Julien Levy: Memoir of an Art Gallery

by Levy, Julien

• ISBN13: 9780878466535
• ISBN10: 0878466533
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-11-01
• Publisher: Distributed Art Pub Inc

Summary

Julien Levy opened his New York gallery in 1931, and the following year assembled the first Surrealist show ever held in that city. Over the next two decades he exhibited works by Dali, Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Calder, Eugene Berman, Tchelitchew, Giacometti, Arshile Gorky and many other luminaries of twentieth-century art, giving a number of them their first shows. But Levy was more than a gifted dealer: he also had a gift for friendship, and in this charming, anecdotal memoir he recounts his intimate dealings with some of the most innovative figures of his generation. He crossed the Atlantic with Duchamp and introduced Tanguy to New York. He conceived the idea for Dali's Birth of Venuspavilion at the World's Fair, shared a summer house with Ernst and fished with Andre Breton (yielding a memorable description of the Surrealist leader's run-in with a blowfish). And he was with Gorky in the final, tragic days before the painter's suicide. Memoir of an Art Galleryis the story of prescient vision and lifelong devotion. By turns humorous and moving, and back in print after many years, it is also one of the most enjoyable works ever written about the pivotal time when Manhattan became the art capital of the world. This edition features a new introduction by Ingrid Schaffner, senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Portrait of an Art Dealer	p. ix
Preliminaries	p. 7
The Gallery	p. 12
Duchamp	p. 18
Duchampiana	p. 20
Duchamp's Kiss	p. 28
Joella	p. 31
Arthur! Arthur!	p. 39
Stieglitz	p. 52
602 Madison Avenue	p. 57
J. C. of Utopia Parkway	p. 76
Eugene Atget	p. 90
James Joyce	p. 124
Dealing with A.E.A.	p. 135
L'Age d'or	p. 148
Summer, 1936: Walpurgisnacht chez Tzara	p. 160
Berman	p. 179
Giorgio de Chirico	p. 183
Dali	p. 197
15 East 57th Street	p. 201
Dream of Venus	p. 205
Joseph Cornell	p. 224
Perspective	p. 232
Matta	p. 247
Out of this Century	p. 253
42 East 57th Street	p. 263
A Summer with M.E., 1944	p. 270
Leonid	p. 281
Arshile Gorky	p. 283
Goodbye My Loveds	p. 287
Chronology of the Julien Levy Gallery	p. 296
Index	p. 313
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