A historian moves to Newtown, answers a want ad in ‘The Bee’ and so begins…

Marie Difilippantonio’s Surreal Life

By John Voket

As the curator for the estate of the famed surrealist promoter and exhibitor Julien Levy, Newtown resident Marie Difilippantonio lives in a world where she frequently drops some of the art world’s most famous names: Salvador Dali, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Frida Kahlo, Eugène Atget, Arshile Gorky, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and Isamu Noguchi.

And since she has, in her professional capacity, cataloged original works, images and correspondence from most of these artistic luminaries, their names fly in and out of conversation like so many droplets of paint flung across a sheer, blank canvas.

But Ms Difilippantonio never fashioned herself  as a resource for a growing number of surrealist art devotees, journalists and photography fans looking to learn more about the handsome gentleman who traveled to France in the late 1920s to study film as a protégé of Man Ray and ended up being the first person to elevate the work of photographers as well as wildly creative painters and sculptors to the floors of the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City just a few years later.

In that respect, Mr Levy and Ms Difilippantonio may have shared the experience of setting off on a journey that brought them to an eventual and unexpected destination.

Ms Difilippantonio has lived in Newtown since 1978 when she moved here from Roswell, Ga. After a divorce, she married Gary Difilippantonio, a Newtown resident, in 1987. Together they have four children, all of whom attended Newtown schools.

It was at a point in 1984 when the history major who previously spent her time as a full-time mom, began doing temporary work at Taunton Press and Gateway Bank. But an ad in The Newtown Bee for a secretary caught her eye, and she dispatched an application and resume to one Jean Farley Levy, the third wife of Julien Levy and recent heir to a substantial collection of Mr Levy’s artwork, photography collectibles and correspondence.

According to Ms Difilippantonio, she later had the opportunity to see the notes on her resume by Mrs Levy, and realized that she was hired as a result of her horoscope and not on any specific attributes from her educational or career background. And while she spent some time handling day-to-day secretarial and estate management duties, she increasingly found herself working with the Levy collection.

“I had a BA in history,” she recalled. “I wasn’t involved in the art world at all. And while I never really worked in the history field, I was always interested in research. So now with the Levy archive, you could say I’m involved in research more or less.”

Early on, Ms  Difilippantonio found herself among files and piles of artwork and photos.

“When Julien closed his galleries in the ‘30s and ‘40s he brought much of his artwork to display at an old farmhouse in Bridgewater,” she said. “But in 1981, when he died, Sotheby’s auctioned off part of his collection to settle his estate, and the remaining collection went to Mrs Levy.” 

The art portion of that collection was auctioned with great success in a historic three-day sale at Tajan in Paris in October 2004 in an auction titled “Hommage à Julien Levy.”  The estate auctioned additional art at Tajan in June of this year and a sale of documentation will be held this coming October. 

A significant portion of the remaining photography, much of which resides permanently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, became the focus of work Ms Difilippantonio continues to monitor to this day. So much of the Levy collection was photography because, as she tells it, “Julien was the first collector to promote photography as an art form.” 

A press release announcing a 2005 surrealist exhibit at the Knoxville Museum of Art sums up the man and his passion succinctly: “Julien Levy was one of the 20th Century’s most influential art dealers and his Manhattan gallery operated from 1931 to 1949, when the center of the cultural avant-garde was transitioning from Paris to New York. As a champion for Surrealism, experimental film and photography, Levy was a conduit for many vital aesthetic changes originating in Europe. Mentored by the great American photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, Levy opened his gallery to showcase a Surrealist approach to photography, a movement that favored psychological complexity over pictorial clarity. As sampled through the singular thread of works on paper, this exhibition attests to Levy’s vigorous appreciation of Surrealism as a whole.”

Cataloguing The Collection

During her years working with Mrs Levy, and in the years since her death, as a curator for the foundation that has taken over affairs for the family, Ms Difilippantonio believes she has cataloged in excess of 2,500 photos, over 1,200 works of art, and numerous books, gallery catalogs and ephemera.

“Even shortly before Julien’s death, some of the collection was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago and Fogg Museum at Harvard. But photography still wasn’t popular for display even in 1981,” Ms Mrs. Difilippantonio said. It wasn’t until Mrs Levy gifted those 2,500 pieces to the Philadelphia Museum of Art 20 years later that the collection received the attention it so richly deserved.

“As part of the gift/purchase agreement, the Philadelphia Museum of Art dedicated a gallery in Julien’s name,” Ms Difilippantonio said.

In 2006, the Levy collection has received much attention from two highly attended exhibits. The first, entitled “Looking at Atget,” was dedicated to more than 300 photographs from the Parisian artist Eugène Atget.

The second exhibit, which recently opened and will run through September is called, “Dreaming in Black and White – Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery.” The show also celebrates what would have been Mr Levy’s 100th birthday.

Besides his affinity for Atget, Mr Levy was a friend and fan of Salvador Dali, and provided Dali with his first U.S. show at the Levy Gallery in New York. And while Mr Levy did not consider himself a photographer, he is known for several works including a series of pictures taken of Dali as he constructed his “Dream of Venus” pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair.

Mr Levy is also known for a series of intimate photos he shot of Frida Kahlo, the wife of painter Diego Rivera, with whom he was rumored to have had a brief love affair.

“He was a collector and dealer of photography and surrealist art, not an artist himself although some of his photography is quite good,” Ms Difilippantonio said. “Mrs Levy was also a great promoter of Julien and the surrealist artists he loved.”

Now it is Ms Difilippantonio who is inspired and charged with carrying on the work of Mrs Levy, “to be sure his work is acknowledged,” she said of the gentleman she never met but knows so intimately.

As recently as last week, Ms Difilippantonio hosted a pair of researchers from Paris, who were doing separate projects on Mr Levy.

“Because he was the first dealer to give shows to Dali, Max Ernst and other surrealist that are so well-known today, there is a lot of interest in Mr Levy,” she said.

Ms Difilippantonio is fond of two particular quotes attributed to Mr Levy that she believes sums up part of the reason why he was so inspired by the hyper-intensified creations.

“Surrealism is a point of view,” Mr Levy wrote in 1936. “And as such, is applied to painting, literature, play, behaviour, politics, architecture, photography and cinema.”

Mr Levy subsequently wrote, “Surrealism attempts to intensify experience,” a quote that has served as something of a credo to not only legions of devotees to the art form, but to Ms Difilippantonio as well.