Documentary and anti-graphic: three at the Julien Levy Gallery, 1935. (Feature).

In the alliance of modernist imagemaking to public or commercial agencies, there is an added view of the diverse links between surrealism and photography. These associations are marked with historic resonance, especially as they coalesced in the 1930s and '40s around New York's Julien Levy Gallery. There was not only a singular brand of exhibition practice inaugurated at this dynamic art space and creative center, where spheres of artistic production, previously seen as incompatible, were overlapped and transvaluated. As a case study of the ways cultural power shifted from Paris to New York, it also made visible the contours of an often excluded term--that of Mexico's parallel modernity. To look then, even briefly, at Julien Levy Gallery's 1935 exhibition that connected Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo--as currently reconstructed at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (November 12, 2002-March 2, 2003)--is to trace one of numerous diagrams in the history of surreali sm that might join it to contemporary questions of transcultural relevance.

Recent scholarship has uncovered the complex role Levy played as one of modernism's crucial entrepreneurs. (1) Equal parts public personality, private collector, marchant and disinterested cultural promoter of the avant-garde, Levy is a link between 'so many of the protagonists of the cultural movements' that emerged between the two world wars. (2) Significantly, he also happened to be the son-in-law of the extraordinary modernist poet and visual artist Mina Loy. As an in-law, friend and arts mentor, the extent of Loy's guidance and sponsorship cannot be underestimated. (3) With radical taste and affinity in addition to her beau monde savvy, Loy communicated her modernist values to Levy as she likewise gained him entry into the salons of bohemian and expatriate Paris during his 1927 sojourn. When he finally opened his New York gallery four years later, Loy continued to serve as his Paris representative.

Levy had been an early collector of works by Marcel Duchamp, the friend who first compelled him to visit Europe. In Paris, already a self-professed (if ambiguous) admirer of Alfred Stieglitz, (4) Levy soon became an unconditional enthusiast of Paul Nadar and the surrealist idol Eugene Atget. ("One of Atget's photographs appearing in Breton's magazine Surrealist Revolution, had caught my eye. 'Pass by and knock on his door any afternoon at all,' Man Ray urged. 'If he is in you will be welcomed." (5)) Levy attributed his uncommon acceptance of photography as a fine art, preceding these personal encounters and connections, to his early training at Harvard University. (6) In his published memoirs, Levy wrote: "I became seriously interested in cinema as an art form and combined with my art history courses some work in the physics of optics and the psychology of vision. [When I opened my gallery of contemporary art, one of my initial interests was to promote the recognition of photography as a form of modern art." (7)

"American Photography: Retrospective Exhibition," a kind of homage to Alfred Stieglitz, was Levy's 1931 inaugural exhibition at the gallery's first space at 602 Madison Avenue (November 2-20). On display were images by Mathew Brady, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Edward Steichen, Clarence White, Gertrude Kasebier and Stieglitz himself. In what remained of that year, and during the immediate ones to follow, the Julien Levy Gallery hosted successive exhibitions that featured photography, either prominently or exclusively. These included the 1932 "Surrealism"' show, (8) a dual exhibition of Nadar and Atget, and solo exhibits of Man Ray, Bernice Abbot, Lee Miller, George Platt Lynes and Emilio Amero, as well as group retrospectives such as "Modern European Photography" (9) and others that included antecedent figures such as Julia Margaret Cameron and David Octavius Hill. (10)

Levy's art-world affiliations and breadth of curiosity ranged widely in scope, and indiscriminately between such fields of interest as popular culture, fashion, entertainment, the decorative arts, performance and the art of the cartoon. This eclecticism was reflected not only in gallery exhibits but in "his own line of photo objects, trompe-l'oeil wastebaskets and lampshades" which he sold side by side with the more elevated artworks. (11) This sensibility was further reflected in his embrace of all forms of new photography, from the "objective" image or the photomontage, to Man Ray's rayographs, Lee Miller's solarizations and Joseph Cornell's daguerreotype portraits, together with stock newspaper images and film stills. The heterogeneity of photographic practices legitimated by Levy at his gallery was destined to contribute to the debates at the time about the vexed location of photography in relation to the other visual arts, not to speak of its status as an object for acquisition by collecting institutions .

