Galerie Chalette

"La Chalette"
Galerie Chalette at 9 88th St., New York
Interactive map of Galerie Chalette
Location	45 West57th Street,New York,United States 1100Madison Avenue, New York, USA 9 East88th Street, New York, USA
Coordinates	40°46′58″N73°57′31″W / 40.782691°N 73.958544°W /40.782691; -73.958544
Owner	Arthur Lejwa, Madeleine Chalette Lejwa
Type	Art gallery
Events	Geometric Abstraction,Modernism,Constructivists,Suprematists[1]
Opened	1954
Closed	1978

Galerie Chalette was a privatecontemporary art gallery inManhattan,New York, USA. It was founded by the married art dealers and collectorsMadeleine Chalette Lejwa (1915–1996) and Arthur Lejwa (1895–1972) in February 1954. The Lejwas were refugees from theNazi invasions ofPoland andFrance. Initially, their gallery specialized in contemporary French and Polish prints and painting. Later they changed its focus to contemporary 20th century American and European Sculpture,^[2] and especially the work ofJean Arp.^[3]

"La Chalette" was best known for organizing important^[4] group exhibitions which were then offered to various museums around the United States, includingConstruction and Geometry in Painting (1960), andStructured Sculpture (1960, 1968), as well as their major Arp exhibition,Jean Arp : from the collections of Mme. Marguerite Arp and Arthur and Madeleine Lejwa, at theMetropolitan Museum of Art, in 1972.^[5]

The gallery closed in 1978.

Madeleine Chalette was born in 1915 inParis,France, and moved with her family toPoland as a child. In 1940, following her successful effort to secure the release of her father, Leon Chalette, fromSachsenhausen, a Germanconcentration camp nearBerlin, father and daughter traveled by boat toShanghai, where they lived duringWorld 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 atLong Island University. He served as a representative of thePolish 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 Nazigas 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 byMarc Chagall,Pablo Picasso, andGeorges Braque from the Chalette family collection helped establish the gallery as viable and set the tone for the gallery's future.^{[citation needed]} 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 byJean 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 theIsrael Museum.^[8] The Lejwas also had an interest inAfrican 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 byFernand Léger.^[11]

In 1957, the gallery expanded into new space onMadison Avenue. During this period the Lejwas liaised withJosef Albers, then head of theYale Department of Design inNew 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 toCincinnati,Chicago,Minneapolis, andSan Francisco.^[12]

At the time,abstract expressionist painting had become mainstream gallery fare. This exhibition presentedgeometric 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 byMichel Seuphor) rather thanattention provoking.^[13] 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 theStructured Sculpture show in the same year, which included works byNorman Carlberg,Kent Bloomer,Erwin Hauer,Stephanie Scuris, andRobert Engman,Deborah De Moulpied, all of whom were working at or for Yale (and Albers) at this time.^[14]

Gallerie Chalette continued to present Geometric and Constructivist ideas in solo exhibits from Burgoyne Diller (1961)^[14] and in a series of shows fromLeon Polk Smith, including hisConstellations exhibition of 1968.^[15]

Galerie Chalette's final move^[when?] to 9 East88th Street, New York, was into the ground floor entry hall of a historical five-storybrownstone building close to theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum and two blocks away from theMetropolitan Museum of Art, the two museums with whom they arranged their last major exhibitions,Fangor, at the Guggenheim in 1970,^[16] and Arp with the Met in 1972.^[5]

"The Galerie Chalette’s distinctive quality was that it represented one stylistic direction, namelygeometric abstraction." "Theirs was a story of continuous work on behalf of this style of artist, carried out with great commitment and capital investment. They were collectors and gallerists, and these aspects were indissolubly bound together."^[17]

The Lejwas published catalogues alongside each of their exhibitions, including color plates where possible and commentary by notable critics. This practice reflected the Lejwas' loyalty to their artists and desire to see their artists' reputations and art established and available beyond the gallery's walls. From a business perspective, this attention to the "secondary" art market (the resale of art following its original acquisition from the artist), contributed to La Chalette's increased stature as a gallery throughout the 1960s.^[17]

The gallery developed a spare yet specific and easily identifiable style for its catalogues, which ranged from relatively simple productions to elaborately printed, numbered, limited editions.

Artists represented by the Galerie Chalette included:^[18]

Selected:

• Hepworth, (1959), Barbara Hepworth
• Construction and Geometry in Painting, (31 March – 4 June 1960)^[23] 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)^[24]
• 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

Arthur Lejwa died in New York in October 1972 and was buried inJerusalem. Madeleine Lejwa reconfigured the gallery business asChalette International and continued on as a dealer and consultant, reducing the exhibition aspects of the gallery's work. Madeleine Lejwa made donations to major museums in the United States,^[5] including Arp'sOriforme to theNational Gallery of Art in 1978.^[26][27]

On Madeleine Lejwa's death in 1991, the Galerie Chalette papers were formally lodged at the SmithsonianArchives of American Art and the bulk of the Lejwa Collection went to theIsrael Museum in Jerusalem, which, in 2004, produced a complete catalogue of theArthur and Madeleine Lejwa Collection, featuring Picasso's image of Madeleine Lejwa on the cover.^[28] There were no family survivors of either the Chalette or Lejwa family.

• Apter-Gabriel, Ruth (2005).The Arthur and Madeleine Chalette Lejwa Collection in the Israel Museum. Jerusalem:The Israel Museum.
• Jean Arp: from the collections of Mme. Marguerite Arp and Arthur and Madeleine Lejwa, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York:The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1972.

• Galerie Chalette catalogues onAbeBooks

• 1954 establishments in New York City
• 1978 disestablishments in New York (state)
• Art museums and galleries established in 1954
• Art museums and galleries disestablished in 1978
• Defunct art museums and galleries in Manhattan
• Contemporary art galleries in the United States

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