Berta Walker Legendary Provincetown Gallerist

Then and Now

By: Charles Giuliano - Mar 31, 2025

The grandparents of Berta Walker arrived in Provincetown in 1915. Her parents, Hudson and Ione (an artist), ran a New York gallery which closed in 1940. They represented Marsden Hartley, among others, and acquired numerous works from Georgia O’Keeffe. They had three daughters of which Berta is a twin, with an older sister.

Early on, when property was still affordable, Berta acquired the building which houses her gallery. In October, 2024, we met there and discussed her remarkable legacy.

Charles Giuliano So this is the 35^th year of Berta Walker Gallery.

Berta Walker (laughing) So, I’m being interviewed! How many years has it been? I knew you before we opened the gallery. That’s how far back we go. You’re old enough to know the saying “I got my job through the New York Times.” I got my job through the Fine Arts Work Center. I was chairman of the board for years and did all kinds of fundraising. I was behind the annual special event in New York, where I was working for the Whitney Museum and other places. I was familiar with the Center for years. I came up one year and said maybe I should do some R&D (research and development). I was founding director of New York’s Graham Modern. Bob Graham brought me in to bring Graham Gallery into the contemporary phase.

I came here as a two-year-old and have been here every summer since then. That’s why I know all the people you have been interviewing.

(The Fine Arts Work Center [FAWC] was founded in 1968 by a group of artists, writers, and patrons, including Stanley Kunitz, Robert Motherwell, Fritz and Jeanne Bultman, Josephine and Salvatore Del Deo, Alan Dugan, Jim Forsberg, Phil and Barbara Malicoat, Myron Stout, Jack Tworkov, Hudson and Ione Walker. The founders envisioned a place in Provincetown, the country’s most enduring artists’ community, where artists and writers could live and work together in the early stages of their creative development. They believed that the freedom to pursue creative work within a community of peers is the best catalyst for artistic growth.)

One summer there was an emergency at FAWC and they had to let the director go. The board president said, “You know the Work Center, so why don’t you become the acting director?” and I did. It must have been 1989 because at the end of that year was when I opened the gallery. There was a space available downtown and a friend said, “You have to open a gallery.” I said, “No way,” but the response was, “Of course you can.” It was 1990, and I opened across the street from the Post Office.

I rented that space for two years but she kept increasing the rent. You can’t do that to a gallery and have it survive. In those days I could buy a building for less than the rent in town. So, I bought this building.

CG What did you pay?

BW I can’t remember.

CG Was it under $100,000?

BW Yes. It was a complex and behind it is an apartment that I now regret not having purchased. At the time I didn’t have the extra $50,000. It’s just fortunate that this property came on the market and could be renovated as a gallery space.

(She greets Stephanie Vevers and discusses her mother, the artist Elspeth Halvorsen.)

You think of Elspeth as such a gutsy woman instead of being an ignored woman in a field which is dominated by men. When Long Point started, instead of kicking and screaming about not being included, Elspeth started her own gallery, Rising Tide, in the same building. She was the founder of that cooperative. Her husband, Tony Vevers, was part of Long Point Gallery. When they started Long Point, I was in New York working at the Whitney. Budd Hopkins called me and said, “We’re starting a co-op gallery and you should come and run it for us.” I had a full-time job and couldn’t leave it for Provincetown. All these years later, I got to meet his daughter, Grace, who is director of this gallery. Today there is no Berta Walker Gallery without Grace Hopkins.

CG When did you step back?

BW I didn’t step back, though I am not in the gallery as much as previously. I do all the advertising and PR. I do the plotting and planning.

CG I wrongly assumed that you took over the Hudson Walker Gallery. (As Hudson Walker told Dorothy Seckler, “I went back to Minneapolis and the family's lumber and real estate business until ’36, when I was married, and my wife and I opened a gallery in New York at 38 East 57th Street, which we continued until 1940.”)

BW There is the Hudson Walker Gallery at the Fine Arts Work Center. My mom, Ione, and dad ran the New York gallery. Mom was an artist, and there is a small piece in the current show that a lot of people like. She said, “I can’t be in the studio and raising twins, etc., etc.” There are three of us. I have a twin sister in California, so we anchor America coast to coast. We have a sister who is 22 months older.

