In early 1927, Julien Levy informed his father that instead of finishing his last semester at Harvard University, he was sailing to Europe with the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to begin his career as an experimental filmmaker. Six months later he returned home to New York with a new passion, Surrealism, and a new calling, gallery director. Levy has long been considered one of the foremost champions in New York of Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, only episodic attention has been paid to an important aspect of his activities: photography. In 1976, David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, organized the exhibition Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection: Starting with Atget, which drew upon the dazzling selection acquired by the institute. Additional exhibitions held in New York in 1977 and 1998, Mexico City in 2002, Paris and Pasadena in 2004, as well as the excellent scholarship of Ingrid Schaffner, have helped fill in Levy’s collecting history. Then in 2006 an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focused on the major gift of around 2,500 photographs given to the museum in 2001 by his widow, Jean Farley Levy, and Lynne and Harold Honickman. The enlightening exhibition catalogue, Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery by Katherine Ware and Peter Barberie, fulfills one of the most important responsibilities of a museum: to document, interpret, and make public its collections. In doing so, Dreaming in Black and White persuasively demonstrates that Levy’s photography exhibitions and collection represent one of the most comprehensive, innovative, and exciting engagements with photography in that era.

While this handsome and hefty book would artfully grace a coffee table, Dreaming in Black and White offers much more. Ware, the author of In-Focus exhibition catalogues on László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray for the Getty Museum (1995 and 1998, respectively), provides a thorough survey of Levy’s work as a dealer of photography. Barberie, the author of Looking at Atget (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), also devoted to works from the Levy Collection at the Philadelphia Museum, examines Levy’s collecting of photographic ephemera as a surrealist activity. The high-quality plates—258 black-and-white gelatin silver prints reproduced in color—remind us of the richness and variety of warm tones that make the innovative photographs of this great interwar period so appealing today. Numerous additional illustrations of the gallery’s brilliantly designed installations and announcements, and photographs of the dramatis personae, reinforce the authors’ discussions of the marvelous in Levy’s career.

As recounted, and sometimes fabulously embellished, in his 1977 autobiography Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: Putnam), the path of Levy’s life took a number of opportune turns that uncannily placed him in the epicenter of both Surrealism in Paris in the 1920s and the New York art scene in the 1930s and 1940s. (The reader of his Memoir continually asks such questions as, “Did he know that person, too?” “Was he really there?” And concludes, “What a life!”) Born into an upper-middle-class family in New York in 1906, Levy made the most of his family’s money in what turned out to be only a marginally lucrative career as an art dealer. On a round of New York galleries with his father in late 1926, the twenty-one-year-old Levy met Duchamp at an exhibition of Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture at the Joseph Brummer Gallery. Edgar Levy went home with a Brancusi sculpture and his son headed to Paris with Duchamp, whom he would later call, along with Alfred Stieglitz, one of his two artistic godfathers. In Paris Duchamp introduced the striking, intelligent Levy to the Surrealist circle, and at this formative point in his life he became a lifelong devotee of the movement. For the young New Yorker, Surrealism was more than a literary and artistic means of expression; as Levy himself stated, it was a “point of view,” a way of being.

With his new wife Joella Haweis to support, Levy regretfully abandoned the life of an aspiring experimental filmmaker in Paris for that of a gallery owner in New York. “I plan to open a gallery of my own, called the PLACE OF LEVY,” he wrote in a letter on March 16, 1931. “I am concentrating chiefly on photography as the ‘supreme expression of our epoch’ always a secret passion of mine. . . .” In addition to its landmark exhibitions of contemporary photography and Surrealism, the Levy Gallery introduced opening cocktail parties and featured a chic modernist interior, with a curving wall that proceeded by a few years Frederick Kiesler’s biomorphic design for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. The Levy Gallery was open from late 1931 until 1949, a period that Levy characterized in his autobiography as between “Dadaism and the apotheosis of Moma-ism.”

