Berthe Weill Exhibition at Grey Art Museum - a conversation with co-curator Lynn Gumpert on Thursday, Feb. 13 at 4 pm ET

 

A conversation with Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery and Co-Curator of Make Way for Berthe Weill, and Beth Gersh-Nesic, on Thursday, February 13, 2025 at 4 pm ET, 1 pm PT, 2pm MT, 3 pm CT, 9 pm UK time, 10 pm France

Hosted by the AFUSA on Zoom. Registration here

Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde, currently at the Grey Art Museum, New York University (through March 1st), shines a bright spotlight on an unsung hero who believed in the emerging artists of the early 20th century, even when she earned very little for her efforts. Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Fernand Léger, Diego Rivera, and Raul Dufy are among the best-known artists in this exhibition. However, there are many lesser-known artists among the 110 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, as well as photographs, catalogs, and other archival material illustrating her life and gallery.  This homage to Berthe Weill (1865-1951) also reintroduces numerous gifted women artists: Suzanne Valadon, Emilie Charmy, Jacqueline Marval, and Hermione David, among many others. 

A conversation with co-curator Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Museum, and art historian Beth Gersh-Nesic, will shed light on Berthe Weill's biography, the artists included in the exhibition, and the fascinating backstory for this show, which took over a decade of dedication from a brilliant team of women arts professionals. The exhibition will be on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art from May through September 2025, and then in Paris at the Musée de l'Orangerie, from October 2025 through January 2026. 

Lynn Gumpert

Museum director, curator, administrator, and art historian, Lynn Gumpert has overseen and organized exhibitions on four continents. For more than 25 years, she has served as Director of New York University’s Grey Art Museum, formerly known as the Grey Art Gallery. During her tenure, the Grey has presented over 75 exhibitions. Among them are: Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Post-War France, 1946-1962 (March-July 2024); Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s 1980s (2020); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); and The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984 (2006). Gumpert received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in art history from the University of Michigan. The French government honored Gumpert with the distinction of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1999.

Beth S. Gersh-Nesic

Art historian, Beth Gersh-Nesic is the Director of the New York Arts Exchange, an arts education service, and she is a staff writer with Bonjour Paris, an online arts and culture magazine.  Her books and articles focus on Picasso, the School of Paris, women artists, and the poet/art critic André Salmon, who wrote about several artists on view in the Berthe Weill exhibition at the Grey.  Her translations of Salmon's books include André Salmon on French Modern Art (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Pablo Picasso, André Salmon and “Young French Painting” (Za Mir Press, 2022). She recently retired from teaching undergraduate and graduate art history courses.

To register for this Zoom event click here , as a friend of the speaker.

Berthe Weill image credits: * Émilie Charmy, Portrait of Berthe Weill, 1910-1914, in the exhibition “Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde.”Credit: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Alberto Ricci; Photo by MMFA, Julie Ciot

An Interview with award-winning translator Sandra Smith in print and on Zoom

 

Dear Friends,

It is a thrill and an honor to interview the gifted translator Sandra Smith, whose work you might know from reading the best-seller Suite Française (Knopf, 2006) by Irène Némirovsky. Our conversation in print for the online magazine Bonjour Paris was published last week.  And our conversation in person, focusing on Smith's last three translations will take place on Zoom next Tuesday.  You can register with our host the Federation of Alliances Françaises by clicking this link. 

I hope to see you then - 

Bien à vous,

Beth

Tuesday, March 1, 2022
4pm PST / 5pm MST / 6pm CST / 7pm EST
Federation of Alliances Françaises USA
In English

Join us for a conversation with Sandra Smith, award-winning translator of French literature, as she discusses the artistry and challenges involved in translating with Beth S. Gersh-Nešić. Their discussions will focus specifically on three significant works: The Prodigal Child, by Irène Némirovsky, In the Shadows of Paris: The Nazi Concentration Camp That Dimmed the City of Light , by Anne Sinclair and Inseparable, by Simone de Beauvoir.

Sandra Smith has translated twelve of Irène Némirovsky’s novels, including the international sensation Suite Française, into English. She has also translated works by Albert Camus, Guy de Maupassant, and Simone de Beauvoir, among many others and is the recipient of numerous awards including the National Jewish Book Award and the PEN Translation Prize.

Beth Susan Gersh-Nešić, Ph.D. is an art historian and the director of the New York Arts Exchange, an arts education service. Her translation and annotation of André Salmon’s first two books on art were published as André Salmon on French Modern Art (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and her most recent book is a translation of Salmon expert Dr. Jacqueline Gojard’s Pablo Picasso and André Salmon: The Painter, the Poet and the Portraits (Za Mir Press, 2019).  She contributes to the online magazine Bonjour Paris and teaches art history at Mercy College.   

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1903 into a wealthy Jewish family and was raised in a life of privilege in Europe. After fleeing Russia during the Revolution, she immersed herself in the company of thinkers, artists, musicians, and other cultural elites as part of the Parisian literati of her time. Sixty-two years after her death, in 2004, the never-before-published Suite Française brought international acclaim to this gifted writer, whose life was tragically lost in the Holocaust. The Prodigal Child can also be found at the following booksellers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop.org.

Anne Sinclair was born in New York City and moved to France with her family as a young girl. There she rose to fame, in part due to her family’s vast collection of paintings by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Léger, which she would become heir to, but also because her prominence as a highly regarded broadcast journalist led to her serving as the model for statues of Marianne, the national emblem of France, symbolizing liberty. From 1984 to 1997 she hosted 7 sur 7, France’s most popular Sunday evening news show, similar to CBS’s 60 Minutes; during that time, she interviewed many world figures, including Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Shimon Peres, and Prince Charles. She is the author of numerous bestsellers in France. In the Shadows of Paris, which was recently recognized as a top-four finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, can also be found at the following booksellers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop.org.

Simone de Beauvoir was a French author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, political and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women’s oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.

This event will be on Zoom and is free for all Alliance Française members, AATF members, and invited guests of the presenter or publicist. Non-members or persons who have no AF chapter nearby can purchase tickets ($10). Please click here to register.