They had the New York gallery from 1938 to 1940. The war started, and he closed it and never again had a gallery. He was very much an anchor as an administrator of the arts. He was involved with MoMA and was the founding president of Artists Equity. It was the only time it had a non-artist as its head. It was started by the artists of the WPA in New York.

CG What was his source of income?

BW He was a jeweler. What I now understand is that colors and the chakras are very important. In this show I looked up the metaphysical description of the color blue. This show is meant to show the strength of Kamala (Harris).

Why Dad ended up as a jeweler was because he liked color. That’s what I do. Red anchors you, while blue is the void. Green represents love and moving on. That may sound foreign, but I learned about chakras. He loved gems, so it is a parallel intuition.

He was the silent mayor of the arts here in Provincetown and in New York. I first went to work as a runner for him. It meant that I was taking diamonds from the shop to the diamond district on 42^nd street. I remember when a dealer dropped his diamonds down on a grid in the street. There was chaos as they recovered them. (laughing) That was my introduction to being a runner. They step outside to look at the diamonds in the sun and he dropped it. I’ll never forget it.

Dad was very involved with the arts and I think he was on the board at MoMA for awhile. I will have to look it up, but I didn’t know that today we would be going to memoryville.

My parents came here because my mother’s parents came here in 1915. My grandmother was a writer who had the pen name of Avery Ball because she was a woman. My parents came from Pittsburgh. My grandfather was a musician, and traveled all around the world. He performed negro spirituals which was the term used at that time. He performed them in Russia. They came in 1915, which I feel connects me back to the early days of the art colony.

My grandmother was a close friend of Mary Heaton Vorse. She was very important and her house has been refurbished. She was a writer and went overseas as a correspondent during WWI. It was in her boathouse that the first plays of the Provincetown Theater (Provincetown Players) were launched. (Mary Heaton Vorse [October 11, 1874–June 14, 1966] was an American journalist and novelist. She established her reputation reporting the labor protests of a largely female and immigrant workforce in the east-coast textile industry. Her later fiction drew on this material profiling the social and domestic struggles of working women. Unwilling to be a disinterested observer, she participated in labor and civil protests, and was for a period the subject of regular U.S. Justice Department surveillance.

In 1915, Vorse helped stage the first performance of a repertoire that included Ida Rauh, Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, and Eugene O'Neill. Once established, the Provincetown Players moved to Greenwich Village in November 1918, opening their own Provincetown Playhouse with O'Neill's one-act play Where the Cross Is Made.)

CG When your father closed the gallery in 1940, he helped to place the artists he represented with other galleries. Can you discuss that?

BW It was so long ago that I can’t remember. I can’t remember who he placed where, but I can tell you a story about my father and Marsden Hartley. He was with Stieglitz at the time, and Dad loved his work. Hartley and Stieglitz were not getting along, so he joined my father’s gallery. I will always remember that he couldn’t sell the work. Artists don’t get supported. Today, with the auction world and all that, it’s getting worse.

CG Did he collect?

BW Yes. When O’Keeffe (the wife and heir of Stieglitz) was selling from the estate, Dad offered to buy all of the Hartleys for $5,000. He got a call from a man I can’t remember and he told my father, “I have talked to O’Keeffe and she will sell me her Hartley’s for $5,000. What do you think?” Dad said, “I just put a check in the mail for the work.” Dad said, “I’m not going to let that bitch make us compete. Why don’t we just take our money ($5,000) and split the work?” There were two stacks of paintings which they took turns for.

CG What did he end up with?

BW That I don’t know, but a lot. More than a hundred, most of which are now in the museum of the University of Minnesota. He was the founding curator when he was there. His grandfather was T.B. Walker, who founded the Walker Art Center.

(In 1879, lumber baron T. B. Walker invited the public into his downtown Minneapolis home to view his art collection. In 1916, Walker bought land in Lowry Hill that he offered to the city of Minneapolis as space for a public library and art museum. After five years of futile negotiation, Walker resolved to build his own museum. Construction began in 1925, and the Walker Art Gallery opened in 1927. After 1935, Walker’s grandchildren, Hudson Walker and Louise Walker McCannel, ran the gallery until the Minnesota Arts Council took charge in 1939.)

