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The
Art Set
Charlie Scheips
Julian and Julien
On
Tuesday night, C & M Arts,
the venerable upper East Side gallery hosted a very
downtown opening
at 545 West 22nd Street. Formerly the Rainer
Fetting
exhibition space and site of many a DIA foundation
dinner, C & M has booked the spot for a show
of large-scale sculpture by Julian Schnabel from
the 1980s and 1990s.
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Julian
Schnabel and Sean Combs
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Despite torrential rains, Schnabel managed to pack
in the crowd that included a good smattering of even
real movie stars. Sean Penn and his wife Robin
Wright Penn, Harvey Keitel, Philip Seymour Hoffmann,
Christopher
Walken, Jessica Lange and director Wes
Anderson.
I saw Lou Reed, and Jane
Holzer too, and artist James
Rosenquist as well as the art set’s Angela
Westwater and David Meitus; Peter
Brant, Feigen’s Lance Kinz, Darlene Lutz, Tony Shafrazi, Bernard
Jacobson, Christophe van der Weghe, Perry Rubenstein, and Alona Kagan.
Schnabel’s
family members were there including ex-wife Jacqueline, son Vito and daughter Lola. C&M’s Bob Mnuchin and Jennifer Vorbach circulated as welcoming
hosts throughout the mob as Schnabel held court amidst
his towering sculptures.
We even saw Puff Daddy/P.Diddy/Sean Combs or
whatever he’s called these days and the Olsen Twins.
My fashion note of the evening was Dr. Lisa
Airan — wearing
a see through plastic Prada raincoat that had all
of us wondering what (or what didn’t)
lay underneath. After all, her expertise is skin. |
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The
crowd
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Dr.
Lisa Airan in Peter Brant's lobby with Jeff
Koons
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Jessica
Lange with Julian Schnabel
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More
of the crowd
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Photographs by Cari Brentegani |
Afterwards,
a group of us headed downtown to mogul Peter
Brant’s art and design crammed Soho loft — joining
a lot of the same cast of characters to nibble and drink
more before going downstairs for a dinner at Lure Fishbar.
C & M Arts has been a major force in the secondary (re-sale)
market for years but they are increasingly making themselves
known in the art of today.
Brant’s
wife Stephanie Seymour joined her husband to welcome
us all. Brant,
who bought Interview magazine from Andy Warhol many
years ago, is a major collector
of the artist’s work. Over the fireplace in the living room hangs Warhol’s
hilarious 1972 Vote McGovern depicting a smarmy Richard Nixon.
Don’t you
love election years?
In 1981 the visionary art dealer Julien Levy died. That was
just about the time when Schnabel burst onto the art scene thanks to his early
dealer Mary Boone. Levy was a bright light in a brilliant constellation
that shaped the art world in the middle of the last century. He was a critical
proponent of a diverse array of cutting-edge modern art enthusiasts who instigated
the critical shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in the years surrounding
the Second World War. He is back in the spotlight today due to an auction of
the remains of his estate as well as two imaginative exhibitions in Paris and
Hartford, Connecticut
that add new luster to Levy’s extraordinary contribution to 20th century
culture.
Born in 1906, Levy was a member of an undergraduate artistic clique at
Harvard during the mid-1920s that went on to create, promote and consume some
of era's
most exciting and important artistic creations and cultural happenings. His classmates
there included future museum directors Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (MoMA)
and A.
Everett (Chick) Austin, Jr. (Wadsworth
Atheneum); curator Agnes
Rindge; New York City
Ballet founder Lincoln Kirstein; composer and critic Virgil
Thomson; architectural
historian Henry Russell Hitchcock; dealer Kirk Askew;
the painter and critic Maurice Grosser; art patrons Edward
M. M. Warburg and James
Thrall Soby; as well as the only surviving member of that set still
with us today — architect,
collector
and patron Philip Johnson. |
L.
to r.: Jay Leyda's portrait of Julien
Levy, circa 1932; Julien and Joella Levy open
their new gallery, 602 Madison Avenue, November 1931. |
During
his time at Harvard, Levy became interested in the artistic importance
of film and photography. In 1927, he dropped out of school and
traveled to Paris — making
the crossing with Marcel Duchamp. Thanks to Duchamp he soon
met most of the major
figures of the Parisian art scene including the photographers Jean Eugène–Auguste
Atget and Man Ray’s American assistant Berenice
Abbott. He managed to purchase as many prints of Atget he could get
his hands on before Atget’s death that same year. By 1930, he joined together
with Abbott to purchase the entire
contents of Atget’s studio — more than two thousand vintage prints
and 10,000 glass plate negatives — preserving Atget’s extraordinary
photographic record of 19th century Paris from probable destruction. He also
managed to marry his first wife Joella (daughter of poet Mina
Loy) with Constantin
Brancusi and James Joyce as best men.
By the time he returned to the States, and with
an inheritance from his mother, Levy decided
to become an art dealer—choosing photography
as his primary focus. He put together an Atget
show with Abbott in New York at the Weyhe Gallery
but they soon learned that photography was a far harder sell than they had anticipated.
He offered the Atget collection to the brand new Museum of Modern Art but he
failed to persuade them of its incredible historic value. Remarkably, the Modern
did eventually buy the collection almost four decades later in 1969 — revealing
just how far ahead of his time Levy was.
