BARBARAPOE-LEVEE REIS

New York, 1922 - Santa Monica, 2013

Born Barbara Reis in New York on March 4, 1922, Barbara Poe-Levee came of age in one of the most culturally distinguished households of her generation. Her parents, Bernard and Rebecca Reis—Bernard was an accountant to Peggy Guggenheim, Mark Rothko and other artists, surrounded their daughter with the displaced European avant-garde. Yet Poe-Levee was a committed artist in her own right, whose surrealist practice, institutional contributions, and collecting legacy shaped modern art on both coasts.

Educated at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York, the Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and the International School of Geneva, she returned to the United States to study painting and engraving under the Swiss Surrealist Kurt Seligmann, alongside fellow student Robert Motherwell. Poe-Levee’s work debuted in the landmark First Papers of Surrealism (New York, 1942), organized by Duchamp and Breton. The following year, at twenty, she became the youngest artist in Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women, showing The Enchanted Bull (1942) — a work rooted in mythology and magical realism that aligns her practice with that of Leonora Carrington, whom she met the same year in Mexico City. Poe-Levee appeared again in The Women (1945) and received her first solo exhibition through collector Betty Parsons.

After settling in Los Angeles, she co-organized the city's first public exhibition of contemporary art at Exposition Park (1946), which led to the founding of the Institute of Art in Beverly Hills, and she became a founding member of the UCLA Arts Council. Her generous donations enriched LACMA, the Hammer Museum, the Getty Villa, the Norton Simon Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Primary documentation of her career is held in the Bernard and Rebecca Reis Papers at the Getty Research Institute and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Poe-Levee's posthumous reputation has gained momentum through the ongoing reappraisal of the Exhibition by 31 Women artists. Her Untitled (c. 1943) drawing was featured in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25), and subsequently in 31 Mulheres at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025) — the most comprehensive institutional reappraisal of Guggenheim's original exhibition to date, firmly cementing Poe-Levee's place within the canon of American Surrealism.

Work by Barbara Poe-Levee Reis is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Reis' contributions in the record of art history.