Julien Levy’s Surrealist Art Galaxy
“I believe in the future resolution of two states (in appearance so contradictory) dream
and reality, into a sort of absolute reality; Surréalité.”1 André Breton
Surrealism, as defined by André Breton’s famous quote, was the perfect siren song for
Julien Levy. Restless and defiant against the conventions of his upper class New York
Jewish upbringing, Levy escaped to Paris in 1927 and was swept away by the
intoxicating world of the Parisian avant-garde where he met a constellation of figures
including Surrealist artists, American expatriates, poets, writers, dancers, and others.
These encounters would change his life, and eventually make him into one of the most
influential art dealers of the twentieth century.
Julien and Joella at the first gallery. Located at 602 Madison Avenue, 1932.
Collection of Joella Bayer.
Levy opened his gallery in 1931, and for two pivotal decades, what he called “those
crucial years between Dadaism and the apotheosis of Moma-ism (Museum-of-ModernArt-ism),”2 electrified New York with shows of the most exciting art of his day. He was
the first American to exhibit the Surrealists and the first to champion photography as high
art. The who’s who of artists he introduced were Berenice Abbott, Henri CartierBresson, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Naum Gabo, Alberto
Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo, André Kertesz, Leonid, Mina Loy, George Platt
Lynes, Matta, Lee Miller, Richard Oelze, Wolfgang Paalen, Man Ray, Ben Shahn,
Dorthea Tanning, Yves Tanguy, and Pavel Tchelitchew among many others.3 The Julien
Levy Gallery became known as “one of the liveliest and most adventurous art-dealing
establishments of the 1930’s.”4 Cocktail openings never really existed before Levy
arrived on the scene, gin sparkling in hand. No single individual of his métier was better
suited in temperament and psychic spirit to preside as Surrealism’s American
emissary/entrepreneur than the many sided, gallery dealer-tastemaker-art historiancollector- filmmaker-writer-teacher, quicksilver Levy himself.
Levy acquired a passion for art during his formative years. As an undergraduate at
Harvard (1923-26), he was a student in Paul Sach’s famous course in museum direction,
along with a luminous group of classmates referred to as the Harvard modernists,
including, Alfred Barr, Chick Austin, Kirk Askew, Lincoln Kirstein, and Phillip Johnson,
all who were to become the future major movers and shakers in the art world.5 Whereas
most of his classmates pursued careers as museum directors, Levy embarked on his own
course. He later was seriously interested in movies, and photography, the latter which led
him to Alfred Stieglitz, the esteemed photographer and art dealer whose Intimate Gallery
Levy would haunt on vacations. Stieglitz had begun in 1903 showing photography, and
later added work by European painters Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, and Americans
Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin and Marsden Hartley. He was the first dealer to show
important early American photographers like Gertrude Kasebier, Paul Strand, Charles
Sheeler, and Edward Steichen, side by side with painting and sculpture, then a radical
idea which would profoundly influence Levy.
It was during this time that Levy met the irresistibly charming and famously enigmatic
French artist Marcel Duchamp while attending an exhibition of the great Romanian
sculptor Constantin Brancusi at the Joseph Brummer Gallery. Levy persuaded his father
to buy a marble Bird in Space which led him to Duchamp, who was representing
Brancusi in New York. In Duchamp, Dada artist-private dealer-filmmaker-chess
champion, he found a kindred spirit. Levy hero-worshipped Stieglitz and Duchamp,
adopted them as godfathers and years later, recollected, “ I didn’t bring them into the
church. I just, in my mind, said ‘I want their blessings,’ and I considered them my
inspiration.”6 While Stieglitz informed his business acumen, Duchamp introduced Levy
to what was to become his passion – Surrealism.
In 1927, Levy left Harvard without graduating and took off to Paris to enjoy the company
of Duchamp. An aspiring movie director, Levy heeded Duchamp’s advice to not go to
Hollywood and instead to “Come over and meet Man Ray and do a film with us in Paris
on a shoestring…We don’t do million-dollar or half-million dollar King Kongs over
there.”7 As luck would have it, just as they were crossing the Atlantic one way, the
American expatriate Man Ray, Dada/Surrealist photographer-filmmaker-painter, was on
his way home to New York. While the film project never panned out, this transatlantic
adventure was to determine Levy’s fate.
