Ingrid Schaffner

Tag: Levy, Julien

  • “Portrait of an Art Dealer.” Introduction to Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2003 (reprint of 1977 original), pp. ix-xxi.

    Portrait of an Art Dealer

    From 1931 to 1949, Julien Levy’s New York gallery played an essential role in the shift of the avant-garde from Paris to America. It championed experimental film and photography and served as a venue for artists fleeing Europe and Hitler. It presented the first New York exhibitions of artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Joseph Cornell, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Arshile Gorky, Lee Miller, René Magritte, and Dorothea Tanning, all the while promoting a vision of art at its broadest. There were “idea shows” suggested by such critical thinkers as André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, as well as shows about fashion, design, dance, popular culture (Walt Disney and Gracie Allen both showed here), and even music (including a performance by Paul Bowles). In bridging the gap between Gilbert Seldes’s early modern model of the “seven lively arts” and today’s more academic “visual studies,” the activities of the Julien Levy Gallery spark electric. It is also a place to watch as the identity of the art gallery as a commercial institution takes shape, from a near-curiosity shop (books, prints, and lampshades were among the first wares) to a contemporary art gallery: naked, white, and modern. All this history argues for the need to read Levy’s memoirs afresh. But there remains a simpler reason for picking up Memoir of an Art Gallery: Julien Levy tells it as he lived it, with wit and appetite. This is a book that deals in sensual adventure, which is exactly what you hear in Levy’s voice, whether written or spoken.

    The first time I heard Levy speak was in a WABC radio recording, aired on June 11, 1938, and now in the collection of the Museum of Broadcasting. People who knew Julien Levy often speak of his voice, which I listened for and heard twice in the course of researching the exhibition “Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery.”[footnote=1] Named after the memoirs now being introduced, “Portrait of an Art Gallery” aimed to conjure the dynamism of a transitional period in American art history through the doings of this maverick art dealer. In the WABC broadcast, Levy was defining the art movement with which his name was synonymous: “Sur-RAIL-ism.” Or so he pronounced it, in a voice inflected as much by his upper-middle class New York upbringing, as by his years doing business in Paris, as well as by cigarettes, cocktails, and a sophisticated sense of culture. In short, it was deep, smoky, and a little affected. The next time I heard his voice, it had aged a few decades, and now when Levy said the word, it was as if a train was rumbling right through the middle of it: surrrrrrrRRRAILLLLLLism. He was narrating a short film called Surrealism Is…, in which he also starred. The film was made as a project with students at SUNY Purchase, where, late in his life, Levy had plans—which never came to pass—to establish a Center for Surrealist Studies. The class appears to have been psychedelic in form: hippyish-looking students conducting experiments in creative automatism outdoors in the open fields around Levy’s house, or playing indoors with his collection of Surrealist art and other curiosities.

    Levy presides over the film, a grand wizard imparting his life’s work to a new generation. For that is what his commitment amounted to—much more than just the art of his day, something he sold as part of his job, Surrealism was an avocation to which he was dedicated. You hear it in his recital of the movement’s definitions, poems, and erotic prayers.

    “A little more than green and less than blond,” he intones after Paul Eluard and Benjamin Péret’s 1925 proverbs. “What is Day?,” an indoctrinated student recites from a 1928 dialogue. “A woman bathing nude at nightfall.” You see it in Levy’s surroundings; besides being chock full of art treasures—there are Max Ernst’s collages and frottages, Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture On ne joue plus, and Dali’s painting Accommodations of Desire—the shelves are loaded with the kinds of optical devices, found objects, and natural artifacts through which the uncanny expressed itself every day to properly attuned Surrealists. The movement’s love of games is evinced by a chess board, evocative of the ones made by artists for the gallery’s 1944 exhibition “The Imagery of Chess.” Indeed, Levy liked to imply that where he failed as a businessman, he succeeded as a collector. But this seems too modest an account of the active devotion with which Levy practiced Surrealism during his entire life. “Pop art is a neo-Surrealism,” he concludes toward the end of the film.

    A rakishly elegant man in his youth, Levy in the film appears (and sounds) aged into a regal wreck of the figure described by the dealer James B. Meyers: “Julien Levy reminds me of Antonin Artaud, probably because I had seen a photograph of Julien with a shaved head, which Berenice Abbott had taken years before in Paris. He is intelligent and handsome with a profile rivaling that of the great actor John Barrymore.”[footnote=2] (Note Barrymore’s bad behavior in the memoir to come: he pees on a painting by Max Ernst.) The shaved head also deserves further comment. Levy claimed that he was following a folk wisdom to rejuvenate his scalp by rubbing bear grease into it. He also liked to say that Marcel Duchamp had put him up to it, by saying that shaved heads were quite the thing among the radical chic in Paris in 1928.

    Levy’s devotion to Surrealism was seconded only by what he called his “hero-worshipping” of Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz, whom he claimed as his godfathers in art. Both men were high priests of early Modernism. Prone to sermonizing and wearing capes, Stieglitz instructed Levy (along with the countless other acolytes who would sit at his feet) to be reverent, especially of photography—then a new medium of dubious aesthetic standing. More profanely, Duchamp inducted the young man into the living pleasures of bohemia when he invited him to tag along on a trip to Paris. On board ship, the two men speculated on the makings of a self-lubricating mechanical woman and discussed plans to shoot a film using Man Ray’s equipment. As told in the memoir, the film was never made, but the trip altered the course of Levy’s life. Both Stieglitz and Duchamp were also artists, dealers, publishers, curators, writers, and lovers of printed matter—all inclinations they passed along to Levy. Besides running a gallery for almost nineteen years, Levy wrote extensively (including a beautiful proto-history of Surrealism in 1936 and monographs on Eugéne Berman and Arshile Gorky)[footnote=3] and helped create exhibitions throughout his life (such as “The Disquieting Muse” at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston in 1958). All of his own shows were accompanied by brochures that announced not only the exhibition but a high sense of style as well. As an artist, Levy was purely an amateur, but he did make a few short Surrealist-style films in the 1930s, including a romp with Max Ernst set at Caresse Crosby’s mill retreat outside Paris, and exquisite portraits, full of motion, of Mina Loy shopping at the marché aux paces and of Lee Miller.

    Memoir of an Art Gallery proves Julien Levy to be an excellent raconteur as well. He knows the value of exaggeration and elision when it comes to crafting the better story. And this is precisely how the book is constructed—tales of luminaries like James Joyce and Giorgio de Chirico, and incendiary episodes such as “Duchamp’s Kiss” and “Walpurgisnacht Chez Tzara.” Each chapter becomes its own piece in a lapidary account that leaves, as all remembrances do, gaps and fissures. To till in some of these gaps, let’s add a little more family background. Julien Sampson Levy was born in New York on January 22, 1906, the oldest of three, with a brother Edgar (Ned) and sister Elizabeth. His mother, Isabelle Estelle Isaacs, had been orphaned as a child and was raised by an uncle, who would co-found the first English-language newspaper for Jews in America. For generations, the Isaacs had been a prominent Jewish family; Rabbi Samuel M. Isaacs read over Abraham Lincoln’s funeral cortege when it passed through New York. Levy’s father, Edgar, who was also raised in the city, had first studied art before becoming a successful lawyer and real estate entrepreneur. He and his partners, including Isabelle’s cousin Stanley Isaacs (later a borough president of Queens), were among the first to develop luxury apartment buildings along Park Avenue. Later in life, Edgar’s real estate empire would obviously aid his son’s desire to set up shop in Manhattan. Both parents, in fact, seem to have had much to do with Levy’s becoming an art dealer. And though Julien depicts his father as a philistine, the elder Levy collected art and dabbled in painting, and also seems to have had a genuine sympathy for his son’s interest in art. Furthermore, as much as Julien sides against his conventional parent and acts like a bohemian, he never truly rejected Edgar’s bourgeois tastes or values. He was, as most Surrealists were, an armchair radical.

    Julien’s mother doted on her oldest son. When as a boy he contracted rheumatic fever, the family moved to Scarsdale, where Levy attended the progressive Roger Ascham School before enrolling at Harvard University. Harvard, unlike the rest of the Ivy League, admitted Jews; Levy’s mother had attended Harvard’s sister college Radcliffe, where her ties later proved useful in helping her son find his way out of an English major and into the study of art. During the summer of Levy’s freshman year, his mother was run over and killed. According to the local newspaper’s obituaries, “Mrs. Levy, accompanied by a Mr. Jacobson, was walking toward Mamaroneck road when an automobile…bore down upon them, crashing into both. The automobile knocked Mrs. Levy down passing over her.” “As she lingered over her fatal injury, her one concern was the welfare of her husband and children,” another one wrote, “and her sole regret was that they would be deprived of such service and comfort as might have been able to render to them, had she been spared a few years more.” Still a third noted that “Mrs. Levy was a member of the Women’s Club and frequently seen in productions by the Wayside Players and the Fireside Players.”

    Buried in these shards are a woman’s creative aspirations. But what is most glaring is the fact that, however violently it rent through his life, Julien’s mother’s death reads largely as an absence from his memoirs. It’s the absence filled, or at least marked, by the intense attachment Levy formed for his mother-in-law, the poet and painter Mina Loy, whose own glamour and sense of personal drama were part of the mythology of the Paris scene during the 1920s.[footnote=4] The fact that she was the widow of one of Duchamp’s heroes, the Dada poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, who disappeared at sea, only heightened her mystique. More than a muse (and less than a mother), Loy is certainly a complicated figure in Levy’s early life as an art dealer and as a husband to her daughter Joella. During their marriage, Joella efficiently ran the day-to-day operations of the gallery in New York, while Loy (flightily) acted as Levy’s agent in Paris. Nurtured by both, Levy was indulged as a son, lover, boss, partner, and proud father of three sons—until Joella left him in 1937 due to his drinking and philandering. At the time of his death, Levy was reported to have been at work editing the voluminous correspondence he kept up with his mother-in-law throughout the rest of her life.[footnote=5]

    But the story is getting ahead of us. Back at Harvard, after his mother’s death, Levy continued on the path she had set for him, which notably included Paul Sachs’s king-making course for museum professionals, “Museum Work and Museum Problems.” There he met Alfred Barr, Jr., Philip Johnson, and Lincoln Kirstein, all to be affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art, and A. Everett (Chick) Austin, Jr., the future director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, among others. Of this institution-bound group, Levy distinguished himself by quitting a semester before graduation in order to try to get a job in the movies (he was besotted with Gloria Swanson). When running errands as a prop boy for Columbia Studios in New York failed to match his aspirations, however, he returned to his initial interest in art. Knocking around the galleries with his father, Levy met Duchamp, who was then acting as Brancusi’s agent. The two formed a friendship, and in February 1927 Levy embarked with Duchamp for Paris on that fateful trip. Returning six months later, he arrived home with his new bride Joella and, among other things, their wedding gift from Brancusi, The Newborn, a bronze head now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Levy’s Paris plunge instilled an ambition to open his own gallery in New York—an ambition that his father agreed to support, provided his son serve a proper apprenticeship. And so from 1928 to 1931, Levy worked as an assistant at the Weyhe Gallery, which specialized in rare books and prints, and where he had his first experience as a dealer, presenting photographs by Eugène Atget.

    On November 2, 1931, Julien Levy opened his own art gallery with tribute to Alfred Stieglitz and American photography. Following that, he went on to present a basically European avant-garde aesthetic and culture, thereby establishing himself as the middleman between artists and collectors, a pioneering purveyor of wares to the Modernist institutions being developed by his former classmates. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, all of the major museums interested in acquiring cutting-edge contemporary art bought from Levy. It is interesting, then, to take note of the prejudices that attach themselves to Levy’s mercantile enterprise. Writing for Vogue, one journalist described him in nearly Fagin-esque terms: “His keen and almost glittering eye, focused on the Parisian scene, may discover this decade’s Cézanne at any moment—a possibility that keeps him and his clients slightly feverish at all times.”[footnote=6] Written in 1938, this statement serves to remind us that the Germans were certainly not alone in their anti-Semitism. Levy, for his part, resented the secondary status accorded dealers within the echelons of the art world, which clearly benefited from their vision and risks.

    Then again, he himself did not always give credit where it was due. One of his gallery’s claims to fame is that in January 1932 it hosted “Surréalisme,” the first exhibition devoted to the movement in New York. This much is true, but it short-shrifts the importance of Chick Austin’s earlier “Newer Super-Realism,” held at the Wadsworth Atheneum, albeit to less public fanfare than Levy’s show, which won a huge New York audience and national press. The two shows ended up being collaborative in that they shared many (though not all) of the same works. But the fact remains that Austin’s show was its own initiative, and by opening on November 15, 1931, it could rightfully claim to be the first exhibition of Surrealism in America.[footnote=7]

    There are several other claims worth tempering. The first is small and involves Levy’s “discovery” of Joseph Cornell. It’s an excellent story about Cornell—and he probably was a most gray young man—stopping by the gallery to look at photographs, only to become, at the behest of the dealer, the first home-grown American Surrealist. What’s missing, however, is any indication of how deliberate and thorough Cornell was in his haunting of New York’s art world. Perhaps Levy, like most of Cornell’s contacts, had no idea how well-connected this most discrete of artists was. If anything, Cornell may have seen in the dealer a potential advocate for his own interests in photography and collage. Indeed, over time, Cornell worked hard to distance himself from his original identification with Surrealism, which he came to see as a form of black magic. (And he seems to have never forgiven Levy for scheduling all of his gallery exhibitions around Christmas time, the better to flog Cornell’s collage objects as toys for adults.)