As a young man Thomas Barlow Walker was in the lumber world. He and a friend took a wagon of supplies to sell to loggers in California. One day the wagon disappeared. Whoever his partner was, took it and disappeared. There he was abandoned, but he didn’t indulge in “poor me” as so many do. When you get knocked out you stay down or get back up. So, he said, guess I’ll learn to cut trees. One thing led to another and he did very well. He invested in timber. He collected a lot of art and opened his home to the public in Minneapolis. It was the same year that the Met was founded.

CG That would have been 1870.

BW See, he knows these things. That’s what happened. The Walker Art Center was T.B. Walker’s collection.

CG What was the collection?

BW A very mixed bag. Dad left most of his art estate to the University. They own the largest single collection of works by Hartley.

CG Did you inherit any of the work?

BW The first work I owned was at birth. Marsden Hartley gave my older sister a big print when she was born. When I was born, we were twins and he gave us a painting.

(Disruption to greet and converse with visiting artists Paul Bowen and Bert Yarborough.)

CG Can you give me a few more minutes. Please discuss the historical collection of the gallery.

BW I like to pair past and present. A Grace Hopkins work with one by Hans Hofmann, for example. The community is so vibrant today, and even though I didn’t know the early artists, my grandparents did. They came when artists arrived in Provincetown after war broke out in Europe. Many of them, like Oliver Chaffee (1881–1944), who is somewhere on the walls. He was an early master who came to Provincetown then connected and studied with Charles W. Hawthorne (1872–1930). So, there is that whole group that came. A lot of them were women, like Ethel Mars (1876–1959) and Agnes Weinrich (1873–1946).

CG What does a print by Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956) sell for now?

BW A good white-line print goes for $50,000 to $70,000. What I’m showing is modest in the $5,000 to $7,000 range.

CG Weinrichs?

BW In that range as well. ($5,000 to $7,000) It’s a matter of the individual piece. There’s a catch-22 because these works come up at auctions which sell for less. That’s a whole other conversation. Ultimately, auctions can destroy art. For me, a passion is for what happens when an artist goes public and starts selling their work. Artists grow, expand, and try all kinds of wonderful things. Sometimes things happen and at other times they don’t, but an artist needs faith to be shown just to get out of their own way. So, they need a gallery. I’m not hustling my gallery, but I’ve witnessed it. The walls have given the artists the chance to expand. There are now not a lot of galleries, and we are losing more each year. Artists need those walls to show their work.

CG Do you represent estates?

BW I do on occasion. (Varujan Boghosian, Gilbert Franklin, Sue Fuller, Elspeth Halvorsen, Budd Hopkins, John Kearney, Anne MacAdam, Marjorie Strider, Selina Trieff, Ione Gaul Walker, Peter Watts, Nancy Whorf.) If there was a Weinrich estate, I would say I represent it, but there really isn’t one. I’ve had many over the past 35 years, but they’ve come and gone.

CG Is she valued more than Karl Knaths, her brother-in-law?

BW That’s a delicate question. Again, it depends on the particular Knaths. I don’t think she is more valued. I did a show called Creative Couples. It was an interesting project. Sometimes it took forever to find the name of the wife of an artist. In many instances they made art but stopped working. They got married and raised children. So, it was really challenging to find them. Then there were gay couples. We did a whole summer on that theme in two galleries. It was so much fun.

Knaths was a great artist but he does not command the kind of prices of the New York School artists. None of the Provincetown artists do (there are exceptions), and I don’t talk money very well. Today, money is strange and I don’t understand what goes on any more. I’ve shown a lot and sold a lot over the years and I knew Knaths. But I can’t give you financials because they change a lot and art is very personal. Covid is a good example because it isolated us. People were not going out. I did window shows. I changed the shows and had window openings. If you buy a work and take it home you look at it very differently. Emotionally and energetically the work becomes so different. When people fall in love with a work of art it’s such a turn-on because they have just made a soul connection. It’s a personal connection to that secret part of us that’s called the spirit.

