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Jan. 20, 2004 • Volume 13 Number 9
Henri Cartier-Bresson's "Valencia, 1933" is among the works on display at the new McMullen Museum exhibition.
Museum Showcases Surrealism
By Rosanne Pellegrini
Staff Writer
The collection of a pioneering New York City art dealer and avant-garde impresario who championed the Surrealism movement is the focus of a new exhibition now under way at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College.
"Accommodations of Desire: Surrealist Works on Paper Collected by Julien Levy," which opened last week, will be on display through March 24.
This national traveling exhibition includes more than 100 drawings, collages, prints, watercolors and photographs by key artists of the Surrealist movement, collected by Julien Levy (1906-1981), one of the 20th century's most influential art dealers.
"The McMullen is pleased to present this exhibition of Surrealist works collected by Julien Levy," said McMullen Museum Director Prof. Nancy Netzer (Fine Arts). "Levy's innovative enterprise as revealed in the exhibition inspires insight into the complex weave of aesthetic, social and economic history in America of the 1930s and 1940s."
A public event to celebrate the opening of the exhibition will be held at the McMullen Museum on Tuesday, Jan. 25, from 7:30-9:30 p.m. It will include a dessert reception, exhibition viewing and music by popular campus jazz band BC bOp! under the direction of BC Band Director Sebastian Bonaiuto. An opening ceremony will be held at 8 p.m.
Surrealism, which dominated modern art in the 1930s and 1940s, attempted to reconcile everyday reality and the world of dreams into a superreality, or surreality (sur being French for "on" or "above").
The 115 works comprising this exhibition testify to Levy's ardor for the Surrealist movement and its many members. More than merely selling Surrealism, Levy lived it, say the exhibition organizers. As revealed in his personal mementos and in works endearingly inscribed to him, Levy was an intimate of the artists he represented. He collaborated with them, making surrealist films, composing a surrealist history, and even initiating a surrealist funhouse for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
Levy described the genre as a melding of dream, metaphor, fetishism, nonsense and play. His passion for this art exceeded professional protocol. One observer described the preeminent art dealer and collector as "militant" about the movement whose cause he advanced through his New York gallery. He was dedicated to the acquisition of surrealist art, including books, paintings, sculpture, toys, seashells, photographs, drawings, records, prints, cabaret posters, chess boards, and even a Victorian circus automaton.
The exhibition title comes from one of Salvador Dali's most famous images, "Accommodations of Desire," a painting that Levy once owned and counted among his favorites. In presenting Levy's personal collection, the exhibition explores not only the dealer's historic role in the promotion of Surrealism, but also his zeal and affinity for the concepts and artists of this movement.
Opening his gallery in 1931 in the midst of the Depression, and closing in 1949 with the country on the verge of postwar prosperity, Levy's endeavor flourished during the very years that the center of the cultural avant-garde was shifting from Paris to New York. Championing and representing Surrealism through its formative years in New York, Levy was a conduit for many vital aesthetic changes that had originated in Europe. Levy ultimately exhibited and sold a vast range of media, as is evident in the list of artists to whom he gave first New York exhibitions: Eugene Berman, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Roberto Matta and Arshile Gorky.
"Accommodations of Desire" is organized and circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, and is curated by Ingrid Schaffner and Colin Westerbeck. Drawings and prints, unless otherwise noted, have been lent by the Jean Farley Levy Estate. Photographs have been lent by David Raymond, New York. The accompanying color catalogue includes essays by the curators.
The exhibition has been underwritten by Boston College with major support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum of Art.
For information on the McMullen Museum days and hours of operation, and for more details on the exhibition, see the McMullen Web site. •