Like so many other American expatriates at the time, Levy had come to Paris seeking
artistic and intellectual nourishment. Thanks to Duchamp, Levy was soon at home in the
exhilarating artistic and intellectual atmosphere of Paris, where he met Ernest
Hemmingway, James Joyce, Mina Loy, many other writers and artists, and his future
wife Joella Loy (daughter of poet-artist Mina Loy). During his stay, Levy lived next door
to Many Ray’s studio and around the corner from Eugène Atget’s studio, the aging
French photographer whose enchanting photographs of Paris – its famous monuments,
shop windows, little-known corners and unexpected passageways – were admired by the
Surrealists. Through Man Ray’s introduction, Levy visited Atget and was able to
purchase many photographs for the gallery he hoped to one day open in New York. His
initial contact with the artist led him to collecting and exhibiting photographs and
surrealist works of art. He told an interviewer in 1975, “So then, several years later,
when it came to opening my own gallery, I already knew the gang as far as modern art
went…That is how I got to know them, how I got to work with them and how, even in
being a dealer, I didn’t feel like a businessman.”8
In 1931, Julien Levy opened a gallery at 602 Madison Avenue, financed by an
inheritance from his mother. The design of the gallery featured an unusual curved wall,
the first of its kind, “so that the pictures hung, not parallel on a rectangular wall, but each
turned slightly away from the other along the curve, so that as the viewer passed he saw
only one at a time.”9 Later in 1937 when the gallery moved to a larger space at 15 East
57th Street, Levy expanded the idea for the entire gallery so that it resembled the shape of
a painter’s palette. With his wife Joella at his side the Levy’s were glamour incarnate.
They were multilingual, social and popular on two continents. They and the gallery
instantly made the New York society columns. Determined to concentrate chiefly on
photography as the “supreme expression of our epoch” Levy’s first show was an homage
to Alfred Steigletz, American Photography Retrospective Exhibition, featuring artists
Charles Sheeler, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Clarence White. The show garnered
significant critical attention and put the gallery on the New York art world’s map.
Joseph Cornell, Portrait of Julien Levy (Daguerrotype-object), 1936
Collection of Jean Farley Levy. The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.
His next photography show featured two one-man exhibitions of great 19th century
French photographers Photographs by Atget and Photographs by Nadar. Levy
considered them his personal discoveries. Nadar’s golden brown portrait of the Parisian
Belle Époque dancer Cleo de Merode enchanted Joseph Cornell, a shy young artist who
made frequent trips to Levy’s gallery during the show. The portrait, also a favorite of
Levy’s, sparked an introduction between the dealer and artist, resulting in Cornell
showing Levy his artwork. Levy found Cornell’s Ernst-like collages of old engravings,
objects made of glitter and tinsel, and his deep blue-tinted collage films essentially
surrealist in spirit and worthy of inclusion in the gallery’s first major Surrealist
exhibition. This contact was essential for Cornell and illustrates just how significant
Levy’s gallery had been to American artists – it provided them with full access to
European art and emerging artists.
Julien and Joella Levy installing the Max Ernst
exhibition at the gallery in 1932.
Collection of Joella Levy Bayer.
Max Ernst and Julien Levy at Levy’s country
house, Great River, Long Island, 1944.
Collection Jean Farley Levy.
In January 1932, Levy presented Surréalisme. The exhibition included photography by
Atget, Herbert Bayer, Boiffard, Lynes, Man Ray, Roger Parry, Maurice Tabard, Umbo
paintings by Bayer, Dalí, Ernst, Picasso, and Pierre Roy; collages by Ernst and Joseph
Cornell; drawings by Cocteau, Ernst and Charles Howard; objects by Cornell and Man
Ray, and surrealist periodicals. An enthusiastic critic from Art News reported: “A
pleasant madness prevails at Julien Levy’s new and interesting gallery, with its
miscellany of surrealistic paintings, drawings, prints, and what-not. Mr. Levy has been at
considerable pains to inform us what these ultra-modern men are up to, and he is to be
congratulated on the well-rounded line-up of the surrealistic camp…Just how serious this
moon struck phase of painting, known as the surrealiste [sic] movement, is to be taken is
something that must be worked out individually.”10
Levy continued to promote the Surrealists and with a nod to Steiglitz, branched out in
many other areas – even showing surrealist films and Walt Disney cartoon cells. By
1936, Levy had established himself as Surrealism’s official American impresario. And
the publication of his anthology Surrealism, printed on pale pink, green, and yellow
pages with numerous pictures and poetry artfully defined his Surrealist aesthetic: “In the
history of art surrealism is a revolution, first against the bondage of realism, secondly
against the snob monopoly of abstract painting.”11 Levy stated, “Surrealism is a point of
view” and “attempts to discover and explore the ‘more real than real world behind the
real.”12 His personal taste paved the way, signaling something larger that was taking hold
of the American imagination, a sort of surrealist zeitgeist, as is evidenced by the cover
story featured in Harpers Bazaar, November 1936: “The Surrealists are exulting that this
is Their Year all over America…Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press is this month
bringing out Mr. Levy’s book ‘Surrealism,’… Department stores have gone demented on
the subject for their windows. Dress designers, advertising artists and photographers,
short stores in the Saturday Evening Post, everywhere, Surrealism.”13
Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning play chess on the set Ernst designed for the “Imagery of Chess Show”
wwithhile Julien and Muriel in the background. Julien and Muriel Levy, 1944. Collection Jean Farley
Levy.
