JULIAN LEVI PAINTINGS
The Downtown Gallery
The Downtown Gallery: JULIAN LEVI PAINTINGS. New York: The Downtown Gallery, February 1940. Original edition. Single blue sheet folded once as a 4-page gallery Announcement. Tipped on halftone to front panel. Printed in silver. Light handling wear overall. A very good example.
7.5 x 5 single-fold Gallery Announcement for Julian Levi’s first solo show From february 20 to March 9, 1940. Mr. Levi moved to New York in 1932 and eventually became a member of the Federal Art Project. In 1940, much of the work he did for the project was shown at the Downtown Gallery in Mr. Levi's first one-man show. [The New York Times]
The The New York Times Obituary JULIAN LEVI, PAINTER, WAS 81; ALSO AN INSTRUCTOR AND CRITIC [Published: March 2, 1982] :
Julian Levi, a painter and an instructor in painting at the Art Students League since 1945, died in St. Vincent's Hospital on Sunday after a short illness. Mr. Levi, who was 81 years old and lived at 79 West 12th Street, was also the director of the art workshop at the New School. Until his retirement in 1977, he was also associated with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, first as a student and later as an instructor and general critic.
Mr. Levi, whose works were in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, was a semi-abstract painter long fascinated by the sea. ''Every artist,'' he said in the 1940's, ''finds some subdivision of nature or experience more congenial to his temperament than any other. To me, it has been the sea.''
In 1958, a critic for The New York Times, commenting on his work, wrote that Mr. Levi's ''kinship with nature is an intimate one; he does not concern himself with specific identifications, but instead with catching in his own way nature's moods in whisks and sprays of shape and color.''
Mr. Levi was born in New York on June 20, 1900. When he was 6, his family moved to Philadelphia, where he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy at the age of 17. Upon his graduation he was awarded a traveling scholarship, which he used to study in Italy. In the 1920's, along with many other expatriates, he lived four years in Paris. Returning to Philadelphia, he later wrote, he found that ''modern artists were scandalous pariahs, and much of our energy at that time was devoted to justifying our existence.''
In 1932, Mr. Levi moved to New York, where he later became a member of the Federal Art Project. In 1940, much of the work he did for the project was shown at the Downtown Gallery in Mr. Levi's first one-man show. In 1969, he was elected a vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Many of the paintings Levi produced while employed by the Federal Art Project, 1936-1938, served as the nucleus of his first one-man show held in 1940 at Downtown Gallery. He remained with Downtown Gallery for more than a decade. Later, he was associated with the Alan Gallery, Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, and Nordness Gallery, each of which staged frequent solo exhibitions of Levi's work. He participated in most of the major national exhibitions and in the Venice Biennale, winning prizes awarded by the Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Institute, National Academy of Design, University of Illinois, Guild Hall, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A large retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by Boston University in 1962, and a small retrospective was held in 1971 at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
A highly respected and much loved teacher, Levi emphasized the importance of drawing and provided individualized instruction. He considered himself a "coach" and viewed his students as less experienced artists (all were encouraged to call him Julian instead of Mr. Levi). His teaching career, which lasted for more than three decades, began in 1946 with his appointments as a painting instructor at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research in New York City (later the New School appointed him director of its Art Workshop). In 1964 he began making weekly trips to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he taught painting; at the start of the 1977 academic year, he reduced his schedule to once a month and acted as a general critic. During the 1967-68 academic year, Levi was on sabbatical leave while artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. In addition, he taught summer courses at Columbia University in the early 1950s and occasionally served as a guest instructor at other summer programs over the years.