Techniques in photographic modernity had distorted conventional habits of reading an image, or frustrated governing assumptions about a picture's potential meaning. Parallel to the formal methods of dadaism, constructivism 'and surrealism, another kind of imagemaking began to surface. Its analogous social realism belied a new objective relationship with the world, the complexity of positions within it and invisible allegiances to the unconscious--all of these effects often represented in the single instant captured by a camera. Following the legacy established by Atget--the lensman as the modern observer of the city streets--certain imagemakers had set out on "a search for particular, transitory, minute signs, in the [concretizing] of the unexpected, in the strangeness of the moment." (12) One of these photographers was Cartier-Bresson. The man Levy later described as "unquenchably eager, shockingly optimistic, wide-eyed with wonder and naivete" had been a practicing photographer for little over two years. Le vy nonetheless recognized the "'snap-shotty' miracles" produced by Cartier-Bresson and organized an exhibition of his prints from September 25 to October 16, 1933 entitled "Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and an Exhibition of Anti-Graphic Photography." There is insufficient documentation to affirm exactly which photographs by Cartier-Bresson were on display in that exhibit. But we do know that Levy employed the apocryphal persona of "art critic" Peter Lloyd to frame the curatorial proposal of the show in the form of a letter that served as the announcement essay. Disguised as "Peter Lloyd," Levy wrote:

Why don't you show the photographs of Cartier-Bresson in one, and the innumerable, incredible, discreditable, profane photographs that form a qualifying program for his idea in the other room? Septic photographs as opposed to the mounting popularity of the antiseptic photograph? Call the exhibition amoral photography, equivocal, ambivalent, antiplastic, accidental photography. Call it anti-graphic photography. That will demand the greater courage, because you have championed since the beginnings of your gallery, the cause of photography as a legitimate graphic art. (13)

Again, we can only surmise the content of those images that constituted the "qualifying program" for Cartier-Bresson's idea; although we do know their tenor as that of news agency or press photographs. If the septic is characterized by decomposition, Levy equates this corruption with graphic aspirations that reiterate the always already organized. Levy seemed to have viewed these anonymous images not as subordinate or incidental to Cartier-Bresson's project, but as imperative to the image environment at large which is capable of producing legitimate, if unwitting, artifacts; an "anti-graphic" register that disavows the accepted premises of what we know by what we see. If these stock images were at all continuous with those of Cartier-Bresson, something about them must have betrayed the camera as the accidental glimpse into the psychology of social space as carved from a fraction in time. (14) Whether by mere verbal correspondence of the "anti-graphic," or by some invisible thread of fact, the foregoing sugges ts related concerns as they unfolded elsewhere--as in the pages of Documents, the short-lived magazine of 1929-1930 edited by Georges Bataille.

The Julien Levy Gallery and Documents are linked concretely by photographers whose work appeared concurrently on the walls of Levy's 602 Madison Avenue venue and on the pages of the Paris journal--Eli Lotar and Jacques-Andre Boiffard, among them. It seems highly improbable that Cartier-Bresson would have been unaware of Documents and its axioms of "Doctrines \ Archeologie \ Beaux-Arts Ethnographie." The magazine had circulated in ways significant to the complex links between ethnography and surrealism that were to form part of a general twentieth-century cultural disposition. (15) Not unconnected to the impetus that led Bataille to fashion himself as a student of Aztec or Mexican art so as to interpellate its religious economies, in 1934 Cartier-Bresson spent a year in Mexico, where he made images of the underlife of the country's urban capital, the town of Juchitan, Oaxaca, and the state of Puebla. Between a kind of exhaustion of the already known, and a pervasive, post-war uncertainty, the turn to Mexico can be viewed as forming an important piece in the assemblage of European and American cultural modernity, and its institutions of the visual. Regardless of their differing media, intentions and results, both Cartier-Bresson and Bataille produced from that cultural contact zone what Michel Leiris later described as a convergence of "eroticism, cosmogonic lyricism and the philosophy of the sacred." (16)

The foregoing connections are meant to be suggestive in general of, and relevant in particular to, "Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs by Henri Cattier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo," organized by Levy in 1935 (April 23-May 7). Because no checklist survives of the exhibit, to speak of it is to transit the uncertain but no less alluring topography of speculation. There are, however, some records and materials worth pursuing. A month prior to this exhibit, pictures by Cartier-Bresson and Alvarez Bravo were featured briefly together at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes (March 11-20), suggesting a possible connection or resemblance between the Palacio and the later Levy exhibits.