    Then there’s Levy’s purported rescue of Eugène Atget’s great photographic archive of Paris. Levy slightly glorifies his early investment in and enthusiasm for the work, at the expense of Berenice Abbott’s essential role. An American photographer based in Paris, Abbott physically prevented this vast collection of plate-glass negatives and prints from being pitched in 1928 into the dustbin of history. Long after Levy’s interest had waned, she continued to make it part of her life’s work to care for and promote the archive, finally landing it a place in the Museum of Modern Art, where it exists as the Abbott-Levy Collection, in 1968. Still, to be fair, Abbott was no less proprietary against Levy’s claims, and Cornell’s championship by Levy was absolutely critical to launching his career, so these revisions to Levy’s memoirs have more to do with tone than with fact.

    And who knows if, as a fledgling gallerist, Julien Levy actually invented the gallery press release and the cocktail party opening? No such patents exist. But the dealer’s claims to priority seem worth defending. Levy’s gallery certainly made art openings, which had hitherto been insular affairs for collectors, into public events that anyone could attend simply out of interest in seeing something new. This is one of the greatest pleasures of Memoir of an Art Gallery: its snapshot depictions of a cultural scene in which, it seemed, anything could happen. Between the wars, not only was the art world much smaller, but with the economy in Depression there was considerably less at stake. There were opportunities for experimentation, and openness in general about what culture could be. Pay attention to all that Levy embarks on, either in hopes of making money or achieving fame. Among his freshest schemes were: Swiss Cheese cloth (his plan to print photographs onto utilitarian objects and materials);[footnote=8] the curved gallery wall (his second gallery location featured an undulating wall upon which works of art seemed to unfurl as viewers moved by them); the gallery caravan (in 1941, Levy took his stock on the road to San Francisco, then Los Angeles, in hopes of drumming up West Coast collectors); Salvador Dalí’s “Dream of Venus” (a Surrealist funhouse for the 1939 World’s Fair); and “The Carnival of Venice” (the gallery’s 1933 exhibition of photographs by Max Ewing of celebrities, socialites, and friends aping in front of a painted Venetian backdrop—Warholian photo-booth-ography thirty years before Pop!).

    On a much darker note, throughout the gallery’s history there are the undercurrents of accident, alcohol, guilt, and depression that appear twisted into this memoir’s silences. Most tragically, in recounting Arshile Gorky’s suicide, Levy isn’t altogether clear that it occurred only a month after he had injured them both in a car crash in which Gorky’s neck and painting arm were both broken. Levy recounts the episode like a cineaste’s dream, starting with chickens and brakes squawking, and ending with the closing of the Julien Levy Gallery in 1949, a year after Gorky’s death. Here, as in some other places, Levy’s account seems too pat, too remote, to convey the true shades of personal memory. It also downplays the downspin of his business, which had been growing steadily out of touch with the latest advancements in art. Uninterested in Abstract Expressionism, Levy stood by Surrealism, to be eclipsed by dealers who maintained more current visions: Pierre Matisse, Sidney Janis, and Betty Parsons among them. But such is the case with good story telling and storytellers—they invite further unraveling.

    First published in 1977, Memoir of an Art Gallery closes with Gorky’s last words, echoed here by Levy in tribute to the history of his gallery: “Good-bye my ‘loveds’.” However, the story hardly ends here. Levy’s 1944 marriage to his second wife, the sculptor Muriel Streeter, ended in divorce. On January 20, 1957, in Bridgewater, Levy married Jean Farley McLaughlin, to whom he dedicated this book, and who remains devoted to preserving her husband’s memory. Until he died in 1981, at the age of seventy-five, Levy remained an engaged emissary of Surrealism. In his later years, he cultivated a Stieglitz-like habit of wearing capes. No doubt he cut a daunting silhouette on his regular visits to New York, where he kept up with contemporary art (he saw Surrealism in the work of artists as diverse as Joseph Beuys and Tom Wesselman) and collaborated with his fellow dealers (including Richard Feigen and Leo Castelli) to show and sell work from his collection. In the late 1970s, Levy was introduced to curator David Travis of the Art Institute of Chicago. Apparently, when the gallery closed Levy had a lot of leftover photography inventory, notably hundreds of works by Jacques-André Boiffard, Lee Miller, Robert Parry, Man Ray, Maurice Tabard, and others. Forty years later, these prints emerged from storage to constitute a virtual missing history—occluded from both photography and Modernism—of Surrealist photography. During Levy’s lifetime, a large number of works were acquired by the AIC to form the Julien Levy Collection. More recently, in 2001, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired through gifts by Levy’s widow and Lynne and Harold Honickman all of the remaining photographs from Levy’s estate to establish the Julien Levy Collection of Photographs.

    What became of other effects of the gallery’s history? Key elements found their way to private and public collections: Cornell’s L’Egypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode cours élémentaire d’histoire naturelle to the Robert Lehrman Collection, Washington, D.C.; Max Ernst’s Vox Angelica to the Daniel Filpacchi Collection, Paris; Dalí’s Persistence of Memory to The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Giacometti’s On ne joue plus to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Gorky’s New Hope Road to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Trotsky to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Pavel Tchelitchew’s Phenomenon to the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Dorothea Tanning’s Guardian Angels to the New Orleans Museum of Art, and so forth out into the world.[footnote=9]

    And what of the papers? In compiling his memoirs, Levy gathered his archives around him, including brochures, reviews, and other related ephemera, to work in a small writing studio on his Connecticut property. It’s unclear how the fire began, but much of the material was destroyed either by flames or water. Whatever could be swept up was saved in a storage area attached to the house, and considered basically inaccessible due to its poor condition. This is not to say that all was lost, and indeed, recent efforts to process what does remain have turned up some astounding stuff. By way of example, let me end with my own story. Last year, I was working on a book about Salvador Dalí’s “Dream of Venus” pavilion, a story in which Levy naturally plays a leading role. I had all but completed my research when the treasures started emerging from the nooks and crannies of Jean and Julien’s house. They included such things as a gramophone record called Dream of Venus (labeled as a recitation by actress Ruth Ford and an accompanying chorus for the World’s Fair), a typed manuscript for the same (“Behold! I am Venus! I am the most beautiful woman in the world!”), a list of rejected names for the concession (“Dalí Trance Forms” and “Dalí’s Wet Dreams” among the lamest), and, most astonishingly, photographs of a strange studio session that involved dressing live models in dead seafood for an unrealized photo-mural. And it didn’t all offer itself at once, but as if summoned piece-by-piece, just in time to fuel the narrative I was in the process of constructing.

    You might call this surreal and leave it at that: Julien himself evidently cherished such coincidences. The real point is that much remains to be known and written about Julien Levy, about his life, his work, his influence as an important American art dealer, and his far-reaching, often arcane interests. His memoirs only begin to tell the tales.

     

  • “Mr Expanding Universe: Isamu Noguchi’s Affiliations across the New York Art World(s) of the 1930s” Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design, co-author Donna Ghelerter. Germany: Vitra Design Museum, 2002, pp. 66-106.

    Mr Expanding Universe: Isamu Noguchi’s Affiliations across the New York Art World(s) of the 1930s

     

    Isamu Noguchi’s reputation as a master modernist lies largely (and squarely) on his achievements as a sculptor who created abstractions in stone and wood during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Noguchi is also well known for having designed emblematic objects of the twentieth-century decorative arts. Starting in the late 1920s, when Noguchi began his career, his ideas of the artist’s role exceeded the prescribed parameters. This exhibition validates Noguchi as a visionary. Determined to shape every aspect of life, from dishware to public parks. It also raises the question: where does this encompassing perspective originate in the development of his art? The answers to this can be found in a period that Noguchi himself later reflected upon as containing the “uncertainties of the 1930s.”[footnote=1]

    Returning to New York at the age of 25, having just left Paris and his apprenticeship with Constantin Brancusi, Noguchi settled himself into the New York art world. “It became self-evident to me that in so-called abstraction lay the expression of the age and that I was especially fitted to be one of its prophets.”[footnote=2] Noguchi’s prophesies of the 1930s take the form of Brancusi-inspired pieces on marble bases; large drawings using traditional Chinese brushwork; an architectural mural influenced by Mexican socialist artists; stage sets for dance, and proposals for public works. His materials were stone, wood, cement, bronze, iron, zinc, stainless steel, terracotta, magnesite, marble, sheet metal and plaster. He was exhibiting regularly and garnering critical acclaim. Despite the attention, the reaction to Noguchi’s far-reaching approach to sculpture was uneven.

    Of course the 1930s were a period of uncertainty not only for Noguchi but for the world at large. An attempt was made to lessen the effects of the Depression on artists’ lives with the creation in 1933 of the PWAP (Public Works of Art Projects), later known at the WPA (Works Progress Administration). This government-sponsored relief project for artists provided them with a regular salary in exchange for making works to be located all over America. While numerous artists benefited from the programme, Noguchi’s involvement was unsuccessful. His multifaceted approach was ill-suited for creating art that had to conform to governmental guidelines. He fell through the national safety net at a time when art galleried were also unable to provide artists with their conventional means of support. Noguchi was in need of devising his own source of income. To solve his economic problems, he began sculpting portrait heads: “There was nothing to do but make heads. It was a matter of eating, and this was the only way I knew of making money.”[footnote=3]

    Noguchi made his first portrait head in 1925, but it was upon his return to New York in 1929 that he sculpted commissioned portraits. Throughout the 1930s, the portraits appear to have constituted his primary, or at least most reliable, source of income. Almost life-size, these heads present various modes of representation. While such portraits were relatively conventional for a sculptor drawn to the abstract, they none the less allowed Noguchi a chance to experiment with forms and materials. As one contemporary reviewer observed: “His portraits, which are invariably distinctive of his personality and style, are also likenesses and achieve an air of sophisticated modernism. This is arrived at … by emphasizing the sitters’ salient characteristics and by using such materials as seem symbolic or suggestive of their personality.”[footnote=4] Among the many personalities who sat for Noguchi were Clare Boothe Luce, then working for Vogue and Vanity Fair before she became a playwright and politician; Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco; mime Agna Enters; waitress Ruth Parks, composer George Gershwin; art dealer J.B. Neumann; the Museum of Modern Art’s first president A. Conger Goodyear; architect Ely Jacques Kahn; Hollywood actress Ginger Rogers, and stage actress Helena Gahagan Douglas, once hailed as “ten of the twelve most beautiful women in America” and later a member of the United States Congress.[footnote=5] This body of work was treated in full by the exhibition Isamu Noguchi, Portrait Sculpture, held at the National Portrait Gallery in 1989. In the invaluable catalogue, curator Nancy Grove provides an art history of the portraits and profiles of their subjects. We have selected from these fascinating figures a group that intersected in Noguchi’s life within an expanded environment of 1930s New York culture. There one finds the points of origin for Noguchi’s creative potential. In this world of artists, dancers, architects, gallery owners fashion designers, we start with Julien Levy, the pre-eminent dealer for advanced contemporary art.

    A child of privilege, Julien Levy (1906-81) was part of the generation known as the Harvard Moderns, who attended college together before embarking on careers that would essentially institutionalize Modernism in America.[footnote=6] Just two years older, Noguchi’s background was worlds away from Levy’s. Growing up estranged from his father, the renowned poet Yone Noguchi, Isamu lived with his American mother in Japan until he was sent to America at the age of fourteen. He cobbled together an education, studying medicine before enrolling at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in New York. Despite these differences, Noguchi’s and Levy’s lives intertwined to a remarkable degree. Both went to Paris in 1927, where they met the writer Robert McAlmon and were inducted into the same circles. McAlmon allegedly introduced Levy to his wife Joella Lloyd, daughter of the poet Mina Loy, whose friend Constantin Brancusi presented the newly-weds with Le Nouveau Né, a bronze sculpture head of an infant.[footnote=7] It was in the artist’s studio that Levy recalls meeting Noguchi: “Brancusi wears a smock and has a white beard and a white dog, and any stranger is shortly rendered indistinguishable by the white dust that falls over him. Noguchi was happy to work there, polishing and cutting stones and listening to Brancusi talk, learning about materials and about form.”[footnote=8] (The lives of Levy and Noguchi share some racier episodes; in his autobiography, Levy recounts a tour he conducted at the behest of Clare Boothe Luce, with Noguchi in tow, of the Paris brothel Le Sphinx.[footnote=9] Both men had affairs with Frida Kahlo – Levy a brief dalliance in New York, Noguchi a love affair that raged in Mexico until it outraged Kahlo’s husband, the muralist Diego Rivera.)

    Levy opened his art gallery in 1931 to promote experimental film and European photography. By 1932, the gallery had presented the first exhibition of Surrealism in New York, codified the ritual of the opening night cocktail party, and become known as the place to see something new. There were premiere exhibitions of photographs by Henri Cartier Bresson and Man Ray; collage films and objects by Joseph Cornell; “snapshots of the mind”, as Salvador Dalí called his early paintings; Alexander Calder’s mobiles; modern day ex-votos by Frida Kahlo; Surrealist paintings by René Magritte; proto-Abstract Expressionist works by Arshile Gorky; plans and models for fantasy architecture by Emilio Terry, even cartoon cels by Walt Disney. This diverse programme was unusually brilliant in its vision, but not in its eclectic embrace. Levy’s gallery was a microcosm of the art world of its day, an art world in which creative people working in all media mingled freely, irrespective of the boundaries that have come to separate them since. An exhibition of paintings by the Neo-Romantic Eugene Berman was illuminated with lamps by the industrial designer Russel Wright. Artists’ sets and costumes for the newly founded American Balley Theater were shown accompanied by the music that was scored for them, including one piece by the writer/composer Paul Bowles. As a phenomenon of the 1930s. this expansive approach to culture suited the restrictive economic conditions. With little money to go around, artists could afford to let their egos relax, pool their efforts, and work as many angles as possible.