During this time, Levy had also been promoting a group of young American artists –
John Atherton, Peter Blume, Paul Cadmus, Walter Quirt and Ben Shahn – known as
American Realists or Magic Realists. Though their subject matter depicted contemporary
issues, social conditions and political events, their style, consisting of a precise and
realistic technique to realize dreamlike or fantastic images, shared common ground with
Surrealism. In November 1937, the Levy gallery dazzled New York with an exhibition
of a single painting: Blume’s scandalous masterpiece, The Eternal City, that, according to
a reviewer, “in a meticulous surrealistic style similar to Dalí, recites an object lesson on
fascism…Blume’s canvas features a pop-eyed papier maché head of Il Duce, springing
out as a jack-in-the-box, with an arrogant underling glaring at the crumbling ruins of the
classical world.”14
Levy’s success continued to be chronicled by the press. In 1938, Vogue profiled several
fashionable New York art dealers each with “a personality as sharp and distinct as any
movie star,” who were clustered around Fifty-Seventh Street and whose galleries “form
the bridge over which most of the picture-buying public crosses happily into the art
world.” In contrast to the velvet walls and Victorian decoration of the other galleries,
Levy’s chic gallery with its “dark wine colored rug and artfully broken up start white
walls, dipping and waving and straightening out again, the effect naked and modern,”
was singled out as simply sensational. The article faithfully related Levy’s creed, “as he
will explain with almost Messianic fervor if you happen to be simpatico. Picasso, is
already a classic. Surrealism the photography of the mind, and Neo-Romanticism the
camera work of the soul, are reactions to Picasso, and the cold logic of photography. For
Surrealism and Neo-Romanticism, Mr. Levy reserves his enthusiasm. There are shows of
Dalí, and Berman, Tchelitchew, and Blume. The Levy efforts, high-pitched and sharp,
have made these artists the enthusiasms also of some of the cleverest and gayest art
collectors. His keen and almost glittering eye, focused on the Parisian scene, may
discover this decades Cézanne at any moment – a possibility that keeps him and his
clients slightly feverish at all times.”15
Architectural drawing for the curved wall at Julien Levy Gallery, 15 East 57 Street. Collection
Jean Farley Levy.
Having exhibited annually since its opening, Dali was the star of Levy’s gallery and his
name became synonymous with Surrealism in New York. His sold-out exhibitions and
shocking behavior garnered heaps of publicity and even got him society portrait
commissions, as well as collaborations with fashion and jewelry designers. Dalí returned
to New York and for his third solo exhibition at Levy’s gallery in March 1939, and soon
after was among the many artists exiled in New York.
