Galerie Chalette

Madeleine Chalette was born in 1915 in Paris, France, and moved with her family to Poland as a child. In 1940, following her successful effort to secure the release of her father, Leon Chalette, from Sachsenhausen, a German concentration camp near Berlin, father and daughter traveled by boat to Shanghai, where they lived during World War II, arriving in the United States in 1946.[6] Arthur Lejwa, a Polish-born biochemist, immigrated to the United States in 1939 and taught at Long Island University. He served as a representative of the Polish Government in Exile during World War II. His intentions of returning to Poland after the war were crushed when he received word that his entire family had perished in the Nazi gas chambers. He met Chalette soon after her arrival in the United States and they married in 1947.[7]

The gallery's early exhibitions in the 1950s were largely thematic.[3] Chalette's pre-war connections and works by Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque from the Chalette family collection helped establish the gallery as viable and set the tone for the gallery's future. The Lejwas prided themselves on their close friendships with the artists they represented.[8] During the first four years of their gallery, they presented new works by Jean Arp,[9] Chagall,[10] Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Henri Matisse, and Picasso. Picasso's sketch of Madeleine Lejwa from this period is now in the collection of the Israel Museum.[11] The Lejwas also had an interest in African art. In 1956, they arranged for North African artisans to produce limited edition carpet designs by Picasso, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Jean Lurçat as well as several pieces by Fernand Léger.[12]

In 1957, the gallery expanded into new space on Madison Avenue. During this period the Lejwas liaised with Josef Albers, then head of the Yale Department of Design in New Haven. Albers, another European war refugee, worked with the Lejwas. In 1960, they mounted the group exhibit, Construction and Geometry in Painting, from Malevich to “tomorrow”, which included works by Albers, Arp, Max Bill, Sonia Delaunay, César Domela, Victor Vasarely, and others. This exhibition subsequently travelled to Cincinnati, Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.[13]

At the time, abstract expressionist painting had become mainstream gallery fare. This exhibition presented geometric abstract painting up to the present day, which was at that time a new aesthetic for the American audience, serious and silent (according to the bilingual catalogue text by Michel Seuphor) rather than attention provoking.[14] Championing the geometric abstract aesthetic would become the work for which Galerie Chalette would become best known.

A second exhibition formed through the Albers connection was the Structured Sculpture show in the same year, which included works by Norman Carlberg, Kent Bloomer, Erwin Hauer, Stephanie Scuris, and Robert Engman, Deborah De Moulpied, all of whom were working at or for Yale (and Albers) at this time.[15]

Gallerie Chalette continued to present Geometric and Constructivist ideas in solo exhibits from Burgoyne Diller (1961)[15] and in a series of shows from Leon Polk Smith, including his Constellations exhibition of 1968.[16]

Construction and Geometry in Painting (1958) This clean, sans-serif font was used on all catalogue not using artist signatures

Galerie Chalette's final move to 9 East 88th Street, New York, was into the ground floor entry hall of a historical five-story brownstone building close to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and two blocks away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the two museums with whom they arranged their last major exhibitions, Fangor, at the Guggenheim in 1970,[17] and Arp with the Met in 1972.[18]

Artists represented by the Galerie Chalette included:[21]

Selected:

• Hepworth, (1959), Barbara Hepworth
• Construction and Geometry in Painting, (31 March – 4 June 1960)[26] Traveling Schedule: Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati (July–October), Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago (November–December), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (January–February)
• Structured Sculpture, (1961)
• Structured Sculpture, (1968)[27]
• Torn Drawings, (1965), Leon Polk Smith
• Fangor, (1970) in collaboration with the Guggenheim
• Jean Arp : from the collections of Mme. Marguerite Arp and Arthur and Madeleine Lejwa, (1972) in collaboration with the Met