    The entrepreneurial Levy had several ploys to earn income for the photographers he represented, including brokering portrait commissions. “It was one of my many ventures – I just tried to hit photography from as many angles as I could think of. Including applied photography. I tried some photographic textiles…”[footnote=10] The portrait venture was well in keeping with the means by which many of Levy’s artists had already reconciled their Modernist ambitions to the exigencies of earning a living. The expatriate Man Ray had a handsome income throughout the 1920s and 1930s as a fashion and portrait photographer. He applied the same compositions and radical techniques – the photogram, solarisation and double exposure – that characterised his most purely experimental works. The sculptor Alexander Calder drew portraits in wire, often on commission. Fleshed out by shadow and space, these directly anticipate the artist’s most important works, the kinetic sculptures that Marcel Duchamp dubbed “mobiles”.[footnote=3] As with Noguchi, the artistic conventions – and, when the work was a commission, the economic incentive – of making portraiture supported and advanced these artists’ respective innovations. Also like Noguchi, their bodies of work portray the larger contexts of the art world and society in which these makers moved.

    Levy showed another Modernist-cum-portraitist, whose life and work overlapped with Noguchi’s, the photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). Man Ray’s assistant in Paris, Abbott had been well trained. When she left him, she opened a rival portrait studio. It was in Paris that Abbott met Noguchi, though he did not sculpt her head until 1929, when they were both back in New York.[footnote=12] Cast in bronze, light nervously pattering over its surface, Abbott’s portrait shows her boyishly bobbed hair massed to a point on her forehead and focuses her being into a pair of eyes that view the world wide open. Documenting the many aspects of the city – its buildings, people and strange empty spaces – is the crux of Abbott’s art, as exemplified by her celebrated work, Changing New York, the urban portrait she created as an employee of the WPA. As a financial sideline, she took pictures of other artists’ works and of gallery installations.[footnote=13] Abbott’s photograph of Noguchi’s 1934 sculpture Death (Lynched Figure) is a complete visual document: it records the image and conveys its impact. From the angle and lighting of this shot, one immediately appreciates the contemporary critic’s disturbed reaction: “If there is anything to make a white man feel squirmy about his color, he has it in this gnarled chromium victim jigging under the wind-swayed rope.”[footnote=14]

    The unnamed critic writing about Noguchi’s 1935 exhibition at the Marie Harriman gallery for the left-leaning journal Parnassus was exceptionally full of praise for this work when it was shown alongside the admirable portrait heads, three models for the public sculptures and some brush drawings. He or she concluded: “But it is when he goes in for sociological ideas that Noguchi seems the freest.” According to the artist, Death was made after a photograph he saw reproduced in the International Labor Defense, and intended to be shown alongside Birth, a work he modeled from life, after watching a woman at Bellevue Hospital endure the agonies of labor.[footnote=15] Objecting to the depiction, Harriman excised this white marble sculpture from the installation, though she permitted Noguchi to show the lynched man. The exhibition was extensively reviewed and, unlike the Parnassus writer, most critics agreed that Noguchi should stick with portraiture. Arch-intellect Henry McBride put it most nastily: he deemed Death “just a little Japanese mistake”. These words were still ringing when, in his 1968 autobiography, Noguchi declared his conviction to seek acceptance for his work outside the conventional art world. “That settled it!” he wrote, after quoting McBride’s review at length, “I determined to have no further truck with either galleries or critics.”[footnote=16]

    Julien Levy had not yet opened his art gallery in 1929 when Noguchi sculpted his head in bronze. He never gave Noguchi a solo show, even though he apparently respected his work; perhaps he found his relationships with other dealers too polygamous. Noguchi’s habit of showing around New York certainly raised eyebrows in the press. Following simultaneous exhibitions at the John Becker and Demotte galleries, a review of Noguchi’s December 1932 show at the Reinhardt Galleries begins: “As if two exhibitions in a single season were not enough to satisfy any artist, Isamu Noguchi displays yet another segment of his talents before the turn of the year.” The reviewer goes on to note “the strange and floating Miss Expanding Universe that has been dangling conspicuously in Julien Levy’s front window this winter.”[footnote=17] The following month, Julien Levy’s beautifully illustrated six-page monographic essay on Noguchi’s work, the first ever published, appeared as the cover story in Creative Art. In it, Levy attributes a “bi-polarity” to Noguchi’s work: “He is always attempting a nice balance between the abstract and the concrete, the relating of fact to meaning, while specifically he exercises a vigorous interpretation of oriental and western aims.”[footnote=18] Levy accounts for Noguchi’s catholic tastes and diverse talents as a search for a singular style. He strongly encourages the artist to follow in the direction of the portrait heads, which he applauds for “applying the formal elements of sculpture to enhance the psychological implications of a portrait” to such a successful degree that “if the portraits were featureless, there should still remain a sort of impression of the subject.”[footnote=19] By contrast, he warns Noguchi against his proclivity for the purely abstract; Levy called the latest large-scale figures in aluminum, including Miss Expanding Universe, “only half-realized, amorphous”. (Here one can detect why Levy hesitated to represent Noguchi fully at his gallery.) The essay concludes: “At first glance, Noguchi appears to have lost connection with the logical continuity of his past progress, but one cannot predict toward what end this tangent may lead.”[footnote=20]

    The Noguchi feature had repercussions over several issues. In March, Creative Art ran a notice to identify the photographer whose pictures “aroused so much favorable comment” as F. S. Lincoln, Massachusetts Institute of Technology=trained biologist and mechanical engineer. His talents as an art photographer were discovered by Buckminster Fuller, when Lincoln, seeing one of his exhibits, offered to make photographs of it as speculation in publicity.[footnote=21] In May a heated round of lengthy letters between Robert Josephy, a designer, and Julien Levy was published. Josephy admonished Levy for his use of the term “style” and admired Noguchi’s attempts to be true to himself: “and if at twenty-eight he has not yet done his masterpieces, there is still no need for him to embrace any such rationalization of artistic sterility.”[footnote=22] Levy defended his position. Josephy rebutted. Levy let his case rest. But the essay and exchange marked Isamu Noguchi as a controversial Modernist, even within the informed art press.

    As Levy confided after seeing Noguchi’s ceramic vases: “one sometimes wishes [Noguchi] would forego some of his more ambitious projects and give us more of these comparative ‘trifles.’”[footnote=23] Levy’s final presentation of Noguchi’s work is perhaps the most significant – though the objects themselves might be considered mere “trifles”. The occasion was The Imagery of Chess, a group show held in 1944 that featured artist-designed chess tables and chess sets. The announcement card was by Dadaist Marcel Duchamp who, as one reviewer described, had “stopped painting when he took up chess and is now one of the leading spirits in the ‘art applied to chess’ movement.”[footnote=24] During the show, Duchamp refereed the event that matched the world champions of blindfolded chess in simultaneous games against players who included the artist Max Ernst and The Museum of Modern Art Director, Alfred Barr, Jr. The sets were more-or-less functional – the Surrealists André Breton and Nicholas Calas submitted a board covered with drinking glasses filled with red and white wine, permitting captors to drink the sweet taste of victory, literally. More pragmatic, Noguchi’s contribution was singled out in Newsweek for being functional and well in keeping with his work as a whole: “The sculptor Noguchi, who is a modernist but no surrealist and has designed playgrounds as well as the panel over the door in Rockefeller Center, created the most beautiful piece in the show – a black plywood chess table of curved design with quarter-size pieces of inlaid plastic to indicate alternate play squares. This table, which would also be nice for tea, can be raised or lowered and the top opens out revealing a pocket to hold the chessmen. Noguchi’s men are angular abstractions of red and green plastic (acetate).”[footnote=25]

    Following the reviewer’s advice, the table went into commercial production: from 1947 to 1949 it was manufactured by Herman Miller. One promotional picture shows it against a bamboo backdrop set for cocktails with a Japanese-inspired arrangement and a sake bottle. Another shows it being used as a sewing table, with skeins of yarn, buttons and pins displayed in the partially opened pockets. The plastic chessmen were not manufactured.

    By this mid-century point, Noguchi was no longer interested in making portrait heads. He had developed his work along lines in which figurative representation, as a form of naturalism, was irrelevant. His decorative arts sensibility had become assimilated into a body of work that included affordable, industrially produced furniture. These provided him with a source of income in true with the vision of his mature art.

    During the 1930s, Noguchi considered his most successful resolution regarding the problems of space and sculpture – problems that essentially had to do with issues of interaction and movement – to be his theatre sets, especially the 21 sets he produced for the modern dancer, Martha Graham (1894-1991). Prior to 1935 Graham had not used sets; Noguchi’s design for Frontier was the first ever to appear in her work. Their collaborations continued until 1966. Noguchi and Graham met in the late 1920s when his mother made costumes; his sister would later dance with the company. In 1929, Noguchi made two portrait heads of Graham. The first she rejected, although the artist always preferred it over the second version.[footnote=26]

    Another portrait subject from the New York world of dance offers an opportunity to explore issues of Noguchi’s identity as they came to bear on the reception of his work during the 1930s and informed one of the most extreme passages in his career. Michio Ito (1892-1967) was a Japanese modern dancer who had trained in Germany. He lived in London, where he starred in At the Hawk’s Well, a play by William Butler Yeats styled after classical Japanese Noh drama. Ito himself was deeply inspired by Egyptian art; his unique dance style was based on definite, almost frieze-like motions. He kept his face still, his features frozen, while he performed. Former student Helen Caldwell recounted: “It was his desire, he said, to bring together East and West in a style of his own. Like a sculptor he worked over every gesture until it meant what he would have it mean. ‘If you cry “Stop!”’ he explained, ‘in any place in my dance, you will find that it is a pose that means something.’”[footnote=27] No wonder Noguchi responded as he did: unlike any of the other heads, Noguchi’s depiction of Michio Ito takes the form of a bronze mask.

    Noguchi sculpted the bronze portrait around the time he had his first foray into theatre, making papier-mâché masks for Ito’s 1926 production of At the Hawk’s Well. Ito had moved to New York in 1916, where he established himself as a leading figure in dance: Agna Enter danced in his Pinwheel Revue in 1922; Martha Graham in his Garden of Kama in 1923. When he moved to Los Angeles in 1929, he played to packed audiences. In 1930, “Michio Ito and his ballet were given a veritable ovation by a crowd that overflowed the [Hollywood] Bowl and filled every standing space on the hillside”.[footnote=28] Ito’s popularity did not prevent him from being interned, along with the rest of the Japanese living on the West Coast, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. He returned to Tokyo in 1942.

    As a Japanese-American, Noguchi’s art was never beyond being discussed on racial grounds. Virtually every early review, including Levy’s essay, takes on the artist’s identity as a main subject and/or impetus for his work. Noguchi himself was keenly interested in Asian art and traditions, and cultivated Eastern principles in his work. In 1930, he travelled to China, where he studied brush drawing for eight months; in 1931 he spent seven months in Japan, attempting to renew his relationship with his father, while studying haniwa and Zen gardens and working in ceramics. (He was no doubt attracted to Michio Ito’s dance because of its explicit references to Kabuki and Noh theatre, the latter traditionally performed in mask.) All of these experiences impacted directly on his work. What is objectionable, however, is how broadly Noguchi’s interpreters read his work through his Asian background as opposed to the language of the forms themselves. Attributing the success of a portrait to an artist’s “racial kinship” with his Japanese model is simply racist.[footnote=29] The fact that Noguchi was part-American only increased speculation. A critic wrote of the artist having “that uncanny intuitive quality and delicacy of perception that sometimes seems to come with a mingling of racial strains”.[footnote=30] Again, a quotation from Henry McBride exemplifies the xenophobia that seemed to be part of America’s everyday discourse. Not sure what to make of a talent that presents itself in two exhibitions at once, McBride theorises: “Being essentially Eastern, [Noguchi] may eventually arrive at profundity through this virtuosity of his. We must give him the benefit of that surmise. But if he were Western, on the contrary, we should agree that he could never surmount so much cleverness to arrive at sincerity.”[footnote=31]

    Noguchi spent seven months in 1942 in an internment camp located on an Indian reservation in Poston Arizona. He says that he went to the camp voluntarily, though one wonders why anyone would willingly forfeit his freedom to live under detention. Perhaps he was determined to make the best of what he saw as an inevitable situation. Having been for so many years the subject of press comments that openly alienated him, Noguchi would have been keenly aware of the vulnerability of his status. When the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on 7 December 1941, Noguchi was staying in Hollywood, having driven out west with Arshile Gorky that summer. He seems to have been actively looking for some kind of patriotic service to perform. In a letter dated 21 October 1941, for example, Clare Boothe Luce advises him to get in touch with a friend in Washington, D.C., who is “looking for someone who could make shortwave broadcasts in Japanese. It seemed to me (knowing where you stood about the horrible war) that you were the person.”[footnote=32] When this and other prospects failed to materialise, Noguchi decided to go to Poston with the intention of improvising living conditions in the camp. His plans included gardens, recreation areas, even a cemetery.
    He had several unrealised public proposals from the 1930s to draw on. From 1933 alone, there was the proto land-work, Monument to the Plow, a pyramid of earth, one mile wide at its base, to be located in Idaho at the geographic centre of the United States, and Play Mountain, the size of a New York city block, a sculpture landscape for sledding, water sliding, and climbing. More recently, on a trip to Hawaii in 1939 to specify a sculpture project for the office lobby of a pineapple company, Noguchi had also, at the behest of the Honolulu parks commissioner, come up with models for playground equipment. Neither of the Hawaiian projects were realised, and nor was Noguchi’s plan for Poston – apparently life in an internment camp was not a subject for improvement.