In the years following the beginning of World War II in September 1939, hundreds of
artists fled France for New York. While Peggy Guggenheim and Pierre Matisse have
been given a large share of the credit for helping the displaced Europeans, Levy’s
contribution should also be recognized. A secretary who worked at the gallery in the
early forties, described it as “a headquarters for the surrealists, all of whom were friends
of Julien’s and many of whom were refugees from Paris, waiting out the war: Max Ernst,
Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, Eugene Berman, later his brother Leonid.”16 As well as
André Breton, Dalí, Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Yves Tanguy and Pavel Tchelitchew. Levy
had always kept in close contact with the Paris artists, and with the commencement of the
war, he did what he could being on the other side of the ocean, to aid their flight. In
particular, Levy was instrumental in obtaining a visa and passage to New York for
Leonid. James Thrall Soby, who was a client of the gallery and a collector of both
Berman brothers, maintained an influential position as a curator/advisor at the Museum
of Modern Art and was closely involved in helping resolve Leonid’s situation. Levy,
who was a terrific raconteur and an avid correspondent, chronicles (with characteristic
dry wit) the circumstances of many of the artists in an excerpt of a letter written to Soby
dated August 22, 1940:
Dear Jim: Thanks for forwarding L’s letter which I now return. Having just
returned from a trip to N.Y. to meet the Dalís on the Excambion. This cut unmercifully
into my vacation, but Dali is always so demanding. I was of course of no service to him,
but my absence would have been disastrous…Virgil (Thompson) and Man Ray came on
the same boat. Man Ray went directly to the country, but I had supper with Virgil – who
is also just the same as ever. His best story was of Jean Michel Frank cabling Nelson
Rock to ask aid in securing a visa. Nelson answered that “it is difficult considering the
present circumstances…etc.” and Frank cabled back “I would not have asked you if it
were not for present circumstances.”…Dalí was not in trouble in Spain, but the rumor
that he was, and the efforts to get him out, almost landed him in jail, because after several
kinds of pressure had been brought to bear from the State Dept. here to release him,
Franco’s men begun to wonder, ‘Who is this guy and what has he done dangerous?”17
A collection of announcements and catalogs for all Salvador Dalí shows at Julien Levy Gallery.
According to the press at the time, American reaction towards the influx of dispossessed
Europeans was not overly enthusiastic. In such an atmosphere, the émigrés
understandably felt marooned in New York. They longer for familiar ground, but were
an ocean’s remove from a Paris café or bar. Levy could identify with their dislocation.
In 1941, with business close to nonexistent, he was forced to pack up and take the gallery
on the road in search of new collectors. He did meet with a modicum of success with the
star-studded crowd in Hollywood. Upon his return to New York in 1942, Levy was
inducted into the Army and assigned to a training unit that took captured planes apart,
providing technological secrets to the United States government.18 During his absence,
his gallery’s concerns were undertaken by a Harvard friend, the dealer Kirk Askew, who
ran the New York branch of the London gallery Durlacher Brothers. In 1943, the gallery
re-emerged at 42 East 57 Street with an exhibition of drawings by Matta, the Chileanborn artist’s second solo show at the gallery. The gallery once again became a place of
meeting for the exiled artists, where one could drop by for a chat, a drink, or if you were
Marcel Duchamp, a quick game of chess.
By then, a sea change in the New York art world was well underway, created by the
sensational debut of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery in 1942, and her
most stunning achievement, the discovery of Jackson Pollock. Guggenheim’s brilliant
prescience was further accented by her financial backing and the promotion of the entire
New York School of Abstract Expressionists. The young American painters were much
influenced by their close contact with the exiled European artists in New York, and felt
an affinity with the Surrealists’ exploration of the subconscious. Their painting emulated
the Surrealist automatism found in the paintings by Ernst, Gorky, and Matta, artists
introduced by the Julien Levy Gallery. The Armenian Gorky had been a frequent visitor
to Levy’s gallery during the thirties, showing up with a portfolio of drawings under his
arm, which Levy looked at and even purchased to help the starving artist out. André
Breton, in his exhibition catalog essay, The Eye-Spring for Gorky’s first solo exhibition
in March 1945 at the Levy Gallery, touted Gorky’s signature style of hybrid and
morphological forms as “Nature treated as a cryptogram.” Gorky continued to exhibit at
the gallery throughout the late forties and he developed a close friendship with Levy.
Gorky’s work can be viewed as an essential artistic link between Automatic Surrealism
and Abstract Expressionism.
The sea change was evident as well with the exiled artists. Playing musical chairs among
the galleries became something of a sport for them. Ernst briefly left Levy’s gallery
during his short lived marriage to Peggy Guggenheim. Levy introduced Ernst to a
beautiful young American painter, Dorothea Tanning. Ernst and Guggenheim divorced.
