Documentary and Anti-Graphic: Three at the Julien Levy Gallery, 1935. (Feature)
2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoIn the alliance of modernist imagemaking to public or commercial agencies, there is an added view of the diverse links between surrealism and photography. These associations are marked with historic resonance, especially as they coalesced in the 1930s and '40s around New York's Julien Levy Gallery. There was not only a singular brand of exhibition practice inaugurated at this dynamic art space and creative center, where spheres of artistic production, previously seen as incompatible, were overlapped and transvaluated. As a case study of the ways cultural power shifted from Paris to New York, it also made visible the contours of an often excluded term--that of Mexico's parallel modernity. To look then, even briefly, at Julien Levy Gallery's 1935 exhibition that connected Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo--as currently reconstructed at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (November 12, 2002-March 2, 2003)--is to trace one of numerous diagrams in the history of surreali sm that might join it to contemporary questions of transcultural relevance. Recent scholarship has uncovered the complex role Levy played as one of modernism's crucial entrepreneurs. (1) Equal parts public personality, private collector, marchant and disinterested cultural promoter of the avant-garde, Levy is a link between 'so many of the protagonists of the cultural movements' that emerged between the two world wars. (2) Significantly, he also happened to be the son-in-law of the extraordinary modernist poet and visual artist Mina Loy. As an in-law, friend and arts mentor, the extent of Loy's guidance and sponsorship cannot be underestimated. (3) With radical taste and affinity in addition to her beau monde savvy, Loy communicated her modernist values to Levy as she likewise gained him entry into the salons of bohemian and expatriate Paris during his 1927 sojourn. When he finally opened his New York gallery four years later, Loy continued to serve as his Paris representative. Levy had been an early collector of works by Marcel Duchamp, the friend who first compelled him to visit Europe. In Paris, already a self-professed (if ambiguous) admirer of Alfred Stieglitz, (4) Levy soon became an unconditional enthusiast of Paul Nadar and the surrealist idol Eugene Atget. (One of Atget's photographs appearing in Breton's magazine Surrealist Revolution, had caught my eye. 'Pass by and knock on his door any afternoon at all,' Man Ray urged. 'If he is in you will be welcomed. (5)) Levy attributed his uncommon acceptance of photography as a fine art, preceding these personal encounters and connections, to his early training at Harvard University. (6) In his published memoirs, Levy wrote: became seriously interested in cinema as an art form and combined with my art history courses some work in the physics of optics and the psychology of vision. [When I opened my gallery of contemporary art, one of my initial interests was to promote the recognition of photography as a form of modern art. (7) American Photography: Retrospective Exhibition, a kind of homage to Alfred Stieglitz, was Levy's 1931 inaugural exhibition at the gallery's first space at 602 Madison Avenue (November 2-20). On display were images by Mathew Brady, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Edward Steichen, Clarence White, Gertrude Kasebier and Stieglitz himself. In what remained of that year, and during the immediate ones to follow, the Julien Levy Gallery hosted successive exhibitions that featured photography, either prominently or exclusively. These included the 1932 Surrealism' show, (8) a dual exhibition of Nadar and Atget, and solo exhibits of Man Ray, Bernice Abbot, Lee Miller, George Platt Lynes and Emilio Amero, as well as group retrospectives such as Modern European Photography (9) and others that included antecedent figures such as Julia Margaret Cameron and David Octavius Hill. …
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