    Noguchi’s mail from the seven months he spent at the camp is eerily studio business as usual.[footnote=30] There is an order for a piece of pink marble for the portrait Ginger Rogers had commissioned while he was in California. The collector Edward James responds to a request from Noguchi who was hoping to include his portrait head of James in in a forthcoming exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. James had been chasing the apple blossom season up the coast of California and apologises for not getting the letter in time, but he advises Noguchi to obtain photographs of the portrait from Man Ray and send them to a curator at The Museum of Modern Art who, James feels sure, will want to include it in a proposed exhibition. There is a correspondence regarding an exhibition in Cambridge, Massachusetts, organised by the Quakers, of work by Japanese artists in internment camps; the writer looks forward to receiving Noguchi’s contribution.

    When Noguchi first showed his proposals for public works of art in 1935, they were accompanied by his statement that “sculpture can be a vital force in man’s daily life if projected into communal usefulness”.[footnote=34] As Poston, after it became clear that he was not going to be given the opportunity to make such a sculpture, he says he simply took a leave of absence from the camp one day and never returned. Back in New York, his proposal for a war monument stands as a twisted counterpart to a playground model he made just prior to his detention. Contoured Playground of 1941 is an optimistic answer to the city’s call for equipment with no dangerous edges. This Tortured Earth of 1943 is also a contoured landscape, this time sculpted by bombs and other equipment of war. As an image of psychic landscape it is a bleak view. In the light of this, the public monuments and parks that Noguchi did go on to realise appear all the more impressive, their mission of communal usefulness so long in waiting.

    In the course of the development of Noguchi’s political consciousness, he crossed paths with American fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes (1903-71). Innovative and rebellious, Hawes changed her course in life many times, from couturier to social activist. Noguchi sculpted a portrait head of her in the early 1930s when she was an observant young woman intent on changing the system.[footnote=35] Hawes worked determinedly to reroute the origin of styles worn by Americans, who typically favoured Paris for their views on fashion. Her efforts paralleled those of other Modernists who were making New York the new centre of international culture. Today Elizabeth Hawes is remembered primarily by historians who become intrigued with her clothes, the people who wore them and the fascinating life their creator led until she died, destitute, at the Chelsea Hotel.[footnote=36]

    In 1928, Elizabeth Hawes, aged 25, established her first couture clothing business in New York City. It was a time when the mere concept of American fashion was untenable to most participants in this exclusive world. While Hawes focused on fashion in the 1930s, it was always from a broad spectrum encompassing many aspects of the arts as well as the social issues of her day. The name Hawes gave to the clothes in each new collection reflect her interests, concerns and sense of humour: “Prosperity is Just Around the Corner” afternoon dress (1933); “Diego Rivera” crepe skirt and chenille blouse (1933); “Alimony” evening dress (1937); and “Beautiful Soup” tea gown (1938). That Hawes seemed so unconventional to the conservative fashion industry is no surprise, nor is the fact that her ideas found appeal with many artists of the period who became her friends, lovers and collaborators.

    The wave of young talent going to Paris in the 1920s included both Noguchi and Hawes. Arriving in 1925, Hawes held a variety of jobs in fashion, including reporting back to the United States on the latest Parisian styles. For the newly founded New Yorker magazine she contributed communiqués under the pen name Parisite. In 1928, with the help of Mainbocher, then the Paris editor of Vogue, Hawes designed clothes at the atelier of Nicole Groult, Paul Poiret’s sister. Following Noguchi’s arrival in Paris in 1927, he became an apprentice in the studio of Constantin Brancusi by way of an introduction from the writer Robert McAlmon. For both, working in Paris was an interlude. In 1929 the Guggenheim Fellowship that had financed Noguchi’s travels came to an end, and he had to return to New York. For Hawes it was a well thought-out decision to establish herself in New York as one of the first American couturiers.

    The showroom she created in 1930 was fresh and lively. Utilising the talents of friends including Alexander Calder,[footnote=38] Noguchi and the architect Willy Muschenheim, she created an interior for Hawes, Inc. that was unlike any other clothing establishment in New York City at that time. Calder contributed a wire fish bowl and a reclining chair; there was a scroll by Noguchi, and aluminum tables by Robert Josephy (who championed Noguchi to the readers of Creative Art). Wire soda-fountain chairs and re-upholstered second-hand furniture completed the look. The atmosphere at Hawes, Inc. was salon-like, with a deliberate overlapping of New York circles. For the socialites, actresses and other women of means who could afford to buy Hawes’s custom-made clothing (or have their heads sculpted by Noguchi), viewing her dresses in this unexpected environment was certainly a novelty and in marked contrast to the classic luxury of Parisian couture houses.[footnote=39]

    What made Hawes’s establishment even more unconventional were the events that she staged when showing each new collection: “Usually we break the show in the middle with some sort of oddity.”[footnote=40] There was a performance of Calder’s Circus (perhaps Noguchi assisted Calder with the gramophone, as he did on occasion). In 1933 a short film, The Panther Woman of the Needle Trades, was shown. Directed by photographer Ralph Steiner,[footnote=41] the film featured Elizabeth Hawes dramatising the development of her creative life. In 1937, the divertissement was a riotous showing of men’s fashions by Hawes. These clothes, a significant leap from then current styles, tested the sartorial limits of her male friends who modeled them. One, an advertising salesman, wore “sailor pants, laced in back, made of light weight, fine wale corduroy, and a sweat shirt of striped upholstery linen.”[footnote=42]

    Hawes was always eager to travel, and in 1935 she planned a trip: “Like many another questing soul, I wanted to go to the Soviet Union.”[footnote=43] Curious about socialism and wanting to see behind the scenes, Hawes arranged for a showing of her clothes at the Soviet Dress Trust: “I was fascinated with looking at a bit of the beginning of something and they were fascinated with looking at my most elaborate and capitalistic clothes.”[footnote=44] Five years later, following the closing of Hawes, Inc. in 1940, Hawes’s political beliefs become enmeshed with her work. Subsequent jobs included reporting for the leftist magazine PM, grinding screws at an aeronautical plant, and writing for the Detroit Free Press and the United Auto Workers. In 1936, Noguchi, too, desired to see another way of life, particularly a place where artists worked with more freedom than he felt was available to him in New York City. He left for Mexico and spent eight months executing a mural, History Mexico, at the Abelardo Rodriguez Market in Mexico City. Noguchi’s interests in the social and political implications of art led to the rejection of many of his projects by both critics and bureaucrats. One project that was realised was a plaque for the Associated Press building at the Rockefeller Center, New York City. Rendered in a social realist style, the cast stainless steel relief depicts a photographer, a journalist and phone, wirephoto and teletype operators as tireless workers.
    The wooden portrait of Eleanor Lambert (b. 1903), made by Noguchi in 1932, sits today in the foyer of her New York apartment.[footnote=45] Eleanor Lambert is well known for her work as a publicist in the fashion industry, which she began to concentrate on in the 1940s after an earlier period spent handling publicity for art galleries. Her gallery clients, whom she charged $10 per week, included the Wildenstein, Knoedler and Perls galleries, as well as the Marie Sterner Gallery which in 1930 put on the first exhibition of Noguchi’s portrait heads. For an additional fee, Lambert also offered to promote the individual artists. Sympathetic to the financial constraints, she sometimes worked for payment in kind, trading her services for their art. Noguchi was among those who benefited from Lambert’s professional talents and connections for little or no fee; his portrait of her, however, was a commission for which she paid him $150. Admiring the talents of this curly-haired and determined artist, as Lambert today remembers Noguchi in the 1930s, she recommended him to friends – in this way, he came to sculpt Clare Boothe Luce, Suzanne Ziegler and others.

    For Noguchi to have a publicist working on his behalf in the early years of his career provided alternative means of visibility. During this period he had obtained recognition from New York art galleries, but he found the context limiting. As publicist for the newly founded Whitney Museum of American Art, Lambert was involved with the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which was headed by the museum’s director Juliana Force. For Noguchi the government programme supplied financial support and allowed him to pursue his views of sculpture as an element of society. Lambert recalls her participation in working with Force to help Noguchi obtain a PWAP grant.[footnote=46] But in exchange Noguchi was unwilling to produce free-standing sculptures, his ideas being far more inspired and monumental. He proposed Play Mountain to be realised as a playground in New York City. But this, and other ideas such as a “ground sculpture covering the entire triangle in front of Newark Airport, to be seen from the air”, were all rejected.[footnote=47] To Noguchi this denied opportunity was an affront that stayed with him throughout his life. He stated decades later: “It was true that I could make some money doing heads even then at the depth of the Depression, but it was not what I wanted to do.”[footnote=48]

    While as an artist Noguchi was in some conflict about portrait sculpture, he did acknowledge that it was “A very good way of getting to know people. Thus it was that I made long-lasting friendships, in particular with Martha Graham and Buckminster Fuller.”[footnote=49] Noguchi and Fuller (1895-1983) met in 1929 at Romany Marie’s, a bohemian café in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Fuller considered Noguchi’s portrait of him, done that same year, as a cohesive act: “he said, could he make a head of me? and I said I’d be glad to have him do it. So posing for him day after day gave us a chance to build up our friendship that went on and on from there.”[footnote=50] Both Noguchi and Fuller were beginning to pursue their visionary ideals, and their immediate friendship influenced events in the early 1930s.

    The chrome-plated bronze portrait of Fuller, made at Noguchi’s studio, which was painted entirely silver at Fuller’s persuasion,[footnote=51] was one of fifteen heads exhibited at the Marie Sterner Gallery in February 1930. Noguchi employed a range of materials and styles. The reflective planar head surface of Fuller’s head strikingly represents this forward-thinking architect of geometric forms. Or, as Fuller describes it: “Completely reflective surfaces provided a fundamental invisibility of the surface.”[footnote=52] It was just prior to their meeting that Fuller had invented his Dymaxion House. A model of the hexagonal house, constructed around a central mast, had been shown in Chicago, at Marshall Field’s House of the Future, show in 1929. In 1930, Fuller’s energies were engaged in promoting the Dymaxion House to architects, possible sponsors, and all those who would listen to his concepts of the future.

    Following the exhibition at the Marie Sterner Gallery, Noguchi and Fuller took to the road with Noguchi’s sculptures and the model of the Dymaxion House packed in the back of Fuller’s station wagon. Their first destination was Cambridge, Massachusetts. For an exhibition at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. The Society was founded in 1929 by some of Julien Levy’s fellow Harvard Moderns Edward Warbug, John Walker III and Lincoln Kirstein (whose portrait Noguchi did in bronze). Its innovative approach to exhibiting art included presentations of architectural and industrial design such as Fuller’s Dymaxion House, along with modern paintings and sculpture. The portrait heads by Noguchi, including those of Martha Graham, George Gershwin and Fuller, were unconventionally shown, placed on pedestals made of galvanized furnace pipe.

    For the Society’s exhibition, the model of the Dymaxion House was placed in the courtyard of the Fogg Art Museum. Presumably Fuller’s architectural drawings were also exhibited. These plans contain handwritten, syncopated poetic descriptions of the house’s remarkable features including “pneumatic beds inflating to desired firmness”, “hexagonal pneumatic divan”, “bakelite floor” and a “dish washing machine which washes dried & returns dishes to shelves”.[footnote=43] Fuller also gave a lecture, one of many he was delivering at this time to explain his inventions. Afterwards Noguchi and Fuller drove to Chicago, where a similar exhibition was held at the Arts Club of Chicago.

    Noguchi returned briefly to New York before sailing in April 1930 to Paris for an extended trip in Europe and Asia. Fuller sent him a telegram from Chicago, intended to reach him aboard the Aquitania before it sailed from New York on 16 April. This Buckminster Fuller monologue on their friendship must have befuddled the Western Union operator to whom it was relayed. It concludes with the following statement: “IDEAL ART WHICH IS PROGRESSIVE INDIVIDUAL RADIONIC SYNCHRONIZATION OF TIME WITH ETERNAL NOW THROUGH REVELATIONS NONWARPABLE TRIANGE.” Fuller was dismayed to find out that his telegram, which he had been “at some pains to compose, as complete summary of our philosophic conversation”,[footnote=54] did not reach Noguchi before he sailed.

    Their “philosophic conversation” continued when Noguchi returned to New York: in 1932. While he was away, Fuller had taken over a magazine called T-Square. He immediately changed the name to Shelter, eliminated all advertising, and announced that issues would come out when “I had something I felt deeply in need to saying”.[footnote=55] Shelter, published from 1930 to 1932, was an opportunity for Fuller to incorporate the works, ideas and philosophies of friends and colleagues such as Noguchi, as well as to amass support for his own architectural plans. Back in New York, the first sculpture Noguchi made was Miss Expanding Universe. Fuller supplied its title and placed the piece on the cover of the November 1932 issue, where it hovers in a stunning photograph by F.S. Lincoln.

