Dreams of desire Portland Museum of Art show celebrates a champion of Surrealism

What’s your fetish? Feet? Cars, gloves, handbags? Your girlfriend, boyfriend, child? Go ahead. Admit it. You have a secret fetish. What’s mine? Please! Fetishes can be very private.

Except if you’re Julien Levy. Levy, the avant-garde impresario, made a career out of collecting fetishes. His happened to be Surrealist art. He even defined Surrealism, the artistic and intellectual movement that transmogrifies reality, as fetishism.

You might say – as Levy would – that Surrealism is the stuff of dreams, weird dreams. Never is that more apparent than in “Accommodations of Desire: Surrealist Works on Paper Collected by Julien Levy,” running through March 19 at the Portland Museum of Art. It’s a good Valentine’s Day outing. And if you can’t take your true love (or your favorite fetish) there today, there’s a Surreal Soiree, 6-8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16, with poetry, music, film, performance art, food and a cash bar (age 21 and older) at the Museum’s Great Hall.

It’s likely that most museum-goers will flock to the strange sexual musings of Salvador Dali, the best known of the Surrealists. “I sleep in a sensational art nouveau bed from which flows an uninterrupted fountain of milk,” wrote Dali in a 1939 card for the opening of the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City.

That’s so drippingly Dali.

But the show features more than 100 works from the 20th century by such luminaries as Jean Arp, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Mina Loy, Dorthea Tanning, Eugene Atget, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott. A national traveling exhibition on its last leg, “Accommodations of Desire,” named after a Dali painting, includes etchings, drawings, paintings, tabloid clippings, collages, photographs, films, spinning disks and even a gouache on celluloid of an animation cel from the 1938 Walt Disney film “Pinocchio.” (Levy was the first to show Disney in a commercial gallery.)

When it comes to the art in this collection, you may find yourself relating to a comment made by one of the characters in a “Krazy Kat” comic strip on display: “Not only do I dun’t know where it is – but I also don’t know where it ain’t.”

A stamped and signed color reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” pays homage to Levy’s godfather in art. When the original was first exhibited, it caused an outrage.

Nothing in this show is particularly outrageous to us today, unless, of course, it’s the history of the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City, which Levy ran from 1931-49. It was the hotbed of his artistic prowess. (Posters from his exhibitions are also part of the Portland show.) If Surrealism flourished in New York in the ’30s and ’40s – as well as anything could during the height of the Depression – it’s in part because Levy championed the movement’s practitioners.

Born in 1906 in New York, Levy was encouraged by his family to collect art. He had plenty of money -his father was a lawyer and real estate entrepreneur who developed luxury apartments on Park Avenue – and a progressive family life, as well as a Harvard education. He met Duchamp on the New York gallery circuit, traveled with him to Paris, and returned to the city to launch his own gallery.

His passion for Surrealist art has been compared to Alfred Stieglitz’s passion for photography and Modernism. Apparently, Levy was honored to have his name come up in the same paragraph as Duchamp and Stieglitz, the latter of whom mentored Levy and helped him open his gallery. Although the space was best known for Surrealist art, Levy also gave shows to Alberto Giacometti, Rene Magritte and Frida Kahlo.

Levy lived intimately in the gestalt of the art he loved and among his Surrealist friends, supporting them and supplying them with a gallery. He even initiated the Surrealist fun house at the 1939 World’s Fair. His ongoing project, however, was to amass Surrealist art, and this collection testifies to his success.

There are no Surrealist works in the Portland Museum’s permanent collection. Very few Maine shows, in fact, have taken on Surrealism. Indeed, this is the first major Surrealism show the Portland Museum has ever mounted. It is also likely to be the last time museum-goers will be able to view the works on paper as a show. In June, they will be auctioned off in Paris.

A limited edition catalog accompanies the show. It’s a small black book with a spine of fur. Depending on your tastes, it could make a funny, if a little kinky – but certainly unexpected – Valentine to someone you love. Or fetishize.

“Accommodations of Desire: Surrealist Works on Paper Collected by Julien Levy” will run through March 19 at the Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland. For information, call 775-6148 or visit www.portlandmuseum.org. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.