He opened the Julien Levy Gallery at 602 Madison
Avenue (at 57th Street) on November 2, 1931 with
a retrospective of American photography organized
with the eminent
photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. The show featured work by everyone
from Matthew Brady and Gertrude Käsebier to the modernists Charles
Sheeler,
Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand. He would continue to show photography regularly
during these first few years but lack of sales gradually put a dent in his early
enthusiasm.
At the end of the first year, Levy’s passion shifted to the
work of the Surrealist artists he had met
in Paris. He organized the first showing in America
of the
then scandalous group. He asked his Harvard classmate Chick Austin, by then director
of the stately Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, to first show the group reasoning
that a museum setting would give added credibility as well as greater publicity.
How right he was. Surrealism would emerge as the decade’s most influential
artistic flowering. Levy’s own Surrealisme exhibition at the gallery followed
directly after the Atheneum’s –opening January 9, 1932.
At the time, Levy offered Chick Austin Salvador
Dali’s most iconic painting, The Persistence of Memory,
1931, for the Atheneum’s permanent collection
for a mere 350 dollars. Austin couldn’t come up with the cash, so the painting
went instead to MoMA where it remains today as one of the most popular pictures
in the collection.
Levy continued to include photography in the
gallery program and regularly featured many of
the most important experimental films of the
era including Luis Bruñel
and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien
Andalou. In 1932 he founded the Film Society— the
precursor to MoMA’s film department. And
long before the advent of Pop Art in the 1960s,
Levy held shows outside traditional artistic
parameters
such as Walt Disney’s film cells and the caricatures of Al
Hirshfield. While
his interests in photography waned a bit with the success of his surrealist endeavors,
he did manage to mount ground-breaking shows in the medium from time to time.
One of these, his 1935 Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs featured Henri
Cartier-Bresson, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Walker Evans — the
first and only time these now-illustrious photographers were seen together during
their lifetimes.
Almost 70 years later, the Fondation Cartier-Bresson in Paris has mounted a major
reconstruction of Levy’s seminal exhibition that runs through December
19. |
Clockwise,
from top left: Julien Levy gallery
invitation,
1935; Le Songe, 1931 (© Manuel Álvarez
Bravo); Alicante, Spain, 1933 (© Henri
Cartier-Bresson/Magnum); Devanture,
New Orleans, 1935 (© Walker
Evans archive). |
Levy
continued to be the preeminent dealer of modern art throughout
the 1940s. By the time he closed the gallery in 1949, he had
given one person shows to a wide range of artists including Man
Ray, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Alberto Giacometti, Rene Magritte,
Frida Kahlo (with whom he had an affair), Dorothea
Tanning, Arshile Gorky and scores more. He also regularly
showed other modern artists ranging from Picasso and Matisse to Rufino
Tamayo, Balthus and Isamu Noguchi.
The masterpieces
that passed through Levy’s hands are mind-boggling to ponder. Thankfully,
most of them are now permanently ensconced in the great museums of the world.
Levy’s gallery archives were donated before his death to the Art Institute
of Chicago. In 1998, a major exhibition of the gallery’s history was presented
in New York at the Equitable (now AXA) Gallery with a companion book entitled
Julien Levy: Portrait of a Gallery. With the recent death of his widow Jean,
the last remnants of Levy’s estate are featured in a three-day sale of
more than 900 lots at Paris’ Tajan auction house beginning October 5.
One would think there would hardly be anything left but Levy was such an addicted
collector — the sale abounds with small works in a variety of media — there
is an ample supply of small gems by both well-known and lesser-known artists.
The sale offers treasures for the collector of works on paper. Among the highest
valued lots are an untitled painting by Salvador Dali and
two 1940s paintings by Arshile Gorky. Lastly, back in Levy’s
old Hartford stomping grounds, Ballet Russes to Balanchine: Dance at
the Wadsworth Atheneum opened recently
and continues
through the end of the year, The exhibition features the museum’s unparalleled
collection of 20th century theater and costume design, related artworks, and
memorabilia, and celebrates the centennial of the great choreographer. The
anchor of this exhibition is the Serge Lifar Collection, which
Levy sold to the Atheneum in 1933 for only $10,000. Today it is one of the
myriad
treasures in the collection
of America’s great, and oldest, art museum.
If
you didn’t know, Balanchine came to America after Lincoln Kirstein
and Chick Austin raised the funds to have the choreographer launch a ballet
school
under the auspices of the Atheneum. Balanchine soon moved the plan to New York
but in tribute to Austin’s efforts, what would become the New York City
Ballet’s world premiere took place in Hartford in 1934. The Atheneum’s
exhibition features the famous letter from Kirstein to Austin that begins “this
will be the most important letter I will ever write you” and ends with: “we
have the future in our hands. For Christ’s sweet sake let us honor
it.”
The show is curated by the Atheneum’s Eric Safran, Carol Dean
Krute and
Susan Hood. Artists featured include Léon
Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Natalia Goncharova,
André Derain, Giorgio de
Chirico, and Pavel Tchelitchew. A monograph, with
contributions from Austin biographer
and museum archivist Eugene Gaddis accompanies the exhibition
that runs through the end of the year. Willard Holmes, formerly
of the Whitney Museum, is now the director of the Atheneum.
The Art Set, ©Charlie Scheips, 2004 |
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