CG Over its 35 years has the gallery been self-sustaining?

(Currently she represents Donald Beal, Tom Boland, Paul Bowen, Polly Burnell, Mike Carroll, Lucy Clark, Ted Chapin, Joe Diggs, Rob DuToit, Robert Henry, Grace Hopkins, Brenda Horowitz, Penelope Jencks, David Kaplan, Judyth Katz, Danielle Mailer, Deb Mell, Rosalind Pace, Erna Partoll, Sky Power, Blair Resika, Paul Resika, Laura Shabott, Bert Yarborough, Murray Zimiles.)

So, it’s a viable business and not a hobby.

BW For me, it’s my life. The artists are my family. A lot of people refer to me as Berta B. Luckily, I’m still in business and can afford to pay staff. In the past 35 years, I have had two galleries, one way down in the West End for ten years, and one in Wellfleet for ten years. It closed just before Covid.

CG You’re the longest running gallery.

BW At this point, Julie Heller (opened 1980) might be. I think she was here before me. I don’t quite know, but the gallery is not quite as active.

CG What about Cherry Stone?

BW They were here before me. (50-plus years) When the gals (Sally Nerber and Lizzie Upham) were active they showed a lot of great artists.

CG How many Weinrichs do you have?

BW About ten. I acquire them from individuals.

CG Do you acquire them at auctions?

BW Not that much. At auctions they are what they are. You don’t get to choose or determine quality. I don’t buy at auction that much. I don’t have that much flow to be buying art so much as supporting it. That’s the reality. We sell to walk-in traffic. We do a lot of advertising and some computer selling. We do a lot of mailing, like the show that is up now. We do a lot of different things, and the shows are knock-outs. I started putting up shows in New York years ago, but after 35 years I know how to put up a show (Celebrating Blue). Grace (Hopkins) and I work on hanging a show and it’s quite a creative process. It’s also true that when you go home, you don’t walk, you crawl. You have so much energy. I learned that from Andre Masson (1896–1987, surrealist) when I did a show with him with Marisa del Re Gallery, which Hartley was with. I was in music and administration at the Whitney. I met Marisa because she thought she would like to do a show at FAWC. I went to see her gallery and thought we might do a benefit. Four months later, I got a call from her and she said, “I have a new gallery on the fourth floor of the Fuller building.” It was a huge space, which I helped her to renovate, and we opened with a benefit for the Fine Arts Work Center. I ended up hanging the show for her. I did the press release, and told her she couldn’t print the catalog as it was written, as she was now a major gallery in the Fuller Building. She asked if I could fix it. I’m not a good writer, but we fixed it and she said,“Why don’t you come and work for me?” So, I got my job through Fine Arts Work Center. It’s part of the synergy of the art world, the way things flow.

CG Did you have any interaction with Walter Chrysler (1875–1940) when he was here?

BW I met him when he was here.

CG Did your father have any interaction with him?

BW He was on the board of the Chrysler Museum, until he noticed that a number of the pictures were questionable. Chrysler had a lot of fakes, and Dad resigned. They knew each other and I knew both of them. He was active in the community and I remember him bringing in Warhol. I was pretty young then.

CG How about Joseph Hirshhorn (1899–1981)?

BW My boss at the Whitney went to work for him as an administrator at the Hirshhorn Museum. I didn’t know Hirshhorn, but I knew his wife.

CG What about your grandparents in Provincetown? Did Tabitha Vevers’ grandmother know your grandmother? Did she first visit at her invitation?

BW My grandparents came in 1915. My grandmother hung around with Mary Heaton Vorse, as I said. She was a very important anchor of Provincetown. My parents came here, then Dad was in OSS during WWII. We subsequently learned it was the Monuments Men. He was in Rome for two years. He never talked about it. The people who did the research were all friends of Dad who went with him to college. They were all names I knew from my father. Dad couldn’t be drafted as he had rheumatic fever and was deaf in one ear. So, I knew he wasn’t a soldier. He never talked about it, but mother bought our little house while he was away. So, she bought our little house in Provincetown.