    The ideological impact of Shelter is evident upon looking at this issue. The magazine claiming to be “A Correlating Medium for the Forces of Architecture”, incorporates progressive, cross-discipline views on architecture, art and even the English language. There is an article by Noguchi, “Shelters of the Orient”; an article on Noguchi’s sculptures, “Colloidals in Time”; Richard Neutra on “New Buildings in Japan”; and C.K. Ogden’s plan for “Basic English” which reduces the number of words in the language to 850. The ideas contained in the pages of Shelter were not passing, momentary notions fixed in the temporal space of 1932, but concepts that Noguchi and Fuller independently pursued throughout their respective careers.[footnote=56]

    In his article, “Shelters of the Orient”, Noguchi establishes a relationship between traditional Asian styles of architecture and modern sensibilities in Western architecture. At its conclusion the correlation becomes a direct link to Fuller: “Translated into modern terms there exists a striking similarity between the ancient Japanese house and Fuller’s Dymaxion.”[footnote=57] Elsewhere Noguchi speaks of a material that plays an important role in his artistic life – paper and its “multitudinous use – diffuser of light, as protection against the wind and rain, lanterns and umbrellas”.[footnote=58] When Noguchi began designing his Akari paper lanterns in 1951, he had considered the role of this material in Japanese life for almost twenty years.

    As an artist, Noguchi did not recoil from verbal philosophies on art. “Colloidals in Time”, which features two other works by Noguchi (a portrait head, Ruth Parks, in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art, and Draped Torso, an aluminum sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), includes his beliefs regarding sculpture and its relationship to the universe, “As a result of our contacts with, and feelings for life, art reminds those, whose minds are clear, of truth.”[footnote=59] While Noguchi and Fuller worked in different spheres, overlapping only on occasions, they absorbed each other’s ideals, and their shared sensibilities incorporated far-reaching perspectives on the world. Decades after Shelter, Noguchi saw their relationship in this way: “Our imagination expands as far as our expanding knowledge and beyond. We were already there in orbit, Bucky and I. New York was our city that glimmers in the distance, and we talked of time and cosmic space.”[footnote=60]

    In 1933, using the money he made from Shelter, Fuller applied his Dymaxion principles to transportation, the result being the Dymaxion Car. Working at a factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Noguchi made the plaster models for the car and Fuller, with a team of 27 men, had this extraordinary vehicle build. Fuller often transported well-known figures around in the Dymaxion car, including the pioneer aviatrix Amelia Earhart and the writer H. G. Wells. Noguchi was a passenger on one particularly notable trip – on 7 February 1934, he and Clare Boothe Luce, Dorothy Hale and others, drove with Fuller to the premiere of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.[footnote=61]

    In a letter of 28 June 1933 arranging their plans for Birdgeport, Fuller imagined that these circumstances might allow Noguchi to realise his art more completely: “It seems to tme that this is the chance that you and I have always looked forward to in the matter of your executing the best of design.”[footnote=62] From these words of encouragement in 1933, Noguchi persevered within the art world, gaining the perspective, discipline and strength to create the range of forms for which he became well known. Perhaps the most complete expressions of his vision are his garden landscapes. It takes only a stroll through Jardin Japonais (1956-58) at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, his first garden project, to experience the synthesis of Noguchi’s work – finally, a large space, such as he had been desiring since the early 1930s, allowed him to transform an urban area using water, stone, copper, wood, trees, grass and even fish. Employing elements of traditional Japanese gardening in unprecedented modern ways, Noguchi unified his Eastern and Western aesthetics, and integrated sculpture and design into everyday life. Stone sculptures function as seating, within a plan of shifting planes and contours that can be viewed as an abstract picture, or moved through and animated as a useful public setting. This garden in Paris takes us miles from the “uncertainties” and strife of the 1930s.

    (We are extremely grateful to Amy Hau, whose expert knowledge of the holdings of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation was invaluable to our research. All citations from material in the archives are published with kind permission of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation.)

  • “Alchemy of the Gallery.” Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery, ed. Ingrid Schaffner, Lisa Jacobs. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998, pp. 20-59.

    ALCHEMY OF THE GALLERY

    I love stupid paintings, decorated transom, stage sets, carnival booths, popular engravings, old fashioned literature, erotic books with non-existent spelling, the novels of our old grandmothers, fairytales, children’s books, old operas, silly refrains and naïve rhythms.

    -Arthur Rimbaud, Alchemy of the Verb, 1873 (translated by John Ashbery)

    Gallery-hoppers once made beelines to the Julien Levy Gallery. It was the place to see advanced contemporary art, according to the collector and Museum of Modern Art curator James Thrall Soby. As Soby reminisced in his unpublished memoirs: “[Julien Levy] was for a long time the only New York dealer who handled the work of the Surrealists and Neo-Romantics…. Nor did he neglect some of the best younger American painters, sculptors and (a very rare inclusion in the early 1930s in New York) photographers. It was at his various galleries in the 57th street area that I first saw the paintings of Ben Shahn, the photographs of Atget and Walker Evans and of many other artists whose names now seem secure in art’s ever-changing constellation.”[footnote=1] Upon arriving in New York from Paris in 1941, Leo Castelli recounted, he “immediately got involved with people who were, like me, interested in the Surrealists, who were very fashionable, the latest thing.”[footnote=2] At the top of his list was Julien Levy.

    In October 1937, the gallery opened at the second of the four locations it would have during its eighteen years in New York. Leading into the space was a magnificent curved wall, “the shape of a painter’s palette.”[footnote=3] Vogue enthused: “The newly-planned walls are broken up artfully, dipping and waving and straightening out again. The rug is dark wine, the walls white, the effect naked and modern.”[footnote=4] Pictures hanging on those walls took on a cinematic sequencing, directed by the dealer. Accelerated by the viewer’s advance, the curve rapidly dissolved one image into another, like frames in a film screened through a projector. A gallery press release announced that pictures “present themselves one by one, instead of stiffly regimented as they would be on a straight wall.”[footnote=5]

    Films and photography had been regular features at the gallery’s first location. Not classic American photography – moments frozen on the straight side of realism – but rather an avant-garde and European aesthetic. Levy’s taste was experimental, the images he chose often blurred by passages of movement and time, the very properties of cinema. Since his college days, the movies were Levy’s first love: in 1927 he sailed across the Atlantic with Marcel Duchamp, intent on making a film with Man Ray. And in 1941, lured by the siren call of Hollywood, he took his gallery on the road with a “caravan” series of exhibitions for a season on the West Coast. In a cast that over the years included Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Frida Kahlo, René Magritte, and Dorothea Tanning, who all debuted in New York at Levy’s gallery, the star of the gallery’s final location was one of Surrealism’s most decisive harbingers of Abstract Expressionism, Arshile Gorky.

    In light of its contemporary reputation and this montage of achievements, Levy’s enterprise during the 1930s and early 1940s can be seen to anticipate the great New York art galleries of the late 1940s and the 1950s, those under the direction of such dealers as Sidney Janis, Sam Kootz, and Betty Parsons. In league with Peggy Guggenheim, Pierre Matisse, and Curt Valentine, Levy promoted the European avant-garde and Internationalism in America; his successors, in turn, promoted an American school of art, Abstract Expressionism, to an international audience of museum directors, collectors, connoisseurs, and critics. What Vogue admired in 1938 as Julien Levy’s stylishly modern good taste in white walls became the de rigueur backdrop for serious painting and sculpture. Betty Parsons recalled the stark white interior of her gallery when it opened in 1946: “In those days galleries mostly had velvet walls and very Victorian decoration. I decided to hell with that…. When you’re showing a large painting by Jackson Pollock, the last thing the work needs is a plush velvet wall behind it.”[footnote=6] Levy codified the rituals of contemporary gallery commerce, from sending out press releases and snappy announcement cards, to throwing opening-night cocktail parties. The gallery routinely published brochures with essays by famous writers and critics, who established an instant context for an artist’s works. Levy created a buzz that attracted the smart set, collectors, curators, press, other artists, who then generated reviews, gossip, speculation, and – most significant for the artists whose work was on view – interest and sales. In short, the Julien Levy Gallery made art lively.

    But it wasn’t all famous names and tasteful surroundings. There emerges another image of the gallery, this one less modern, retardataire, even. For each naked white wall, Levy’s gallery also had is scarlet side, with a “Harvard red room which took the place of red velvet…. I’ve always kept that color for painting.”[footnote=7] In such a room, Levy would show old American theatrical posters, American folk art, drawings for interiors by design students, costume designs for the ballet, and would sell books and periodicals. In pursuit of commercial opportunities for his artists and himself, he kept portfolios of portrait photography with hopes of landing paying sitters. He sought mural commissions for decorative interiors by his artists. He even offered a line of his own photo objects, trompe-l’oeil wastebaskets and lampshades.

    These “kinick kinacks,” as Levy called them, hark back to the historic origins of art dealing, to the curiosity shops and antiques trade. An eighteenth-century French dealer’s card exemplifies the diversity of interested that captivated early collectors:

    Gersaint, jewelry merchant…sells all of the latest metalwares and objects of taste, jewels, mirrors, cabinet paintings, pagodas, Japanese lacquerware and porcelain, seashells and other artifacts of natural history, pebbles, agates, and all kinds of strange and curious merchandise in general, in Paris, 1740.[footnote=8]

    Two hundred fifty years later, this bricolage of bric-a-brac seems closer to the marché aux puces than to the Leo Castelli Gallery.[footnote=9] But for Julien Levy in the 1930s and 1940s, such a display was evidently surreal. And although he may not have gone so far as to deal in bijoux and bibelots, he did show the work of Joseph Cornell, whose collage boxes are filled, like miniature Wunderkammern, with just such a world of “strange and curious” things.

    Levy’s was quintessentially a Surrealist sensibility, undivided in its affections for high and low art and artifacts. As Soby remarked, “Indeed he was as close to being an official Surrealist himself as one could come without signing one of André Breton’s guidelines to the Surrealist faith.”[footnote=10] But Levy’s personal identification with the French art movement does not fully explain the paradoxical position of his gallery. Simultaneously forward- and backward-looking, the gallery is emblematic of shifts taking place in the arts world and in art commerce just before the boom of the American postwar period. This essay will consider Levy as both a singular and a representative art dealer in America between 1931 and 1949, when galleries changed from upholstered enclaves and salon-style sanctuaries to fashionable forums with an expanded public, when contemporary artists began to have the cachet of old masters, and when dealers gained new authority within a system of showing and selling directly related to museum collecting and exhibiting. It will also consider Levy’s particular affinities, ambitions, and legacy, and what made his enterprise unique.

    The Economy of Art Dealing

    Like the rest of the economy during the early 1930s, the American art market was in a depression. In August 1931, just months before the Julien Levy Gallery opened, The Art News reported rhetorically: “Today there is a slump in the art trade of Great Britain and American brought about by large numbers of collectors who are in the habit of buying art [who are] temporarily ceasing to make purchases.”[footnote=11] An art gallery is by nature an expensive proposition. Aside from its dealing in luxuries, there is the basic cost of rent. Here, Levy had an indisputable advantage in that his father, Edgar, was a powerful New York real estate developer, who during the Depression had many primary locations available to let. On April 3, 1931, Julien wrote to his mother-in-law, Mina Loy, who would serve as his Paris agent during the first years of his gallery: “I have found a beautiful location, size about 20 feet x 50 feet, with a good show window, very bon marché because of the depression, and I am on the point of signing the lease.”[footnote=12]

    Having secured a space, the dealer pays the cost of shipping, insurance, framing, if not outright buying works of art, and then of photographing, and printing announcements, catalogues, and press releases. On top of this, there are “optional” expenses of a gallery assistant’s salary, opening-night parties, artist’s stipends, and professional fees for outside writers and curators. From sales income, the dealer stands to make fifty percent if the work comes directly from the artist, but only a portion of that if another dealer is involved. Although no comprehensive gallery records survive, it seems that Levy’s policy was to collect from the artist a work from each exhibition for his private collection, in addition to which he frequently purchased another work or two.[footnote=13] When, as in the case of Alberto Giacometti and René Magritte, there were few other sales, Levy would be his own best client.

    Price tags from the 1930s indicate that the business prospects for the Julien Levy Gallery could not have been less auspicious. An insurance checklist from Levy for loans to the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art in January 1932 values Atget photographs at $10 apiece, Moholy-Nagy photographs at $15, an Ernst painting at $250, and a Dalí at $450. The high end of Levy’s market was represented by Picasso – two tiny paintings at $1,800 each – and Pierre Roy – a $1,500 painting – which Levy had on consignment from other galleries. In the best of times, Levy’s income from any of these sales would have been nominal. With the market in recession, a gallery specializing in contemporary art seems to have been an insupportable venture.

    And yet it was a time for wealthy young men to embark on visionary ventures. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was the first acting director of the Museum of Modern Art; Arthur Everett (“Chick”) Austin, Jr., as director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, established the Avery Memorial Wing for modern Ballet. All were expressing ambitions to institute the avant-garde in America. Even the Whitney Studio Club changed its identity, becoming the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931. As reactions against the old cultural establishment, with its spectacularly failed investment in the status quo, these efforts might even be seen as an extension of New Deal aspirations. At the very least they indicate how opportune it was to try something new, perhaps because there was so little to lose. By his own account, Levy, a young man from New York’s upper middle class who had been happily seduced from family business by bohemia, was in it for fame.

    Atget and Ambition

    Julien Levy’s first inklings of becoming an art dealer can be traced to one body of work, the golden-toned photographs of turn-of-the-century Paris by Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget. “You remember the photos?” Levy wrote to Mina Loy on March 12, 1930. “Of every concievable [sic] subject in or around Paris, doorways, stairways, brothels, courts, trees, street vendors, fairs, shop windows, corsets and umbrellas. All taken with beautiful quality, selection, and composition.” Levy had been introduced to Atget during his 1927 Paris trip through Man Ray, who lived near the photographer. At the time, Levy purchased as many prints as Atget would sell, and as many as he could ferret out at antiquarian booksellers’. In 1930, Levy suddenly had more Atgets than he knew what to do with, having just acquired a partial interest in Berenice Abbott’s archive of more than ten thousand prints and nearly two thousand glass-plate negatives.

