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5 THINGS YOU MISSED IN LOS FOMOS LAST WEEK:
w. contributions from @speakup @typeof.eth @janicka @hollins @aether @ogebaeby @eduardmsmr @kugusha.eth
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@pauline-unik
Sunday evening tune
https://open.spotify.com/track/2QSuqxALyh7JFoQEBxyo0H?si=ZzeVkNy3RsuUDPjm6UNr3g
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@eduardmsmr
Happy Surrealist Saturday!
For this week’s exploration, I wanted to do something different. Recently I ran into a name that intrigued me a lot, and the more I read about him, the more I realized how profound his impact on Surrealism truly was. So today, instead of exploring the world of a painter or poet or photographer, my path led me into a gallery on Madison Avenue in 1932. And the person I found there wasn’t capturing moments with a brush, or a pen, or a camera. He was opening doors. His name was Julien Levy
He was born in 1906 in New York, and while he wasn't a Surrealist artist himself, he is often regarded as being the person who brought Surrealism to America. His story made me realize that sometimes the most important people in the movement aren't the ones making the art, but rather the ones making sure the art can breathe, can be seen, can change lives.
Levy's story starts on a ship in 1927. He was a Harvard dropout sailing to Paris when he met Marcel Duchamp, and that meeting changed everything. Through Duchamp, he entered the inner circle of the Parisian avant-garde (Man Ray, André Breton, and the entire surrealist world). He married Joella Haweis, daughter of Dadaist muse Mina Loy. He spent summers with Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, and frequently fished with Breton. He was basically living surrealism and was more into it than most
But what actually struck me the most, and the one thing that made a huge difference in surrealism, was the opening of Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932. The first exhibition was called “Surréalisme” and was the first major Surrealist show in NYC, only the second in all of the US (crazy!!). He showed Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" to American people for the first time. The exhibition was wildly popular, and overnight, his gallery became the bridge between European Surrealism and American soil
What he managed to do through his gallery makes me understand even more his importance in the world of surrealism. He created a lot of epiphanies. Joseph Cornell, who would become famous for his dreamlike box assemblages, walked into the gallery, saw Max Ernst's collages, and had a revelation. He went home and immediately started making his own. Arshile Gorky, the Armenian-American painter who would bridge Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, visited the 1932 exhibition and saw something that fundamentally changed how he would make art for the rest of his life. Artists, scholars, and critics who would later define Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s spent their time at the Levy Gallery, which many saw as a small piece of pre-war Paris transplanted to Manhattan
Levy represented and exhibited giants like Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Frida Kahlo, and Joseph Cornell. Many of these artists had their first American solo shows in his gallery. And he did it with a kind of passionate belief. One observer described him as being “as close to being an official Surrealist himself as one could come without signing one of André Breton's guidelines to the surrealist faith”
What I love about Levy's role is that he understood that Surrealism wasn't just paintings on walls. In his 1936 book “Surrealism” he wrote that it was a point of view applied to everything. His gallery became a place for spirited discussions among artists, writers, musicians, and many others. It was almost like a piece of surrealistic art itself, though it was living and breathing
Levy's work shaped the collections we see today in MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Met. During those years from 1931 to 1949, when the cultural avant-garde was shifting from Paris to New York, Levy's gallery was at the center of that transformation. After closing his gallery in 1949, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College and SUNY Purchase, passing on what he knew to new generations
What Julien Levy taught me is that you can reshape the world without ever picking up a brush. Sometimes the most surreal act is believing in something so completely that you build a space for it to exist. He may not have painted the dreams, but he gave them a room, a wall, and a light
And here, in this lesson, I find another surrealist thing:
Reality can be transformed not just by what you create but by what you make possible for others!
Thank you for reading!🌹
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@pauline-unik
10/10 would have loved to visit the cabaret l‘enfer (hell cabaret) in pigalle Paris
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@pauline-unik
ty to those who joined us!!! This was fun, i could hang WAY more often with @tako-unik and @benna tbh
spicy chats indeed
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@retalien
Los Fomos live with @tako-unik @pauline-unik @benna in @losfomos on @retake
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