Arts and Letters

In spite of all the years I had known Julian Levi as a close friend, I found when writing this tribute that I knew very little about his early days or his formative years. We chatted constantly when we were together, about current events, and personalities in the art world, and what we were doing or about to do. I seldom made a move on the professional level without talking it over with Julian; he had such very good sense. But our conversations never went back to the distant past.

What I know about his beginnings is what he revealed in an article about himself that he contributed to The Magazine of Art for December 1940.

Julian Levi was born in New York City, June 20, 1900, but his family moved to Philadelphia when he was six. He attended public schools until he was seventeen, and then enrolled in the venerable Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Just at this time there was a real crisis at the school, a war between conservatives and radicals. Julian didn't know much about the issues involved, but he sided with the radicals, being won over by their personal warmth and exuberance. The radicals of those days were Post-Impressionists, not Cubists, and he chose to study under Arthur Carles, who had once studied under Matisse.

After three years at the Academy, Julian had made a name for himself as one of the most promising students. He was awarded the Cresson Traveling Fellowship, which was intended to offer a Grand Tour, lasting about a year, of the masterpieces of Europe. Having sailed for Italy in 1920, he spent some time in Rome and then in Florence. His strongest impression was of the Masaccio frescoes in Florence, which overwhelmed him with their penetrative rendering of human feeling. He had never before heard of Masaccio and now wondered why the Academy hadn't prepared him for the impact of those frescoes.

Julian was glad to leave Italy, where the Blackshirts were becoming obstreperous. The real action, so he felt, was to be found in Paris. Once there, he determined to live like a Frenchman and learn to speak the language with decent fluency. He was in Montparnasse during the great onrush of American "exiles," and some of them became his lifelong friends. His closest companion, however, was neither French nor American; he was Jules Pascin, an artist of Middle European background. Pascin was pretty famous, had traveled widely on several continents (besides spending the war years in the United States), and had acquired a vast sophistication. He was known chiefly as a draftsman and he had developed his own style of drawing, one that is hard to find words for. Awkwardly it can be described as a kind of empathetic hypnotic relationship with the model, with vibrations emanating through the tip of the drawing instrument, without correction. Julian did a lot of sketching with Pascin in all sorts of places, some of them "disreputable." Pascin was supposed to know every brothel in Paris. That was in the tradition of Toulouse-Lautrec, to whose draftsmanship Pascin owed a great deal.

Of course, something else was going on in Paris at the time. Julian haunted the Louvre, as well as other galleries great and small, and he was lifted by the groundswell of experimentation with new patterns and colors. During this post-Cubist period he learned about "the architecture of painting" from Picasso and Léger. He worked intensely at his painting as only the very young can work. Paintings of his were accepted by the Salon d'Automne in 1921 and 1922, a great honor for such a young man.

After four years in Paris it was time for him to go home. The fellowship had been used up long before, but he had done odd jobs for magazines and had received some help from his family. He was not prepared for the quality of life that he encountered after his return. Philadelphia, once the center of civilization in America, now seemed hidebound and provincial. Modern art was something to be jeered at in Philadelphia, and there were scarcely half a dozen liberated artists in the area. Franklin Watkins, George Biddle, Arthur Carles, and even Charles Demuth were the derided ones, and they decided to organize a Salon des Refusés. Alas, that turned out to be a disaster and Julian was plunged into a deeper gloom. He decided to take the bold step, for him, of leaving Philadelphia and permanently settling in New York.

That was in the depths of the Depression. New York was more hospitable to modern art than Philadelphia, but even so the opportunities for a modern American artist were, at the time, severely limited. There were only two permanent galleries devoted to modern work. They were the Stieglitz and the Daniel Galleries, both of which were having a hard time paying the rent. For Julian the chances were not bright.

When the Federal Art Project was organized there was a miraculous change in the fortunes of art in America. For the first time artists were being paid a little public money to do their own work. The weekly payment was only a pittance—but still it preserved the promise and the future of many American artists of every political and artistic persuasion. It brought artists together as nothing before had ever brought them, and Julian found himself in the middle of the action, completely integrated.

The reactions of different artists to the hardships of the Great Depression were as varied and complicated as the condition that called them forth. One needed no foreign ideology to drive home the point. It was not a simple matter of leaving the ivory tower, as pure art had come to be called, and taking to the streets. Each artist responded differently and within his own context. Julian, for example, immersed himself in the subjects he knew best—“the things of the sea," as he called them—especially Barnegat Bay on the Jersey shore, with its seascapes and its people. He also did a remarkable series of portraits at the time. One that especially comes to mind is "Mrs. Boni Playing the Recorder," for the magically simple fashion in which he organized the portrait. The subject has a placid, contained face, with all the mobility expressed in her fingers playing the recorder. Something of Pascin's method must have operated here.

I first met Julian in 1934. He was a rather short man with a full, sweeping mustache—his most prominent feature at a time when most men wore their hair short and kept their mustaches trimmed. He had lively eyes and a gentle face and was very good company. Over the years we saw a lot of Julian and his wife Jean and always wished we could have seen more.

His first one-man show was at the Downtown Gallery and it was a great critical and financial success. From that time he began to accumulate honors and medals, more of them than I could list. But the period of his widest success, not merely American but international, was cut short by a serious heart attack in the 1950s.

One day he stopped in to his framer's to ask about a picture. The framer said, "I'd like to show you a Picasso that I'm reframing—what do you think of it?" Julian, at moments when he wanted to be emphatic, had a habit of talking through the side of his mouth in a low, measured tone. "That's not a Picasso," he said. The framer said, "What do you mean not a Picasso? It's signed and dated and look at the documentation on the back." Julian said, "I know it's not a Picasso because I painted it myself."

Pictures from his Paris period may have been kept in a closet somewhere, but he never showed them to me, and I saw only one on the wall of a collector. It was signed Julian E. Levi, and it looked perfectly comfortable among the Picassos and the Juan Gris.

Julian's heart attack in the 1950s was a true disaster. In those days the cure usually prescribed by doctors was complete rest, no exercise or stress of any sort, and plenty of tranquilizers. Julian was terrified. He stopped painting—though nothing could have been more agitating—and started teaching at the Art Students League. There he became one of the most popular instructors in the history of the League. As he regained health and confidence, he started painting again. Naturally he went back to his old passion, "the things of the sea," with special emphasis on the architecture of painting.

He produced a few fine pictures in this later period, but he was plagued with ill health recurrently and the new synthesis did not come easily. As a result, he found himself teaching more and painting less. Besides his post at the Art Students League he also taught at the New School, and finally—as if to express the love that was mingled with his hatred of Philadelphia—he became associated as an adviser to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.