    After the photographer’s death in August 1927, Abbott, who had been Man Ray’s assistant, rescued Atget’s oeuvre from the proverbial dustbin of history by acquiring all of the material that remained in the studio from Atget’s friend André Calmette. One of her first projects with the material was to coordinate a monograph in French on Atget, which she brought with her to New York in 1930. Levy was then working as an assistant to Carl Zigrosser in the upstairs print room at the Weyhe Gallery, and presumably because of his established interest in the work, Abbott took the book to him in hopes of finding an American publisher. She got that, and more, according to Levy’s news to Loy:

    [Bernice] will tell you that I have arranged an exhibition for next year of her Atget photos. And I have also bought a part interest in them. They will be hard to exploit as the public in America is decidedly not photo-minded, but I think they are very beautiful, the kind of work of genius that doesn’t appear every day, and the problem of managing them to the best advantage will mean two years fun at least. And if they are half as successful as they deserve to be, my reputation as a person, a connoisseur, an art dealer, man in public life, etc. will be made. Also Berenice’s reputation as a photographer will be more than merely boosted, and she should make a tidy sum of money. IF they are half as successful as they desrve [sic] to be.[footnote=14]

    In Levy, Abbott found the support to secure financially the Atget archive that was in her keeping. As a photographer, she had already assumed the artistic charge that she would maintain over the archive, organizing the material, making prints, and storing the glass negatives. She further expressed her deep affinity for Atget by lecturing extensively on his work and, even more explicitly, by undertaking in 1929 a project to document Manhattan, as he had Paris, in photographs. Through Abbott, Levy had found the start of a career, and he set out to make his mark as a New York art dealer representing the work of Atget.

    As detailed in his correspondence with Loy, Levy’s experience coordinating the Atget show at the Weyhe Gallery is a preview of coming attractions, expectations, and disappointments at the future Julien Levy Gallery. The summer her spent making selections for the Weyhe exhibition was a period of intense fulfillment, of rapturous engagement. What familiarity he had with Atget’s work promptly developed into greater intimacy; he “cheated” on his wife, Joella, who was living in Scarsdale until the young couple’s New York apartment was renovated, to “work at [the photographs] evenings, staying in town overnight about twice every week. Always discovering new and exciting ones.”[footnote=15] To his mother-in-law, he happily confessed, “My photographs are giving me a heavenly summer…. There is nothing I could ask for better than to roll myself between sheets of Atgets, each new one I find (and there are thousands) is a revelation.”[footnote=16] Years later, when an interviewer suggested that Atget was essentially a Romantic, Levy snapped to the defense of his first love in photography: “I don’t know whether you mean it in an insulting way or what”; but he conceded that Atget “probably was.”[footnote=17 Levy then proceeded to describe with vivid clarity “this monumental effect, in nothingness,” in Atget’s original prints, as he had come to know them more than forty years before.

    At Weyhe, while arranging the photographs along the bookshelves, Levy found the prints as “beautiful [as] most paintings,” if not more so. But seeking to promote the work in advance of the exhibition led to one of Levy’s first professional disappointments. The editors at Hound and Horn, the literary magazine founded by Lincoln Kirstein, were enthusiastic. Unfortunately, however, as Levy explained to Loy, “when Mr. Kirstein heard of the project he flatly said NO. He had only just then decided that nothing but American contributions would be accepted in the future.”[footnote=18] Levy did manage to place Atget’s work in Ezra Pound’s literary magazine Pagany.[footnote=19] The next sign that selling French photographs in American was not going to be easy came from the Museum of Modern Art. During the summer, Levy feverishly fantasized to Loy of Atget’s incipient fame: “Even if I am left without one in my possession, I dream of saying 20 years hence ‘I once had them all alone in my room, and now they can only be seen in a Museum (or morgue).’”[footnote=20] Alfred Barr shared Levy’s admiration for Atget and advocated photography as an art in its own right, worthy of museum exhibition and collection. And yet early autumn found Levy faced with a cooler reality. He wrote Loy, “The only set-back being that the trustees of the great Museum of Modern Art have refused photography in general as art. Had counted on a promise from the director to show my Atgets. And that cursed museum has come to dictate the taste in contemporania of most of N.Y. and even of Am.U.S.”[footnote=21] In 1969 the same “cursed museum” would purchase the entire Abbott-Levy collection of Atget’s negatives and photographs.

    Impatient for some evidence of recognition, while constructing dream galleries in the air, Levy joked to Loy, “I am perpetually irritated that things take three of four days to materialize. As soon as I think of the project it should be done, rise whole and sweet from the mental energy I generate. I am already spending the money we haven’t gottened, and tomorrow I will be a suicide because nobody comes into the gallery we haven’t yet gottened.”[footnote=22] His reluctance to develop a project, to nurture an artist’s reputation over time, would prove among Levy’s foremost professional liabilities. As a dealer, he was too often ready to lose interest in those things that did not garner instant support, as Atget’s photographs did not. Where his vision was radically was radically ahead of the market, Levy succeeded as a collector, not a dealer. After two early shows at his gallery failed to popularize Atget’s prints, they were essentially consigned to storage. (This would be a source of bitterness for Abbott, whose active and steadfast responsibility toward the work led to its sale to the Museum of Modern Art; she resented having to share the proceeds with Levy.[footnote=23]) Such was the fate of photography in general, which was soon supplanted by painting and sculpture as the Levy Gallery’s focus. Unlike Alfred Stieglitz, for example, Levy was unable or unwilling to commit himself to the long-term project of preaching, proselytizing, and performing the little miracles that it takes to challenge resistance, alter perceptions, and create public acceptance of new art. He experienced a rush of irritation toward potential Atget customers, as he told Loy: “Everybody admires [Atget’s photographs] but nobody seems willing to pay a price for one. The feeling is that any photograph is just a snapshot and only worth its association value, no more than that. If you concieve [sic] of a promising sales program, do communicate.”[footnote=24]

    It was not all dark premonitions. Although he was not as successful as he had hoped, Levy did experience the first thrill of sales in his introductory exhibit of Atget’s work. In late July, even before the Weyhe show officially opened, he boasted to Loy that “the first primed and mounted specimens were delivered to me here at the gallery, and within an hour I had sold 10 TEN, to two utter strangers (or almost utter).”[footnote=25] Midway through the exhibition, he reported: “This week we received rather good publicity and the photographs have begun to boom. I have made back all expenses in the two weeks, no profits yet, but expect sales to multiply as the days go on, and that will be all profit as there are no further expenses to expect.”[footnote=26] There is no account from Levy tallying the score of the Atget show. By the end of the exhibition, on December 6, he had, according to his correspondence to Loy, at least broken even, received some good press (“Really of course in these days of depression praise rather than shekels is the best one should expect”) and made some new connections (“I am having my quota of amusement and meeting many important personages through the exhibition”).[footnote=27] The experience buoyed him sufficiently that he could announce to Loy his intention to open a gallery. On January 2, 1931, less than a month after the Atget show ended, he wrote: “I enter upon the money my mother left me – Jan. 22 at the age of 25. I am seriously thinking of taking a chance on my immature inexperience because the state of affairs is too opportune to pass up. I may invest the money in buying pictures, objects, etc. to stock my destined Arte Shoppe. Perhaps I may leave Weyhe.”

    A Bid for the Future

    Dear Mr. Stieglitz,

    Greetings! I have so much to tell you, and to ask you, and many pictures to show you. I am more anxious for your approval than that of any man I know.[footnote=28]

    Shortly after coming into his inheritance, Levy quit Weyhe. He wrote confidently to Loy on March 16, 1931: “I plan to open a gallery of my own, called the PLACE OF LEVY…. I am concentrating chiefly on photography as the ‘supreme expression of our epoch’ always a secret passion of mine, i.e. any supreme expression, but I am glad to take anything else that may be cornered.” And again in April: “I do not plan to have only photographs, but pictures, sculpture, and even kinick kinacks. But photographs are a bid for the future, for uniqueness and publicity.”[footnote=29] Levy’s vision was not unique. Sharing her husband’s ambition and informing his plans, Joella Levy encouraged him, in an undated letter, that it was time to act on the opening of a photography gallery. (From her tone, it seems that photo galleries were the rage among the aesthetically inclined of Levy’s generation.) She advised him of her choice for the best location – 602 Madison Avenue, at Fifty-seventh Street – and urged him to sign the lease.

    On November 2, 1931, the Julien Levy Gallery opened at that address, with American Photography Retrospective Exhibition. Announced in the brochure as a “concise restatement of work since the daguerreotype,” the show was a tribute to New York’s high priest of photography and art dealing, Alfred Stieglitz, whose work was displayed along with that of five of his artists. Levy was too young to have experienced Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, “291” for short. Between 1905 and 1917, the gallery had hosted a roster of ground-breaking exhibitions: of photographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn, caricatures by Marius de Zayas, New York studies by Francis Picabia. During the late 1920s, however, Levy had made routine visits to Stieglitz’s successive spaces, the Intimate Gallery (1925-1929) and An American Place (1929-1946), whose name one cannot help hearing echoed in the mock “Place of Levy.”[footnote=30]

    The interior of Levy’s gallery was modeled in part on Stieglitz’s immaculate aesthetic. The front room was painted white, but instead of hanging the pictures on plaster walls that would require maintenance after each exhibition, Levy installed an inventive system of wooden moldings designed to hold photographs sandwiched between reusable sheets of glass. This would obviate the costs of framing and touch-up. The back room, reserved for paintings, was painted red. This touch of the old in the midst of the new perhaps reflects on his previous employment at Weyhe, an altogether different type of gallery. The evenings at Stieglitz’s may have been inspirational, but the days at Weyhe provided Levy with practical experience. “It made an apprenticeship for me,” he later said of the years he had worked under the print connoisseur and future curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carl Zigrosser.[footnote=31] During Levy’s employment at Weyhe, there were shows of woodcuts by Alexander Calder and watercolors by Rockwell Kent; the mainstay there, though, was books.

    Books and periodicals played an important role also at Levy’s gallery, attracting their own public, Bothered by browsers, gallery assistant Allen Porter interrupted himself in a letter to Agnes Rindge, the Vassar College art historian who was part of the gallery’s inner circle of clients and collaborators: “This is all very disjointed on account of I’m here all alone and I have to keep getting up and answering sill questions like are those books for sale. My God, do they think this is an educational institution?”[footnote=32] There were buyers. Levy’s reputation as a dealer seems to have been as much for art as for books, whose prices at the time were comparable to those of photographs. He sold issues of La Révolution Surréaliste ($7.50 a copy) to Harvard University, and poetry and prose to his colleague Pierre Matisse, who purchased Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris ($3.00), René Crevel’s Le Clavecin de Diderot ($2.00), and Paul Éluard’s La Rose Publique ($2.75).[footnote=33] Levy was a distributor for Minotaure, the art magazine that launched Skira as a high-end fine-arts publisher. And when Camille Dausse, a physician in Paris who exchanged his services to artists for books, decided to sell his substantial library of Surrealist material, he approached Levy to act as his agent to the Museum of Modern Art.[footnote=34]
    Stieglitz had diversified interests, too. He was a photographer, an art dealer, and a publisher. (Among Levy’s papers was an undated brochure from Weyhe announcing that, in collaboration with Stieglitz, the gallery would carry back issues of his journal Camera Work.) For all its personal adaptations, Levy’s opening program and plan remain essentially an homage to Stieglitz. It was wise strategy for the twenty-five-year-old novice to affiliate his enterprise with the established authority in the field. After an exhibition of paintings buy the popular portraitist Massimo Compigli (whose sales were intended to compensate for photography’s negligible market[footnote=35]), Levy presented the historic French photographers Atget and Nadar, both of whom were still little known in America.[footnote=36] Atget earned the highest ordination when a reviewer for The Art Digest compared his art to Stieglitz’s.[footnote=37] If Levy’s first step as a dealer was to stand on the shoulders of this art world giant, his next several shows marked strides in new directions.

    Fame, Fashion, and Film

    Having staked his opening bid for “uniqueness and publicity” on photography, Levy was granted both, when, in January 1932, his gallery presented the first exhibition of Surrealism – titled in the French, Surréalisme – in New York. Featuring painting, sculpture, collage, photography, and books, the show instantly earned the Julien Levy Gallery the distinction of being the place to see sensationally new art. And with the first New York appearance of work by Salvador Dalí, there was publicity galore.[footnote=38] Dalí’s Persistence of Memory was reproduced in virtually every review, with one perplexed critic at The Art Digest going so far as to poll New York’s psychiatric community: “The limpness of the clocks, one of them found, expressed impotence. Another felt that it was an excellent rendition of potence, because time … meant power, which could be transformed into anything, even saddles on which one might mount and ride off to victory in the distant hills.”[footnote=39] Writing on a “bewildering” exhibit, the critic for The New York Times demurred: “One of the most entertaining exhibitions of the season (possibly the most profound) is in progress at the Julien Levy Gallery.”[footnote=40]

    The public success of the show gave Levy the fame that he prized over fortune, and plunged the young dealer into activity that turned the next years at the gallery into an extended definition of Surrealism. The course had been inadvertently forecast by Chick Austin, whose Newer Super-Realism at the Wadsworth Atheneum was in fact the first exhibition of Surrealism in the United States, having preceded Levy’s by two months.[footnote=41] Austin asserted: “Sensational, yes, but after all the paintings of our present day must compete with the movie thriller and the scandal sheet,” and added, “We do not hesitate to dress in fashion because we fear the next year the mode will alter…. These pictures are chic. They are entertaining. They are of the moment.”[footnote=42] Over the years, Levy’s gallery would make art fashionable, and take him to Hollywood.