An even earlier show (January 5-31,1935) at the Julien Levy Gallery of paintings, watercolors, drawings and photographs by Emilio Amero suggests the additional importance of this particular Mexican modernist in his role as New York champion of Mexico's vigorous artistic climate and its cultural avant-garde. In a letter written during the mid-1970s, Alvarez Bravo later recalled the link between his own work, Amero's and the Julien Levy Gallery:

Emilio Amero lived for extended periods of time in New York, and others in Mexico City. In New York he taught photography and print-making. He painted grisailles, I believe in the 1920s, at the Secretariat of Public Education. In all likelihood--I don't know if it was before or after his own solo show--he arranged the Levy exhibit of Cartier-Bresson, [Walker Evans] and myself. (17)

For the Palacio exhibit, the American poet Langston Hughes--who spent significant time in Mexico, and who even shared an apartment for a time with Cartier-Bresson--wrote a critical text, presumably for the accompanying catalog. (18) Entitled "Pictures More Than Pictures," Hughes makes reference not only to specific images by Cartier-Bresson and Alvarez Bravo; but he also addressed the difference between the documentary and the anti-graphic, when he begins the essay: "A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself." (19) In this way, Hughes calls into question the role of the photographer as a subject both continuous with, and at a remove from, the people or public spectacle recorded, so as to identify a relevant photograph as being somehow in excess of itself.

As for the 1935 Levy exhibit, it is very tempting to imagine Cartier-Bresson's 1934 images of Mexico as having figured side by side with Evans' 1933 series produced in Havana, Cuba. However, based on what seems to be the sole surviving review of the exhibit--it passed otherwise unnoticed--Evans was represented, at least in part, by the architectural series he had recently completed in the American South. The anonymous critic for the Sun wrote: "Walker Evans's 'documents' begin to be well known, but the better they are known the better they are liked. The present series of Southern facades with iron-grilled balconies are among his most enchanting." (20) The same critic spoke in contrast of the "happy accidents" produced by Cartier-Bresson and Alvarez Bravo, which suggests the contraries intended by the title of the exhibition--as if the anti-graphic were that which makes visible the impossibility of a one-to-one relation between the world and its various analogues, photographic or otherwise.

The design of the exhibition invitation--the name of each artist forming typographic upper and lower eyelids--alludes inevitably to Alvarez Bravo's now iconic 1934 image Parabola 6ptica. Even as it linked Paris, New York and Mexico City as sites of modernity, the exhibition also pitted optic viewpoints involved in activating new formations, both cultural and formal, against one another. Cartier-Bresson's Mexico may have been constructed through a lens of the exotic, but no less so than Evans' American South, or the familiar made strange in his New York City pictures. Similarly, there is no reason to assume that Evans did not also exhibit, in addition to the images of New Orleans and elsewhere in the South, some of his New York photographs, as he had done previously at the Levy Gallery for the show "Photographs of New York by New York Photographers. (21) (In the journal Documents, Leiris had written: "Like everything which has about it a prestige of exoticism, the tall buildings of America lend themselves, wi th an insolent ease, to the tempting amusement of comparisons. (22)

To imagine the Julien Levy Gallery exhibition of 1935 therefore to think of the differential relationship between the work of Cartier-Bresson, Evans and Alvarez Bravo as historic operations still active in the present. To the monumental promises made by the perspective and spatial division that modernity gave rise to--especially in New York as recorded by Evans in his images of skyscrapers, bridges, billboards, subways, aerial views and neon advertisements-there surfaced in response what Walter Benjamin identified as "a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday." (23) And it was Jose Ortega y Gasset who, already in 1925, had identified surrealism or infrarealism as a change of perspective in the "natural order" and its 'definite hierarchy." As a critical relation to the categories of metaphor and taboo, or all of that which is resistant to representation, Ortega y Gasset viewed surrealism as equipped with the negative force of aesthetic expression and irony's "unexpected grimace of surfeit or disdain." He wrote that it was possible "to overcome realism by merely putting too fine a point on it and discovering, lens in hand, the microstructure of life. (24)

