An Avant-Garde Impresario - Julien Levy

Julien call together the promoter of Surrealism and pioneering fresh York art dealer of the 1930 and '40 was the make submissive of a recent exhibition that wove together art works and archival materials.

As art historians have become increasingly affected with social and economic history, interest has grown in the part played by dealers and galleries. lately this sort of scholarly attention to the business side of art proceeded in "Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery," an absorbing exhibition at the Equitable Gallery and the Archives of American Art in novel York. Focusing on an innovative American art dealer of the 1930 and '40 the exhibit 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 prosperous New York real-estate developer, call together was initially drawn to avant-garde film. In 1927 at the age of 21 he abandoned his studies at Harvard in order to make progress to Paris, where he spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed to make a film in Man Ray's studio. (Levy's admission into the Parisian art world was from one side Marcel Duchamp, whom he had met after convincing his father to purchase Brancusi's Bird in Space from the sculptor's 1926 fresh York exhibition, which Duchamp had organized.) While the Man Ray film not at any time came to pass, another shoot forward imperceptibly began: the formation of Julien call together avant-garde impresario. A key figure in this proces was photographer Berenice Abbott, with whom call together joined in a business partnership to guard and promote the work of the not long ago deceased Eugene Atget. While in France, he also met and married Joella Haweis, daughter of Dadaist muse Mina Loy

Returning to the U he embarked upon his career as a dealer, initially as an employee of the Weyhe Gallery and then, from 1931 upon as the proprietor of Julien muster Gallery. Although best remembered as the preeminent American dealer of Surrealism, call together first exhibited and sold a range of European and American photographs, organizing an Atget exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery and opening his hold gallery with works by Stieglitz and five other photographers. In addition to Atget, raise 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 muster showed in the 1930s. (A noteworthy feature of "Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery," and an indication of the significant research done by dint of co-curators Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs, was that each work on view had been exhibited, sold or possessed by Levy.) This included a assemblage of Cartier-Bressons that were in Levy's groundbreaking 1932 exhibition "Anti-Graphic Photography." The pamphlet for this show, displayed at the Archives of American Art, plants out the esthetic program governing the exhibition in a alphabetic character supposedly sent to Levy on the contrary actually written by the dealer himself. Describing Cartier-Bresson's images as possibly too "rude and crude" for the American public, the note praises juxtaposing these works with "innumerable, incredible, discreditable, profane photographs." And this is just what call together did, displaying prints by Cartier-Bresson in individual room and vernacular photographs from sources of that kind as the tabloid newspapers and advertisements in the other. muster would continue to exhibit popular art in the 1940 showing cel from Disney cartoons and Milton Caniff's drawings for his comic strip Terry and the Pirates.

This prescient juxtaposing of high and depressed was informed by Levy's interdisciplinary esthetic. In his catalogue essay, Steven Watson sketches the links between raise and a group he metes 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. raise who had studied with Austin and Hitchcock, shared the Harvard modernists' ambition to interrelate and assist a broad range of cultural forms. Like the exhibitions at Barr's Museum of late Art, Levy's gallery program made a point of combining film, photography and design with the traditional fine-art mediums of painting and sculpture

single of the most interesting sections of "Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery" was devot to the industrial design throw outs that Levy initiated for his artists, like as Abbott's wastepaper basket overlayed with a photo of crumpl paper. Experimental films made by the agency of Levy himself also were shown at Equitable, as well as films that he protectioned at his gallery, including rare footage of Dada fiction 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.