Then Ernst married Tanning and returned to Levy’s gallery. Calder, de Chirico,
Giacometti, Matta, and Tanguy all eventually left Levy for Matisse’s gallery. Where
Matisse’s promotion of the exiles in New York heralded their foreign status and political
views, Levy engaged them in true surrealist fashion, shifting the focus back to the
imagination with exhibitions such as the 1944 The Imagery of Chess. Levy sought to
merge European and American artists in an inclusive, if not common, pursuit. Duchamp,
who years earlier on their fateful voyage to Paris had taught Levy the fine appreciation of
chess and the game’s inherent expression of true artistic feeling, inspired the theme and
designed the announcement for The Imagery of Chess. Levy commissioned 32 artists
(exiles including: Berman, Breton, Nicolas Calas, Duchamp, Ernst, Jean Helion,
Frederick Kiesler, Matta, Xanti Schawinsky, Kurt Seligmann, Tanguy, and Ossip
Zadkine) to design chess sets or paintings and sculptures inspired by the game. One of
the more fabulous sets, was noted in Newsweek, December 25, 1944: “On the prankster
side, though, is the concoction of the surrealist writers Nicolas Calas and André
Breton…Their board is made up of mirrors so that the ‘narcissistic’ players can see
themselves, and the chessman are ordinary drinking glasses of various sizes and shapes,
the ‘blacks’ filled with red wine, the ‘whites’ with white wine. When a player captures a
piece he ‘must drink the symbolic blood of the victim.’” In conjunction with the show,
Levy organized a chess game in which George Koltanowski, World Champion of
Blindfold Chess, played blindfolded, 5 simultaneous games against Alfred Barr Jr., Ernst,
Kiesler, Levy, Tanning, and Gregory Zilboorg, with Duchamp serving as referee. Blind
games, with the absence of any conscious control, were the purest expression of
Surrealist art and perfectly evoked Duchamp’s feeling for the game: “It’s an aesthetic
game, and you feel the shape of the board as it begins to shift its patterns and you make it
become beautiful…”19
Patterns were shifting in Levy’s world as well. In 1948, he and Gorky got into a terrible
car accident that left Levy with a broken collar bone and Gorky with a broken neck.
Gorky’s wounded physical condition combined with other circumstances – his wife
leaving him and a studio fire that destroyed a majority of his paintings – contributed to a
dark state of depression that led him to commit suicide. Saddened by the death of his
friend, and indifferent to the changing tide of the art world, Levy closed his gallery in
1949. Abstract Expressionism would soon eclipse Surrealism and the art Levy loved.
Years later, looking back over the course of his life in art, Levy remarked, “Art to me is
almost a religion.”20 With great devoutness, Levy lived and laid down his life for
Surrealism: hustling, inspiring, promoting, selling and, above all, defending his passion.
In the history of art dealers of the twentieth century, Levy emerges as a shining star,
whose legacy twinkles brightly.
1. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. By
Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
Michigan, 1969),p. 14.
2. Quoted in Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New
York, 1977), p. 12.
3. For a comprehensive list of exhibitions compiled by the author, see Ingrid
Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs “Chronology of Exhibitions,” Julien Levy: Portrait of
an Art Gallery The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 173-187.
4. Quoted in Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern (Atheneum, New York, 1973), p.98.
5. For further reading about the Harvard Modernists, see Steve Watson “Julien
Levy: Exhibitionist and Harvard Modernist,” in Schaffner and Jacobs, Julien
Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery pp. 80-95, and Nicholas Fox Weber, Patron
Saints, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995.
6. Quoted in Charles Desmarais, “Julien Levy: Surrealist Author, Dealer, and
Collector,” After Image, January 1977, p. 5.
7. Quoted in Charles Desmarais, “Julien Levy: Surrealist Author, Dealer, and
Collector,” After Image, January 1977, p. 5.
8. Quoted in Paul Cummings “Interview of Julien Levy,” Archives of American Art,
May 30, 1975, p. 8.
9. Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery, p. 12.
10. “Surrealisme” Artnews, January 16 1932, p. 10.
11. Quoted in Julien Levy Surrealism (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995),p. 9.
12. Ibid, p. 4,5.
13. Harper’s Bazaar, November 1936 pp. 62, 126.
14. “A One Painting Show,” The Art Digest, December 1, 1937, p. 18.
15. Sallie Faxon Saunders, “Middle Men of Art,” Vogue, March 15, 1938, p. 102.
16. Eleanor Perenyi, interview with the author.
17. Julien levy to James Thrall Soby, August 22, [1940], Getty Research Institute,
Resource Collections, box 3, folder 16.
18. Jerrold Levy, interview with the author.
19. Cummings, p. 12.
20. Judith Parker, “A conversation with Julien Levy, collector, gallery dealer, are
historian.” Harvard Magazine, September-October 1979, Volume Núm.82 p. 38.