    During the 1930s and 1940s, the arts mixed freely. Perhaps, again, with fewer rewards at stake, artists, dancers, dress designers, and choreographers could risk losing their identities in collaboration. Representative was the 1937 exhibition, organized by Lincoln Kirstein and held at the Levy Gallery, of the Ballet Caravan Collaborators of the School of American Ballet. The exhibition showcased set designs by Paul Cadmus, choreography by Lew Christianson, and music by Paul Bowles and Virgil Thomson; and displayed a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, from which costumes had been ordered, and a seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte engraving, which inspired one dance’s imagery of Harlequin. Amid this creative hubbub, one can see the period as a throwback to pre-modern culture, when fewer distinctions separated high from low, art from decoration, beauty from pleasure. Austin, for instance, observed the liaison between Surrealism and fashion. Levy also represented the now almost forgotten, but then fantastically popular, Neo-Romantic figurative painters, who merged Picasso’s Blue Period with classical de Chirico to conjure an attractive ambience of pathos and ruin. They were also available for mural commissions. Eugene Berman turned James Thrall Soby’s dining room into a theatrical setting, an at-home version of a folly at Versailles. The cultural ideals were in many other respects elitist, dictates by young barons such as Kirstein from their privileged, and self-made, posts. For the amount of hybridization, this cultured imagery could even be called baroque. At the same time, the general readership for the arts seems to have been quite sophisticated. Open a contemporary issue of Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue and you will find an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, models posed in a tableau by de Chirico or photographed by Man Ray, ads for Elsa Schiaparelli designed by Dalí, and items about the Julien Levy Gallery, where there was always something amazing going on.

    Where else could you view paintings by Gracie Allen with such titles as Behind the Before yet Under the Vast above the World is in Tears and Tomorrow is Tuesday, or Eyes Adrift as Sardines Wrench at Your Heart Strings?[footnote=43] Where could you shop for prints by Picasso and constructions by Cornell, commission a photographic portrait from Edward Weston, George Platt Lynes, or Lee Miller, and see Frida Kahlo, dressed in full Mexicanista, installing her first exhibition in New York? Where could you buy a Magritte? And when Pavel Tchelitchew’s Phenomena, a sensational allegory of the contemporary cultural universe, studded with miniature portraits of Gertrude Stein, the poet Charles Henri Ford, and Joella Levy, to name merely a few luminaries, traveled from Paris to London, where did it stop in New York for one week only, but at the Julien Levy Gallery?

    Carl Van Vechten, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, and George Gershwin were among those who RSVP’ed to a private screening of Un Chien Andalou held at the gallery on November 17, 1932. This was the second evening of film hosted by Levy that fall, when he also took office as president of the first Film Society of New York. Modeled after clubs in France, the Society sent out a prospectus in the summer of 1932:

    Beginning in January, THE FILM SOCIETY will show to its private membership on one Sunday evening a month… motion pictures of excellence, not ordinarily to be seen even in little playhouses, or forbidden for public performance by the censors, and revivals important to the history of the motion picture.

    The first program, held on January 29 of the following year at the Essex House, included an animated color cartoon by Walt Disney, an abstract film of light waves produced by music, and G.W. Pabst’s Die Dreigroschenoper in a French version. Four more equally diverse programs appeared through May, with the American premiere on March 19 of Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or, “the first surrealist film of feature length.”[footnote=44] In preparation for this event, Levy contacted Mina Loy: “If Bunuel gets in touch with you bargain with him…. Impress on him [that] I probably can do better than our offer by renting them to other similar organizations which are in process of appearing like mushrooms these days, and sharing the profits with him.” After a successful screening, Levy reported to Loy: “Presenting L’Âge D’Or was most exciting. We didn’t know if our show would be the success of the year, or if we would be run out of town. The former proved true and the film is still the only topic for dinner conversation all about New York.”[footnote=45]

    The Film Society folded after its first season. Levy continued to show artists’ films at his gallery, most notably Cornell’s Rose Hobart and Goofy Newsreels, collaged from found footage the artist was buying by the pound from distribution warehouses in New Jersey. The short-lived Society was officially reincarnated in 1937, when the Museum of Modern Art appointed Iris Barry, founder of the London Film Society and formerly on the board of directors of the New York Film Society, to head its new Film Library; this would eventually become the Museum’s Film Department.
    Museum Versus Gallery

    This progression of events demonstrates the dynamics between gallery and museum. Although Alfred Barr had included both film and photography departments in his preliminary plans for the Museum of Modern Art, his board initially opposed these areas of collecting. One can imagine that the reputation of photography at the Museum was significantly besmirched through association with the ill-fated Murals by American Painters and Photographers exhibition of 1932. Organized by Kirstein, who asked Levy to curate the photography section, the show was an invitational that turned disastrous when several advisory committee members resigned in objection to perceived leftist imagery; one contributor, for instance, had “mixed ticker tape with pigs and financiers.”[footnote=46] Not until 1937 would the Museum seriously broach the subject of photography again, with a major survey curated by Beaumont Newhall. Levy lent several works to the show, which covered much of the ground he had explored in the early years of his gallery.[footnote=47]

    With his Surreéalisme of 1932 and many subsequent solo shows of Surrealist artists, Levy’s activities laid the groundwork for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. Compare his New York premieres of Dalí and Tchelitchew in 1933 with the museum’s exhibitions of their work in 1942; his 1933 Cartier-Bresson show with the Museum’s 1947 exhibition; his 1945 Gorky show with the Museum’s 1962 exhibition; or his 1932 Cornell Show with the Museum’s 1980 retrospective. The list could go on, as so many of the artists Levy responded to as emerging talents would become the subjects of major museum surveys. But this is the role of the gallery, a fast and light operation with easy access to artists and the work insider their studios. The ponderous machinery of a museum, with its labyrinth of departments and administrations, its public and fiscal responsibilities, moves slowly and cautiously, and ruminates on what happens in the galleries. Levy, ever outspoken about his aversion to museum bureaucracies, may not have been exaggerating when he said that Barr was “jealous” of his freedom as a dealer.[footnote=48] Barr’s brilliance was often encumbered and embattled by opposition from inside and outside the museum. When key works in the Fantastic Art exhibition were suspected of being communist, for example, Barr had to defend to his colleagues their inclusion in the subsequent tour of the show.[footnote49] On the other hand, a museum has the power and resources to grant an artist the public and historic interest that takes time to establish. And in this respect, although Barr may have envied Levy’s independence, Levy would have enjoyed the acknowledgement a museum receives for consecrating subjects that his gallery took the risk to originate. If the museum exhibition, which takes a minimum of a year to organize and which can fill entire floors, is a full-length novel or an encyclopedia, the gallery exhibition is an essay, composed in a relatively compressed time and space. Still, the number of shows Levy produced each season is remarkable, especially since they were so brief in duration, often only two weeks; today, gallery exhibitions run usually for at least a month, sometimes two. One museum man of Levy’s generation operated with the light speed of a gallerist and the historicizing vision of a curator. As director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Chick Austin moved on a maverick course that, in relation to Levy and Barr, stands outside the usual dealer/curator/director constructs. Austin was a magician. (In truth he was, performing as Osram the Great to benefit the Atheneum’s art classes for children.) He pulled ideas, brilliantly full-blown, out of his hat almost faster than they could be contained by his trustees or absorbed by the public. Austin’s museum was his theater: in 1929 he screened silent movies to foster interest in film as an art form; in 1930 he showed photography; in 1931 he premiered the Neo-Romantics in Five Young Painters and Surrealism in Newer Super-Realism; in 1934 he held the first American retrospective of Picasso. And that was just the beginning. Austin even managed to scoop Kirstein, when, in October 1933, he brought George Balanchine from Paris, eventually to found the School of American Ballet in Hartford. It lasted only a few days there before bursting like a bubble, having floated too far from the rarified atmosphere of New York, where it would thrive under Kirstein’s aegis.

    During the 1930s, Levy and Austin shuttled art and exhibitions between New York and Hartford. The dealer regularly borrowed works from the Atheneum and the director made major acquisitions through the gallery – most significant, in 1933, the Serge Lifar collection of ballet sets and costume designs. (Their correspondence reveals another aspect of Levy and Austin’s transactions, with Levy frequently resorting to humorous desperation, “Dear Chick: I must have some consideration given to our bill or I’ll take an overdose of Luminol. Wasn’t I empathetic enough when I spoke to you verbally?”[footnote=50]) The exchange was more than mercantile; Levy credited Austin, for instance, for adding a touch of theater to one of his exhibitions by proposing a black wall as a backdrop for the pictures.[footnote=51]

    As the art world in Levy’s day was much smaller than it is today – there were probably fewer than fifteen galleries in New York at any one time in the 1930s, and only three or so concentrating on contemporary art – the boundaries between dealer and curator, gallery and museum were more fluid. Several of Levy’s exhibitions toured to (or from) public institutions: Eight Modes of Painting, curated by Agnes Rindge, appeared at Levy’s gallery on a tour organized by the College Art Association; Abstract Sculpture by Alberto Giacometti traveled to the Arts Club of Chicago; Constructions in Space: Gabo went from the Wadsworth to Levy to the Vassar College Art Gallery; and Documents of Cubism appeared at the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Smith College Museum of Art.

    Hollywood

    In the late summer of 1941, Levy took his gallery on the road, with what he called in his autobiography “a traveling gallery, a caravan of modern art.”[footnote=52] He headed west, and set up shop first in San Francisco at the Courvoisier Galleries, the official dealer for Walt Disney’s animation art. Levy had already presented Disney’s cels in New York, in a series of very successful shows. In San Francisco, he presented a dealer’s version of Duchamp’s traveling boîte-en-valise: highlights from his New York stable, including group shows of Neo-Romantics and Surrealists. The next stop was Hollywood, where he established himself on Sunset Boulevard and opened with Dalí. The show was tantalizingly framed by the gallery announcement: “These paintings are to be shipped to New York for exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and will be available in Hollywood for one week only.” To Soby, on the receiving end of Dalís, Levy wrote that so far “Hollywood is exciting and the Gallery is alive and selling.”[footnote=53] He also confided his financial motivation in leaving New York: to save on rent and sell off some of the old gallery stock.

    Banking on glamour to attract publicity and customers, Levy next organized a Hollywood show of work by the Art Deco modernist Tamara de Lempicka, Baroness Kuffner.[foonote=54] Eugene Berman, who was in Santa Barbara preparing an exhibition of his work for the city’s Museum of Art, reported acidly to Soby: “We’re having a heat wave and the temperature is near 90˚. Julien opened his gallery a few weeks ago with a terrible exhibition of Lempicka and big opening party and terrific crowds. Now it’s the Neo-Romantic show, much less flashy and not so swank, but it’s a good exhibition and on the whole Julien is doing much better than expected, since Hollywood is such a difficult place for business.”[footnote=55]

    Levy was not the only New Yorker attracted to the local industry and industrialists of celluloid dreams. Out West, he met many colleagues from back East. Imagining that Hollywood might naturally respond with enthusiasm to his experience with photography and fashion, Man Ray spent the war years in Los Angeles in exile from Paris.[footnote=56] The Dada collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg had been living in Los Angeles since 1921, attracting Duchamp for visits in 1936, 1949, and 1959, as well as a steady stream of curators and museum directors hoping to land a bequest of the couple’s collection.[footnote=57] (René d’Harnoncourt won, for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) In 1941 and 1943, Chick Austin was in Hollywood to found Gates Theatre Studio with Edgar Bergen, Charles Coburn, Walter Huston, and others. Salvador Dalí went there to stage the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 movie Spellbound, and again in 1946 at the invitation of Walt Disney to collaborate on Destino, an unrealized animated film based on a Mexican ballad. In 1945, MGM tapped twelve artists for a competition, won by Max Ernst, to paint a Temptation of Saint Anthony as a prop for the movie Bel-Ami. Despite these flirtations between art and film, artists and actors, dealers and directors, when William Copley went west in 1947 and exhibited the work of Cornell, Ernst, and Man Ray, he could not sell a thing.[footnote=58] His gallery closed the following year.

    Gallery Versus Gallery

    In 1938, Vogue profiled seven Fifty-seventh Street galleries, each with “a personality as sharp and distinct as any movie star.”[footnote=59] The lineup reveals Levy’s colleagues and competition at the peak of his gallery’s success, beginning with Durand-Ruel, the gallery “that sold the French Impressionists to the Americans.” The walls were “covered in dull brown velvet,” which the writer found “curiously soothing,” as were “the same Negro attendants who have been opening the doors” for great collectors for years. Alternatively, there was Wildenstein, behind a Louis XVI façade, “brought, stone by stone, from France,” where “a gallant Frenchman escorts clients the length of the marble hall into a beautiful Louis-Quinze room… furnished to what would have been Marie Antoinette’s taste.” At Marie Harriman’s, the surroundings went ignored, because of the “best-looking art dealer…best skier and best bowler on Fifty-Seventh Street”; but the fare was strictly School of Paris. Levy’s specialties were “Surrealism, the photography of the mind,’ and Neo-Romanticism, ‘the camera of the soul.’” His gallery was “principally for the sophisticated and the young,” in marked contrast to the neighboring (and no doubt intimidating) bastions of conservative art commerce.

