CHESTNUT HILL, MA.- The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College will host the New England premiere of Accommodations of Desire: Surrealist Works on Paper Collected by Julien Levy, which will be on display from January 15 through March 24, 2005. This national traveling exhibition includes over 100 drawings, collages, prints, watercolors and photographs by key artists of the Surrealist movement, collected by the late Julien Levy—one of the twentieth century’s most influential art dealers.
“The McMullen is pleased to present this exhibition of Surrealist works collected by the pioneering New York art dealer and avant-garde impresario Julien Levy,” said McMullen Museum Director and Professor of Art History Nancy Netzer. “Levy’s innovative enterprise as revealed in the exhibition inspires insight into the complex weave of aesthetic, social and economic history in America of the 1930s and 1940s.”

Surrealism, which dominated modern art in the 1930s and 1940s, attempted to reconcile everyday reality and the world of dreams into a superreality, or surreality (sur being French for “on” or “above”). Levy described the genre as a melding of dream, metaphor, fetishism, nonsense and play. His passion for this art exceeded professional protocol. One observer described the preeminent art dealer and collector as “militant” about the movement whose cause he advanced through his New York gallery.

He was dedicated to the acquisition of surrealist art—including books, paintings, sculpture, toys, seashells, photographs, drawings, records, prints, cabaret posters, chess boards, and even a Victorian circus automaton.

The 115 works comprising this exhibition testify to Levy’s ardor for the Surrealist movement and its many members. More than merely selling Surrealism, Levy lived it. As revealed in his personal mementos and in works endearingly inscribed to him, Levy was an intimate of the artists he represented. He collaborated with them, making surrealist films, composing a surrealist history, and even initiating a surrealist funhouse for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The exhibition title comes from one of Salvador Dalí’s most famous images, Accommodations of Desire—a painting that Levy once owned and counted among his favorites. In presenting Levy’s personal collection, the exhibition explores not only the dealer’s historic role in the promotion of Surrealism, but also his zeal and affinity for the concepts and artists of this movement.