The auction houses Millon and Baron Ribeyre again dedicate two auctions to the photographs gathered by the gallery owner Gérard Lévy (1934-2016) on June 13 and 16, 2017.
Back in the early 1970s, Gérard Lévy showed me something terrible: an album of Paris police photographs recording scenes of violent crimes from around 1900. Sprawling victims in sordid rooms. Chaos. Blood everywhere. He was gleeful when I winced. He loved testing Americans.
Did I see what he saw? Did I see, beyond the brutality, what moved him to acquire this foul object from that dingy shop, La Lanterne Magique? Did I see how crime was stupid, brilliant, and plainly human? I think this is why he collected and sold photographs. He wasn’t only building a clientele in the little room behind his shop of Asian antiquities on the rue de Beaune. He was creating a circle of people like himself, for whom the eye is a more mysterious, more imaginative version of the brain. Where every image leads the viewer beyond what is seen.
Every time I came to Paris I visited Gérard’s police album, quivering, as if it were some ferocious beast in a zoo. I kept coming. After twenty-five years, it was part of me. I wrote a book about it—Crime Album Stories (2000). It was inevitable. I’d been schooled to love it. Gérard was unique—an art dealer who loved to teach. Looking was a fine art for him. He made it into a drama. He staged his presentations of photographs exactly the way he taught me to eat the cheese course at a French meal. Don’t just plunge in, cherie! Start with the mildest and gradually, doucement, progress toward the one that bites your tongue and makes you sneeze. That’s how he showed us photographs. I don’t know if he realized the extent to which he was also teaching history, geography, customs, moral philosophy, and the strangeness of human behavior. It didn’t matter. His sales to curators and collectors began to establish the beginnings of the photo-graphic market in the 1970s, not only because what he had to offer was beautiful and rare. Buyers came to be awakened and enchanted.
So did scholars. When the Musées nationaux invited me to curate the photography section for the exhibition L’Art en France sous le Second Empire, in 1978, I turned to Gérard. “Photography is the greatest art the Second Empire produced. This section has to be unlike anything anyone has ever seen,” I told him. Suddenly he was showing me one-of-a-kind Nadars and Le Grays he’d pulled from his cellar. “Un choix royal!” he crowed. It was. Of the forty-two photographs I borrowed, sixteen were Gérard’s. Le Monde loved it. Gérard confided, “You’ll never be asked to do this again.”
It was his highest compliment. Meaning what we had achieved far exceeded what the museums expected or dreamed of. And why not? Everything Gérard did in photography was exactly that.
Eugenia Parry
Eugenia Parry is an art historian and critic living in the United States.
Sales of the Gérard Lévy collection
Tuesday June 13, 2017 at 2:30 PM
Photographs for all – Unusual photographs
Friday, June 16, 2017 at 2:30 PM
The excellence of a look II
Collection Photographs
Salle V.V.
3 rue Rossini
75009 Paris
France
