nineteenth century French landscape painting, her fields of expertise also include nineteenth century art criticism and the art market and the role of women in the art world. She received her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, her M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, and her Licence from the Université Paris-Sorbonne. She is also a graduate of the Ecole du Louvre in museum studies. Most recently she has been focusing on organizing academic conferences which bring together art history and art market studies, such as Celebrating Female Agency in the Art in June 2018, and Women Art Dealers 1940-1990 in May 2019. Her current collaborative project is the Women Art Dealers Digital Archive (WADDA), a digital platform that maps the role women art dealers played in the institutionalization of modern and contemporary art. In September 2022, she was elected co-chair of The International Art Market Studies Association [TIAMSA] and a section editor for the upcoming Art Market Dictionary to be published by Bloomsbury Press in London, late 2022.