The borderline relation of these three photographers to surrealism might be summarized best by the uncanny resemblance in their individual images describing the quotidian ceremony of public eating--the distinct but inscrutable expression on the faces of the suit-and-hat office men looking out through the storefront counter in Evans' depiction of a New York Luncheon Counter (c. 1930); and the two portrayals, one an untitled 1934 photograph by Cartier-Bresson, and another, Los Agachados (c. 1934) by Alvarez Bravo, of Mexican workers, respectively, at an outdoor and indoor comedor--with backs turned--oblivious to the onlooker. If the descriptive terms of "documentary" and "anti-graphic" are meaningful today, it is as Levy might have envisioned such prescriptive effects: as joining forces to make visible that "lack of organic connection between art and society which is characteristic of the modern world." Like Herbert Read, Levy suspected "the fault lies in the economic structure of society." As a surrealist him self, Levy knew that "no satisfactory basis for art can be found within the existing form of society." (25) Had they been included together at his gallery in 1935, these three images would have sufficed to say as much.

Are photography and surrealism such an "unnatural coupling," as one observer has recently suggested? (26) If the legacy of the surrealist enterprise endures (like the effects that led to many of its photographic artifacts) as a series of inexhaustible practices, then Levy's injunction against "the mounting popularity of the antiseptic" survives as a relevant formal and social residue from the 1935 exhibition. In the lapse between the way it might have existed in the actual historic past and how it may be useful in the variable present, "Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs by Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Alvarez Bravo" provides us with a meaningful theoretical wager with regard to one aspect of photographic surrealism and its systems of value and representation. Even though these three photographers rarely destructured the photographic plane, or distanced the image from its referent, they nevertheless saw beyond the descriptive function of the photograph. In this, Levy preferred to see the documenta ry and the anti-graphic activated as incisive surrealist techniques; not as opposing forces, but--as with power and desire, taboo and metaphor--mutual intensities that join to make the cultural life of the senses productive of the social order.

[Ed. note: See obituary of Manuel Alvarez Bravo in this issue.]

NOTES

(1.) This essay is indebted to the work of editors Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacob in their fine institutional history and source book, Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998). I am especially grateful for the generous time spent in conversation with these scholar-curators who shared with me so much of their invaluable research and archival material.

(2.) In an estimation of Levy's cultural significance, Dorothea Tanning wrote: "Far stronger than the art dealer's temporal sponsorship of a new trend in painting was Julien's commitment to what he saw as an irresistible blue-print for psychic adventure. With his avid research, his translations from the French, and especially his own writing, he ranged himself on the side of ideas rather than that of commercialism, and thus was only a part-time dealer. In Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs, eds., Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), p. 19.

(3.) See Carolyn Burke, "Loy-alism: Julien Levy's Kinship with Mina Loy" in Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs, eds., Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1989), pp. 61-79. See also Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1996), pp. 37-71, 37681 400-402.

(4.) Despite his promotion and support of Stieglitz's work, in his memoir, Levy wrote: "Not having the humility to be a true believer in anyone, including myself, I was never a disciple of Stieglitz, unconvinced, certainly of his mystique as an art dealer, which, at any rate, I did not entirely understand." In Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: Putnam, 1977), p. 52.

(5.) Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: Putnam, 1977), p. 90.

(6.) Levy and his colleagues at Harvard eventually formed an influential generation of cultural promoters or stewards of avant-garde institutions. These include Alfred Barr Jr., at the Museum of Modern Art, and Arthur Everett Austin Jr., at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

(7.) Levy, p. 7.

(8.) This exhibition, which ran January 9-29, 1932, included works by Eugene Atget, Herbert Bayer, Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Charles Howard, George Platt Lynes, Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Roger Parry, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Roy, Maurice Tabard, Umbo, Unknown Master and Jean Violier. The announcement cover was designed by Joseph Cornell.

(9.) This exhibition, which ran February 20-March 11, 1932, included the photographers Herbert Bayer, Ilse Bing, Brassai (credited as "Halesz"), Andre Kertesz, Eli Lotar, Lee Miller and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

(10.) "Exhibition of Portrait Photography, Old and New" ran October 15-November 5,1932. Other photographers included Berenice Abbott, Matthew Brady, Man Ray, Lee Miller, Lucia Moholy, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White.