With its title picking up on Levy’s description, Ware’s essay “Between Dadaism and MoMA-ism at the Julien Levy Gallery” offers a history of the gallery—its context, conception, exhibitions, and stable of photographers—that is detailed and well documented (there are 359 endnotes). The gallery’s first exhibition, a retrospective of American photography, established photography as an important medium with a history six years before Beaumont Newhall’s “groundbreaking” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Levy enlisted the help of Godfather Stieglitz in organizing the exhibition, which focused on the pictorialists and new modernists whom Stieglitz championed. By this time Stieglitz’s own appetite for organizing exhibitions had waned, and Levy picked up the mantle, figuratively and literally: later in his life Levy was seen around New York brandishing, as had Stieglitz, a black cape.

Also like Stieglitz, Levy supported the work of younger and often lesser-known photographers in what were often their first solo exhibitions. Many were still in their twenties, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Brett Weston, and George Platt Lynes. Just another ho-hum, canonical line-up? Not at all, for we must remember that Levy was showing and collecting contemporary photography before there was a canon. An important contribution of Ware’s essay and accompanying plates is the inclusion in the book of many lesser-known but strong photographers that Levy represented, such as the Americans Kurt Baasch, Eliot Elisofon, Arthur Gerlach, and Sherril Schell. Levy also collected works by many women photographers, including the more famous—Ilse Bing, Lucia Moholy, and Imogen Cunningham—and the not so famous, such as Clara Sipprell and Stella Simon. However, this was the thirties; the only women to whom Levy gave solo shows were Berenice Abbott and Lee Miller, both highly talented and deserving but who were especially close to Levy—Abbott as the co-owner of the Eugène Atget archive, which they purchased after his death in 1927, and Miller as a lover.

Barberie approaches Levy’s collecting from a different perspective in his essay, provocatively titled “Found Objects, or a History of the Medium, to No Particular End.” The Surrealists—and Barberie rightly maintains that Levy was one himself—made collecting hordes of ephemera from everyday life, both past and present, an integral part of their artistic activities. Levy’s eclectic, often anonymous photographic finds, ranging from nineteenth century cartes-de-visite to mid-twentieth century pornography, from tabloids to advertisements and everything in between, epitomize the Surrealists’ playful use of imagery, verbal and visual, to spark the imagination. Levy valued these photographs as the evidence of the uncanny that could be found anywhere and everywhere; and they were provocative rather than political (there is no social documentary photography by someone like Lewis Hine to be found here). Levy often made a juxtaposition of the “high and low” in his photography exhibitions. Ware’s and Barberie’s essays complement each other in this same manner; and as Barberie perceptively points out, so did Levy’s choice of Stieglitz and Duchamp as his heroes.

Initially, Levy dedicated his gallery to photography, but after mounting twenty shows in the first four years of the gallery, his photography exhibitions tailed off. Because few photographs sold—this was the Depression—he switched to groundbreaking exhibitions of artists such as Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, and Joseph Cornell (whom Levy claims to have discovered). Turning to other media, Levy stored his photographs away, reportedly in the barn of his Connecticut home, where they remained until they were exhibited in Chicago in 1976, just five years before his death. Levy seems to have known from the beginning that he could not focus on photography alone; his original stationary said “Julien Levy Gallery: Paintings-Photographs-Drawings-Books” at the top, while “A Gallery for Photography” was relegated to the bottom.

The many splendid photographs and the informative essays in Dreaming in Black and White remind us that Levy’s run was a glorious one. If there is a shortcoming of the book, it is that Ware and Barberie do not devote a greater proportion of their essays to analyses of the photographs themselves. Nevertheless, their book provides a fresh and penetrating perspective on Levy’s engagement with photography and with some of the most fascinating photographic minds of his day. Yet, perhaps nothing can replicate the wit and charm experienced by those of us fortunate to have heard Levy tell his story in person, or the pure wonder of his Memoir of an Art Gallery.