In early 1927, Julien Levy informed his father that instead of finishing his last semester at Harvard University, he was sailing to Europe with the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to begin his career as an experimental filmmaker. Six months later he returned home to New York with a new passion, Surrealism, and a new calling, gallery director. Levy has long been considered one of the foremost champions in New York of Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, only episodic attention has been paid to an important aspect of his activities: photography. In 1976, David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, organized the exhibition Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection: Starting with Atget, which drew upon the dazzling selection acquired by the institute. Additional exhibitions held in New York in 1977 and 1998, Mexico City in 2002, Paris and Pasadena in 2004, as well as the excellent scholarship of Ingrid Schaffner, have helped fill in Levy’s collecting history. Then in 2006 an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focused on the major gift of around 2,500 photographs given to the museum in 2001 by his widow, Jean Farley Levy, and Lynne and Harold Honickman. The...