Julien Levy was an art dealer and owner of Julien Levy Gallery in New York City, important as a venue for Surrealists, avante-garde artists and American photographers in the 1930s and 1940s. Levy was born in New York. After studying museum administration at Harvard under Paul J. Sachs, Levy dropped out, traveled to Paris by boat, and befriended Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Berenice Abbott, through whom he came into possession of a portion of Eugène Atget's personal archive. In Paris, he also met his future wife, Joella Haweis, daughter of artist and writer Mina Loy. At some point in his life, Julien Levy remarried to surrealist artist Muriel Streeter. His connections with many other artists during this period of the 1930s and 1940s allowed Streeter to gain helpful insight with her own work during this time spent in and around Levy's New York gallery. Back in New York, Levy worked briefly at the Weyhe Gallery before establishing his own New York gallery at 602 Madison Avenue in 1931. Concentrating at first on photography, he staged Man Ray's first major show, introduced Henri Cartier-Bresson to the U.S., and promoted many other European and American figures. On January 29th, 1932, there came the landmark multi-media Surrealist exhibition of the work of Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, and the introduction of Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory. He also championed the surrealist work of Leon Kelly. This exhibition marks the first in New York to display the works of members of the official surrealist group. In 1937, the gallery moved to 15 East 57th Street, where Levy mounted the first solo exhibition of the work of Frida Kahlo, November 1 to 15, 1938. From 1943 to 1949, the gallery was located at 42 East 57th Street. In 1945, Arshile Gorky had his first solo show there. After closing the gallery, Levy taught at Sarah Lawrence College and State University of New York at Purchase. Levy's books include Memoir of an Art Galleryand Surrealism.
