Sale salutes a force in Surrealism

Julien Levy made his name in New York as a visionary art dealer who introduced Surrealism to America and promoted the international avant-garde in the 1930s and ‘40s. A free spirit with more intellectual curiosity and aesthetic passion than business sense, he operated his gallery from the dark days of the Depression to the dawning of postwar prosperity, serving as a cultural ambassador while New York established itself as the center of the art world.

But Levy lost his heart in Paris in 1927, when he dropped out of Harvard at 21 and took a fateful trip with artist Marcel Duchamp. Enchanted by the city and its artistic riches, he formed enduring relationships with a circle of Surrealist artists, poets and filmmakers. If he returned here today -- 23 years after his death -- he would probably be delighted to see that memories of his life and work are thriving on both sides of the Seine.

Tajan, a major auction house in a chic commercial district on the Right Bank, has staged a three-week exhibition from Levy’s collection in preparation for a sale of about 900 paintings, drawings, sculptures and bits of ephemera that begins today and runs through Thursday. Coincidentally, in a quiet section of Montparnasse on the Left Bank, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation has re-created a landmark photography show presented at Levy’s gallery in 1935. The exhibition of vintage prints by French master Cartier-Bresson, Mexican artist Manuel Alvarez Bravo and American photographer Walker Evans continues through Dec. 19.

The two events shed considerable light on the son of a prosperous New York real estate developer who established his gallery with a trust fund but forged his own way. He opened the gallery in 1931 with a show of modern photography and made his first big splash the following year with an exhibition of Surrealist art, including works by Duchamp, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Joseph Cornell. A similar exhibition opened around the same time at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., but Levy is credited with making Surrealism known to the American public and championing it until he closed the gallery in 1949.

The collection that will go on the block was amassed from purchases and gifts of works by more than 100 artists. Consigned by the estate of Levy’s third wife, Jean Farley Levy, who died last year, it’s not a big deal in financial terms. No one predicts that the auction will rival last year’s $50-million sale of 5,500 artworks and related material collected by poet Andre Breton, founder and chief theorist of the Surrealist movement. Working with Parisian dealers and Surrealism experts Marcel and David Fleiss, Tajan has set the overall presale estimate at $6.8 million to $8.1 million. And about half that sum is tied up in two early-1940s paintings by Arshile Gorky, whose work bridged Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

But Levy’s eccentric treasure-trove constitutes a juicy chapter of art history.

“This sale is important for us,” said auctioneer Francois Tajan. “It’s a major victory for Paris. Julien Levy lived in New York, so it might have been easier for Sotheby’s or Christie’s to do it, but we have proved that we are capable of organizing it. We hope it will be a nice adventure that is cultural and intellectual as well as financial. We want to tell the story of Surrealism at the same time as we make money for the estate.”

The New York auction houses were interested in the Levy collection, but they would have divided it and incorporated it into several sales of similar material. Tajan won the consignment by thinking big: a single, marathon sale with a hefty catalog conceived as a homage to an influential force on the international art scene.

Those who peruse the show and catalog will discover that the dealer’s taste was broader than his reputation might suggest. Along with the core of pieces by celebrated Surrealists, there are paintings and drawings by their lesser-known Neo-Romantic contemporaries Christian Berard, Pavel Tchelitchew and Eugene Berman; portraits of Gertrude Stein by Pierre Tal Coat; humorous paintings of a Las Vegas crime scene and a beauty contest by William Copley; and a stained-glass window by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Handwritten letters, greeting cards and exhibition brochures -- including an announcement of a Dali show with tiny images of his work on fold-out strips attached to a woman’s breasts -- offer insight into Levy’s friendship with artists and the spirit of his gallery. Among the 20 works by Duchamp is a wedding gift to the Levys. Displayed on a pedestal as the centerpiece of the exhibition and valued at $120,000 to $144,000, it’s a foam-rubber toilet seat lined with foam breasts that the artist dubbed “For Sitting Only.”

“I cannot say it is beautiful,” Fleiss says, “but I think lots of museums would like to get it.”

Most of Levy’s photography collection -- 2,500 images by more than 130 artists -- was acquired in 2001 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a gift of his widow and a purchase funded by museum patrons. Selections will go on view at the museum in a show of French photographer Eugene Atget’s work in 2005 and a survey of the collection in 2006.

Although the auction contains little evidence of Levy’s devotion to camera art, the show at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation indicates that he had a sharp eye for young photographers who would evolve into giants of the field. Pulling together closely related black-and-white images made in the early 1930s by Bravo, Evans and Cartier-Bresson, who died in August at 95, Levy selected extraordinary pictures of ordinary people on the streets of Mexico, Cuba, India, Spain, France and the United States.

He called the exhibition “Documentary and Anti-graphic Photographs” to emphasize the work’s opposition to the slickly polished “graphic” style then in vogue. And apparently he made his point. A brief review from the New York Times, displayed with the photographs, refers to the “shock value” of seeing real life without distortion in pictures that appear to have been taken by accident but reveal startling truths.

That assessment probably pleased Levy, who wrote in 1936 that the Surrealists deliberately shocked viewers to wake them up. “Unless people are startled they frequently fail to devote their attention to anything as subtle as a work of art, which must be understood through contemplation,” he wrote. “The Surrealist fight is against apathy, not against incomprehension.” Much the same could be said of Levy’s passionate involvement with the art of his time.