Weyhe Gallery

Weyhe Gallery (also known as Weyhe Gallery and Bookstore) was a New York–based print and art bookshop. It operated from 1919 to 1923 at 710 Lexington Avenue, and then from 1923 until 2003 in a nineteenth-century, four-story townhouse at 794 Lexington Avenue. During its existence it was considered an institution within the New York art world and served as a meeting place for art dealers and collectors interested in modern art.

The gallery’s founder, Erhard Weyhe (1882–1972), began his career as a publisher and print and book dealer in Western Europe. When World War I began, Weyhe, a German national, closed the bookstore he owned in London and moved to New York.

Weyhe Gallery specialized in prints and drawings, which were featured in exhibitions and publications, such as The Weyhe Portfolios and Fine Prints. Occasionally, exhibitions were organized in partnership with other dealers, including Pierre Matisse. The gallery’s main focus was modern and contemporary European artists, among them Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; American artists such as Rockwell Kent, Louis Lozowick, Reginald Marsh, and John Sloan; and Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera. It also sold old master drawings. Weyhe also collected and sold sculpture, including a limited number of works by Picasso. He acquired the bronze sculpture, Head of a Woman (1909; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection) from the French dealer Ambroise Vollard.

From 1919 to 1940, Weyhe Gallery was directed by Carl Zigrosser, a print dealer who eventually accepted a curatorial position in the department of prints and drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. After Zigrosser’s departure, Weyhe took over direction of the gallery until his death in 1972, when the gallery passed to his daughter, Gertrude Weyhe Dennis. When she died, the gallery relocated to Mt. Desert, Maine, where it currently operates as Weyhe Art Books.