Foundation 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. 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.
45 West 57th Street The gallery's early exhibitions in the 1950s were largely thematic. During the first four years of their gallery, they presented new works by
Jean Arp, Chagall,
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.
1100 Madison Avenue 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. 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. 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. Gallerie Chalette continued to present Geometric and Constructivist ideas in solo exhibits from Burgoyne Diller (1961)
88th Street 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, and Arp with the Met in 1972. == Aesthetic ==