The dealer who launched Picasso

 
 
Plus: Where are all the young collectors?
 
 
 
 
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Tom Stammers on Berthe Weill's dedication to modern art
 
Tom Stammers on Berthe Weill's dedication to modern art 
Berthe Weill's real passion was the coming generation; her motto was 'place aux jeunes', or 'make way for the young'. She acted not from calculation, but surrendered to the 'revolution' that seemed to be sweeping through the arts, well aware as a sympathetic bystander that she was on a 'slippery slope'. A crucial contact in the early years was Pedro Mañach, the Catalan entrepreneur who introduced her to his cohort of Spanish painters keen to make a name for themselves at the time of the 1900 Paris Exposition. This was how Weill came to obtain for Picasso his first sales in the city – three pastels of bullfighting scenes, which she bought for a total of 100 francs and sold on to the publisher Adolphe Brisson for 150. Weill was always proud of her role in launching Picasso's career and reproduced the line-drawing he made of her in 1920, seated in hat and fur collar, for the frontispiece of her memoir. (In a repeated pattern, he was soon signed by a rival, wealthier gallery and started fetching prices far beyond her means.) 
 
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Jane Morris wonders where a new generation of collectors will come from
 
Jane Morris asks where a new generation of collectors will come from 
'There's a generational shift in collecting going on, with a changing of the guard who defined the past 30 years,' says Noah Horowitz, chief executive of Art Basel. The new generation are mostly self-made people who come from all over the world. 'Buying art is no longer the preserve of the European and American upper-class,' he says. 'But new collectors also have more in common with other young people in cities like Berlin, Los Angeles and Mexico City than their forebears in their own locations.' They also have little loyalty to individual artists or galleries. 'Earlier generations built collections hand-in-hand with dealers in a linear, focused way,' Horowitz says. 'The new generation is much more diversified and their tastes are widespread. In one way it is exciting, but it is also keeping us all on our toes.'
 
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Sarah Moss on the dangerous beauty of Waterhouse's nymphs
 
Sarah Moss on the dangerous beauty of Waterhouse's nymphs 
I don't remember when I first saw Hylas and the Nymphs (1896), but I do remember being compelled by it. I liked the textures of water, lilies, hair and skin. I noticed the way in which the artist, John William Waterhouse, had painted the skin under water and in the air, particularly the arm and belly of the central nymph with the yellow flower in her hair, and the difference between the dry and water-logged sections of the hair of the girl in the foreground. I often arranged my own hair like that, though I usually ended up tying it back properly when the floating locks tangled in my bike helmet. The Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic was in fashion again: girls with sickly bodies and lively hair, loose-fitting clothes with thin arms sticking out of them, and at 12, 13, 14 years old, slipping into the self-starvation that deformed my growing up, the nymphs' bodies looked generous – softer than those of the models and singers held out to me and my friends. I liked the lilies, the shapes of the thirsty roots, the autumnal colours of leaves and hair. Apart from Hylas's red sash, the painting's sensuality seemed gentle and seasonally melancholic. The nymphs were doing enough by existing, by being themselves, with no obligation to produce or consume, to pass exams or do housework, and that looked pretty idyllic to me. I wanted, obviously, permission to stop and rest, simply to be. I hadn't noticed that the price of that permission was inhuman beauty – that the nymphs were just pretty things and that even their prettiness was a danger to men.
 
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In the studio with… Pauline Curnier Jardin
 
In the studio with… Pauline Curnier Jardin 
'I have an antique manhole cover made from travertine, which is a stone that has been used since the Renaissance. But I also have the frame that comes with it – the square piece of pavement that the cover slots into. I found it outside my studio one day. It weighs 80 kilos, so I had to ask friends to help me carry it in. It's like a beautiful readymade. I think of it as a door – one that gives me direct access to the past, to the underground, to hell.'
 
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 Michael Prodger on a brief history of sketching through the ages
 
 Michael Prodger on a brief history of sketching through the ages 
Towards the end of his life, William Blake met John Constable, perhaps for the first and only time. As he looked through a book of the younger artist's sketches he stopped, startled, at a drawing of fir trees on Hampstead Heath: 'Why this is not drawing, but inspiration!' he exclaimed. Constable replied with a drollery: 'I never knew it before; I meant it for drawing.' Susan Owens's compelling and enlightening book is an examination of the question at the heart of this little scenario: what is drawing?
 
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In the current issue…
 
As the Warburg Institute opens up to the public, Alison Cole recalls her student days in a more idiosyncratic environment
 
As the Warburg Institute opens up to the public, Alison Cole recalls her student days in a more idiosyncratic environment
The photographic collection of the Warburg Institute in London, where I had my first summer job in the 1980s, was then a little principality of its own. Situated on the 'piano nobile' of the institute's 1950s building, illuminated by full-length windows filled with the foliage of Woburn Square in Bloomsbury, it was the domain of three remarkable women: Ruth Rubinstein, with her beautiful long white hair, Jennifer Montagu, with her dry humour and pungent cigars and Elizabeth McGrath, with her sprightly mind and step – I think of them as akin to the great female trios of Greek and Norse mythologies. The crammed cabinets were arranged in categories from 'Antiquities' to 'Unidentified Iconographies', opening up the whole world of ancient, medieval and Renaissance visual culture. There, in thousands of reproductions, through posture, gesture, expression or billowing draperies, one could trace the thrilling afterlife of antiquity.
 
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In the next issue…
 
The fine art of food
 
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