An Avant-Garde Impresario - Julien Levy

Art in America, March, 1999 by Bruce Altshuler

Julien Levy, the promoter of Surrealism and pioneering New York art dealer of the 1930s and '40s, was the subject of a recent exhibition that wove together art works and archival materials.

As art historians have become increasingly concerned with social and economic history, interest has grown in the role played by dealers and galleries. Recently, this sort of scholarly attention to the business side of art resulted in "Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery," an absorbing exhibition at the Equitable Gallery and the Archives of American Art in New York. Focusing on an innovative American art dealer of the 1930s and '40s, the show compellingly presented the gallery and the dealer as central nodes of artistic activity. Using a mixture of art works, documentation and ephemera, it tracked Julien Levy's personal and business relationships as well as revealing his esthetic programs.

The son of a successful New York real-estate developer, Levy was initially drawn to avant-garde film. In 1927, at the age of 21, he abandoned his studies at Harvard in order to go to Paris, where he hoped to make a film in Man Ray's studio. (Levy's entree into the Parisian art world was through Marcel Duchamp, whom he had met after convincing his father to buy Brancusi's Bird in Space from the sculptor's 1926 New York exhibition, which Duchamp had organized.) While the Man Ray film never came to pass, another project imperceptibly began: the formation of Julien Levy, avant-garde impresario. A key figure in this process was photographer Berenice Abbott, with whom Levy joined in a business partnership to preserve and promote the work of the recently deceased Eugene Atget. While in France, he also met and married Joella Haweis, daughter of Dadaist muse Mina Loy.

Returning to the U.S., he embarked on his career as a dealer, initially as an employee of the Weyhe Gallery and then, from 1931 on, as the proprietor of Julien Levy Gallery. Although best remembered as the preeminent American dealer of Surrealism, Levy first exhibited and sold a range of European and American photographs, organizing an Atget exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery and opening his own gallery with works by Stieglitz and five other photographers. In addition to Atget, Levy introduced to America much classic French photography, including the work of Nadar and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The first section of the Equitable exhibition contained an impressive selection of photographs that Levy showed in the 1930s. (A noteworthy feature of "Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery," and an indication of the significant research done by co-curators Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs, was that every work on view had been exhibited, sold or owned by Levy.) This included a group of Cartier-Bressons that were in Levy's groundbreaking 1932 exhibition "Anti-Graphic Photography." The brochure for this show, displayed at the Archives of American Art, sets out the esthetic program governing the exhibition in a letter supposedly sent to Levy but actually written by the dealer himself. Describing Cartier-Bresson's images as possibly too "rude and crude" for the American public, the note recommends juxtaposing these works with "innumerable, incredible, discreditable, profane photographs." And this is just what Levy did, displaying prints by Cartier-Bresson in one room and vernacular photographs from sources such as the tabloid newspapers and advertisements in the other. Levy would continue to exhibit popular art in the 1940s, showing cels from Disney cartoons and Milton Caniff's drawings for his comic strip Terry and the Pirates.

This prescient juxtaposing of high and low was informed by Levy's interdisciplinary esthetic. In his catalogue essay, Steven Watson sketches the links between Levy and a group he terms the "Harvard modernists," which included the "museum men" Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and C. Everett "Chick" Austin, art historians Agnes Rindge and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and balletophile Lincoln Kirstein. Levy, who had studied with Austin and Hitchcock, shared the Harvard modernists' ambition to interrelate and promote a broad range of cultural forms. Like the exhibitions at Barr's Museum of Modern Art, Levy's gallery program made a point of combining film, photography and design with the traditional fine-art mediums of painting and sculpture.

One of the most interesting sections of "Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery" was devoted to the industrial design projects that Levy initiated for his artists, such as Abbott's wastepaper basket covered with a photo of crumpled paper. Experimental films made by Levy himself also were shown at Equitable, as well as films that he screened at his gallery, including rare footage of Dada legend Arthur Cravan boxing, and Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou. Related ephemera at the Archives of American Art included a note from Nelson Rockefeller and his wife accepting an invitation to the November 1932 premier at the gallery of that Surrealist masterpiece.

Initially, Levy financed the gallery (and his share in the Atget estate) with an inheritance from his mother. Having launched his enterprise at an economically inauspicious moment--the Great Depression was in full swing--he was forced to continue relying on family money to stay in business. In a letter to Mina Loy he complained about the difficulties of selling Atget prints: "The feeling is that any photograph is just a snapshot and only worth its association value." Levy seems to have been his own best customer, often purchasing one or two pieces from an artist's exhibition, in addition to the work that he generally received in trade for mounting the show.