Anisabelle Berès-Montanari, a prominent Parisian gallerist, has died at age 78. Born in 1948, she joined the family business Galerie Berès in 1975, which was founded by her mother Huguette Berès in 1952. Over decades, she built the gallery's reputation through scholarly exhibitions on Japanese prints, Manet, the Nabis, and overlooked modern artists like Henri Laurens and Serge Férat. In 2019, she became the first woman president of the Syndicat national des antiquaires (SNA), serving until 2023. The gallery continues under her daughters Florence Berès-Montanari and Capucine Montanari-Fleury.
Her death marks the end of an era for a family-run gallery that shaped the Parisian art market's approach to 19th- and 20th-century art. Berès-Montanari combined rigorous documentation and provenance research with commercial dealing, regularly supplying works to institutions like the Musée d'Orsay. Her leadership of the SNA during a challenging period for the Biennale de Paris and the antiques trade underscored her institutional influence. The gallery's survival into a third generation highlights the enduring model of specialized, scholarly family galleries in an increasingly globalized market.