    Not on Vogue’s shortlist was the Pierre Matisse Gallery, which opened just before Levy’s, in late October 1931, with an exhibition of Georges Braque, Jean Lurçat, and Georges Rouault. Having served his apprenticeship at the prestigious Valentine-Dudensing gallery of modern European art, and as son of Henri (whose Museum of Modern Art retrospective opened one month after his son’s gallery), Pierre had impeccable credentials. And while Levy had to “adopt” his patrimony, claiming Stieglitz and Duchamp to be his godfathers (“I didn’t bring them into the church. I just, in my mind, said, ‘I want theiur belssings,’ and I consider them my inspiration”[footnote=60]), Matisse was a blueblood, who would establish the first blue-chip gallery of modern art in New York. The two dealers operated within different, at times overlapping, echelons. Matisse showed only established figures; Levy took his chances. Many artists who had a start in New York at Levy’s gallery, including Calder, Giacometti, Matta, Tanguy, and Gorky, went on to enjoy sustained careers and become the new old masters with Pierre Matisse.

    “Idea Shows” and Duchamp

    Compared with Matisse’s gallery, with its museumlike program, and from today’s perspective, Levy’s seems more an alternative space than a typical commercial gallery. In the early 1930s, he established diversity with forays into film and photography and with innovative group shows. Later on in the decade, he relied on an increasingly conceptual program and featured a number of what he called “idea shows,” some curated by artists. In 1938, Levy organized Old and New “Trompe l’Oeil,” mixing F.G. da Bibiena and William Harnett with Berman and Dalí. One of his favorite writers, Henry James, inspired The “Picturesque” Tradition in American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, a 1943 show of landscape paintings. The same year, Through the Big End of the Opera Glass focused on miniature works by Cornell, Duchamp, and Tanguy. For the 1944 Imagery of Chess exhibition, Levy commissioned boards and pieces from the artists, several of whom also participated in a competition at the gallery. This was something of an early Happening, with the reigning “World Champion of Blindfold Chess,” George Koltanowski, scheduled to play in simultaneous matches against (blindfolded) Barr, Ernst, Levy, Dorothea Tanning, the architect Frederick Kiesler, and Dr. Gregory Zilboorg. (The champion beat everyone but Kiesler, who managed a draw.) And in 1945, Objects of My Affection featured works by Man Ray selected by Man Ray.

    Looming large behind these projects was Marcel Duchamp: from the trompe-l’oeil of his Rotoreliefs, to the museum-in-a-suitcase of miniature reproductions of his own art (the boîte-en-valise), to his binary intrigue with the conceptual play behind a game of chess and a work of art. In addition, Duchamp advocated specific artists to Levy, such as the painter Gar Sparks and the sculptor Maria Martins, who was also the model for the supine female figure in Duchamp’s last work, the tableau Étant Donnés.[footnote=61] Levy had known and admired Duchamp (he blatantly called it hero worship[footnote=62]) since 1926, when Levy persuaded his father to buy a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, whose interests Duchamp was representing in America. Like Stieglitz, Duchamp impressed Levy as dealer, artist, and impresario. And just as Stieglitz had influenced the first years of the Levy Gallery, so would Duchamp inspire its second phase.

    Duchamp had been an active member of the Dada movement in New York throughout the teens and twenties; during the forties he functioned as a spiritual presence, detached yet omnipresent. The city was full of his European colleagues, among them artists and intellectuals who had fled the German occupation: Berman, Breton, Ernst, André Masson, Amédée Ozenfant, Kurt Seligmann, Tanguy, Ossip Zadkine. Breton, who never learned to speak English, presided over the Surrealists in exile, with the Euro-centric Levy Gallery serving as his base of operations. (The scholar Anna Balakian recalled that when, as a graduate student, she wanted to meet Breton, Levy provided the introduction at his gallery.[footnote=63]) Duchamp, a Surrealist sympathizer, contributed to Breton’s projects – he designed the catalogue and created an extraordinary installation from one mile of string for Breton’s 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, for instance – without ever being the initiator.[footnote=64] Even in the midst of Levy’s most Duchampian exploits, the artist’s involvement was indirect. When the matches were on during the Imagery of Chess exhibition, Duchamp declined to play, preferring to act as referee.[footnote=65]

    In his unpublished memoirs, Soby paid a retrospective visit to the Julien Levy Gallery, where he found Levy engrossed in yet another game of chess with Duchamp, the implication being that this was the dealer’s most cherished diversion.[footnote=66] A perceptive assessment, for it does seem that, more than the satisfaction of running a business, what Levy enjoyed about being an art dealer was his interaction with the players, the challenge of coming up with successful strategies for exhibitions, the pleasure in handling the pieces themselves – particularly if they were artworks by Man Ray, Ernst, Atget, Tanning, Gorky, or Dalí.

    Abstraction and Architecture

    That the Pierre Matisse Gallery survived the 1940s and the Levy Gallery did not is more than just a tribute to Matisse’s greater business acumen. It also reflects changed that Matisse’s powerful gallery effortlessly weathered but that would compromise Julien’s “Arte Shoppe.” Levy’s identity was inextricably linked with Surrealism as a contemporary art movement, and by the 1940s its hold on current imagination was beginning to wane. Its passage and substitution occurred essentially in one place, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. The New York heiress’s museum and gallery opened in October 1942 with a landmark exhibition of Surrealist art, made iconic in the photographs taken of it by Berenice Abbott. Important works by Ernst, Duchamp, Giacometti, and Paul Delvaux were installed by Frederick Kiesler in a custom-designed interior. Paintings were hung projected on the ends of baseball bats, against radically concave wooden walls. Biomorphic furniture – Kiesler’s specially designed “seven-way units” – served as everything from sculpture pedestals to seating for viewers. What is not apparent from photographs of the exhibition are the kinetics: spotlights on timers flashed on several pictures simultaneously, while the rest were plunged into a darkness periodically pierced by the amplified sound effects of a train screaming through a tunnel. At the time, Levy was out of commission; he had enlisted in the army, and his gallery’s interests were being carried on at Durlacher Brothers by the dealer Kirk Askew, whose passions were the Baroque and Neo-Romanticism. (Upon Levy’s return to business, in March 1943, many of his artists, including one of his biggest sellers, Tchelitchew, would defect to Durlacher.) Guggenheim was the new Surrealist on the block, and her electrifying fun house blasted away most recollections of Levy’s elegantly curved white walls.[footnote=67]

    Art of This Century produced the next wave of change, in 1943, with a Spring Salon for Young Artists, selected by Barr, Duchamp, Mondrian, Soby, and others. This included work by a young painter who was visibly wrestling with what appeared now to be the European old guard of Surrealism. In November, at the bejest of her advisor Howard Putzel, Guggenheim gave Jackson Pollock his first one-artist show. The brochure essay by James Johnson Sweeney charged American painters to follow Pollock’s lead and “risk spoiling the canvas to say something in their own way.”[footnote=68] Clement Greenberg’s review saw in this artist an end to Picasso, Miró, and even Mexican mural painting as overpowering influences: American art had finally achieved a new, native influence.[footnote=69]

    Of course things are never that simple. The first artist of the New York School, Pollock, arrived at his innovations not, as Greenberg suggested, through esoteric study of “that American chiaroscuro that dominated Melville, Hawthorne, Poe… Blakelock and Rider,” but through avid appreciation of Surrealist automatism in the works of Matta, Ernst, and Gorky, those exiles from abroad who established themselves in New York through the Julien Levy Gallery. Levy opened at his final location in March 1943 with an exhibition of drawings by Matta (the Chilean artist’s second show at the gallery) and gave Gorky his first New York show there in March 1945. André Breton’s brochure essay for the latter, entitled “Eye-Spring” (after a complex metaphor of time that turns a watch spring into a “wire of maximum ductility” located inside an “opaque case”), echoed Sweeney’s claims for Pollock. In Gorky, too, there was “an art entirely new… the proof that only absolute purity of means… can empower a leap beyond the ordinary and known to indicate… a real feeling of liberty.” Yet while Pollock’s abstraction was being touted locally in terms of an emerging American cultural nationalism, Gorky’s was being advanced as a last victory organized by the general himself, Breton, who, allied with Levy, was determined to defend the dwindling ranks of Surrealism.

    In March 1947, Town & Country published a veiled portrait of the Julien Levy Gallery, written by a gallery assistant, Eleanor Perényl.[footnote=70] She plays “Frances” to Levy’s “Mr. Jellicoe,” a man who “generated a constant tension. With his pale, ascetic good looks, he made Frances think of a perpetually fallen angel.” Illustrated with a cartoon by Saul Steinberg, Perényl’s essay describes a day at the gallery during its declining years:

    Just now, they were in the doldrums… The opening had been successful. Mr. Jellicoe’s friends, who went to all the openings anyway, liked and understood the kind of dreams and magic he was so unsuccessful in selling to the general public. But in the next day or so, the atmosphere had slowly flattened. Boiled down, the sales amounted to one or two drawings, kept in a portfolio in the office, and an almost-sold small painting in the exhibition itself.

    Legacies and Monuments

    Peggy Guggenheim closed her gallery in May 1947, having given Pollock four solo exhibitions. Levy, who had given Gorky five solos, closed in 1949 (not quite a year after the artist’s suicide). Curiously, despite so many brilliant shows involving so many famous and infamous artists (to say nothing of writers, curators, dancers, filmmakers, and just plain personalities), Levy’s achievements have been subsumed by Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. Perhaps this is due to her quick, succinct transformation of her program, in just five seasons, from Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism. Levy, his former openness to possibilities notwithstanding, was adamantly a Surrealist to the end.

    Both Levy and Guggenheim were passionate collectors, but the scope of their acquisitions was distinctly different. Working with a string of advisors over the years (most notably, the English art historian Sir Herbert Read), Guggenheim amassed a world-class collection of modern art, primarily from the postwar period. In 1949 she opened the doors of her Venetian villa as a public museum. Levy’s vision for his legacy took form in the late 1970s with a proposed Center for Surrealist Studies of Alternative Thinking and Expanding Experience, whose nerve centers would be the Levy collection and library. He proposed the package as an endowment to the State University of New York, Purchase, where he was teaching a seminar, “Surrealism Is…” The Center called for an ambitious and imaginative interdisciplinary program, involving art (for a “Surrealist Contemplation Room,” students would create a “constantly changing exhibition of two separate surrealist paintings, one classic and one recent”); literature (“in connection with the French department the Center will undertake the translations of key surrealist works [to be] serialized in the Quarterly”); cultural studies (one planned symposium was on “The Image of Woman in Surrealist Art”); psychoanalytic studies (readings in Freud and Lacan); theater (staging Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Ubu Roi, and other plays); film and video (Buñuel, Cornell, and Hans Richter, as well as Robert Altman, Judy Chicago, and William Wegman). The program’s agenda set out to prove that, far from being dead, Surrealism had never lost its vitality. The course “Surrealist Behavior” would study “the development of certain actions as art,” from Arthur Cravan to Joseph Beuys.[footnote=71]

    The architecture and language of Levy’s proposal can be seen as elaborations of an earlier project undertaken with Ian Woodner Silverman for a Surrealist House, an installation for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The 1970s Center proposal opens: “Step right up and get inside your mind, and meet yourself crossing the frontal LOBE… seeing is disbelieving. Conceive before you think.” The carnival barker likewise beckoned to the 1939 World’s Fair pavilion: a “’Funny House’ from a new angle,” featuring “whispers,” a “pneumatic wall,” “Hallucination,” and “Rocking Floors.” Upon reaching the top of an “Audible Staircase,” visitors would experience the “Sensation of Falling.”[footnote=72] This idea in particular (“the public will be catapulted”), with its specter of imminent lawsuits, may have discouraged Fair sponsors from adopting the plan. In any case, the house was replaced by Dalí’s Dream of Venus pavilion, with Levy in close collaboration as the artist’s dealer and representative in New York.[footnote=73]

    The Surrealist Center had no such apotheosis after the project was scrapped, for a murky complex of reasons.[footnote=74] Levy’s art went to his Connecticut home, upon his death in 1981, the bulk of his collection was dispersed at auction., leaving no marker or monument. There is one important exception. During the 1970s, Levy’s sleeping beauty of a photograph collection was acquired through purchase and gift by the Art Institute of Chicago. Amid the famous – Atget, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Strand – were the then virtually unknown Ilse Bing, Jacques-André Boiffard, Francis Bruguière, Lee Miller, Roger Parry, Emmanuel Sougez, Luke Swank, Maurice Tabard. (There was not a single print by Stieglitz.) For the curator, David Travis, researching the collection for the Institute’s 1976 exhibition was rewarding detective work that disclosed an alternative history of photography conditioned on the intervention of Surrealism and film.[footnote=75] With its original vision intact, Chicago’s Julien Levy Collection remains the dealer’s greatest legacy.

    Gentle Fadeout

    Balancing fashionable fare with less known works, offsetting shows that sold poorly with sure hits, Julien Levy kept his gallery in business for almost twenty years. During the Depression and then during wartime, with neither collectors nor cash in abundance throughout, it was necessary constantly to invent and reinvent a market. In this respect, Levy’s mercurial program, and his forays into decorative arts, commercial and portrait photography, and the entertainment industry, were resourceful efforts to keep his shop open. These activities also had the advantage of being newsworthy to the popular press. In addition to receiving constant notice in The Art Digest, The Art News, and The New York Times, the gallery received regular coverage in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Newsweek, and Time. The December 1940 exhibit of cartoonist Milton Caniff’s original drawings for Terry and the Pirates fetched full-page illustrated features in Life and Newsweek, both boasting of Terry’s tony affiliations with “the swank New York gallery of Julien Levy.”[footnote=76] There one was as likely to spot a Gorky as a Kahlo, a Cornell as a cartoon, a ballet dancer as a blindfolded chess champion, all participating in a transformative history of the gallery by “one of New York’s most fashionable art shops.”[footnote=77]