(11.) Ingrid Schaffner writes: "this bricolage of bric-a-brac seems closer to the marche aux puces than to the Leo Castelli Gallery. But for Julien Levy in the 1930s and 1940s, such a display was evidently surreal. And although he may not have gone so far as to deal in bijoux and bibelots, he did show the work of Joseph Cornell, whose collage boxes are filled, like miniature Wunderkammern, with such a world of 'strange and curious' things." From "Alchemy of the Gallery" in Schaffner and Jacobs, p. 23.

(12.) Michel Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography (Cologne: Konemann, 1998), p.454.

(13.) Levy, p.49.

(14.) Cartier Bresson, Apropos de Paris (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 160. Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues equates Cartier-Bresson's use of the camera--he was rarely without his Leica, from the very first camera, "with neither range finder nor interchangeable lenses"--to the Surrealists' use of automatic writing: "as a window that one leaves permanently open for visitations of the unconscious and the unpredictable."

(15.) See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 121: "The ethnographic label suggests a characteristic attitude of participant observation among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality. The surrealists were intensely interested in exotic worlds, among which they included a certain Paris. Their attitude, while comparable to that of the fieldworker who strives to render the unfamiliar comprehensible, tended to work in the reverse sense, making the familiar strange."

(16.) Michel Leiris, "De Bataille el imposible a la impossible 'Documents'" in Huellas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988), p. 264.

(17.) Manuel Alvarez Bravo to David Travis (Assistant Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago), September 20, 1976, from the Julien Levy Archive, Art Institute of Chicago, in the hand transcription made by Lisa Jacobs.

(18.) Research has failed to uncover any extant copy of the Palacio de Bellas Artes catalog. Reference to the piece by Langston Hughes was provided by Colette Alvarez Urbajtel in the form of a typewritten manuscript.

(19.) As for Cartier-Bresson, Hughes mentions the "tumble-down walls of demolished dwellings in Spain where children are playing in a tumble down world; in others, the worn-bright gestures of prostitutes against doors that are also walls"--an image made on the Calle Cuauhtemoctzin in Mexico City. Regarding the work of Alvarez Bravo, Hughes discusses the photographs Los Agachados, Escala de escalas and Los obstaculos.

(20.) Jeff L. Rosenheim, "'The Cruel Radiance of What Is': Walker Evans and the South" in Hambourg, et. al., Walker Evans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 167.

(21.) This exhibition included Berenice Abbott, Kurt Baasch, Margaret Bourke-White, Maurice Brattner, Anton Bruehl, Arthur Gerlacj Samuel Gottscho, Johnson, Lester, George Platt Lynes, Wendall McRae, Ira Martin, Mortimer Ottner, Thurman Rotan, Sherrill Schell, Stella Simon and Ralph Steiner.

(22.) Michel Leiris, "Skyscraper," in Encyclopedia Acephalica (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 72. By linking the skyscraper to Freud's Oedipus complex, Leiris concludes that these American buildings constitute "one of the most powerful factors in evolution or, if one believes in it, of 'progress,' since it implies a desire not less for substitution than for joyful demolition."

(23.) Walter Benjamin, Edmund Jephcott, trans., "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" in Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 190.

(24.) Jose Ortega y Gasset, Helene Weyl, trans., The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 35-6.

(25.) Herbert Read, Art and Society (1936) (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 120.

(26.) Andy Grundberg, "On the Dissection Table: The Unnatural Coupling of Surrealism and Photography" in Carol Squiers, ed., Over Exposed: Essays on Photography (New York: The New Press, 2001), pp. 123-133. Grundburg sees an unsettled theoretical field in the various historical models fashioned for surrealism and its various appearances-as threads or pulses-throughout the last century. My point is simply that surrealism has various theories of itself, like the important efficacy of the documentary and the anti-graphic as they coalesced around the Julien Levy Gallery in 1935. As a theory and a practice, the possibilities suggested by the mutual terms remain to be further explored today by photographers and cultural critics alike.

ROBERTO TEJADA is an art writer and curator and has authored numerous. catalog essays as well as critical writings on contemporary Latin Amen-can and U.S. Latino artists and photographers in Aperture, SF Camera work and Third Text. Last year, he served as guest curator on the exhibition Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Optical Parables at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and wrote the accompanying material for the Getty's In Focus series. He is currently the Getty E. Chavez Fellow at Dartmouth College.