During time spent in Paris in 1927, New York-born Julien Levy came into contact with a number of European artists and photographers, as well as some American artists and photographers who were spending time there. After his return to New York, he worked in the print room at the Weyhe Gallery as Carl Zigrosser’s assistant.
In 1931 he opened his own gallery on 607 Madison Avenue, where it remained until 1937 when he moved it to 15 East 57th Street. In 1941, he spent some time in California running his business there, then in 1942 he relocated back to 15 East 57th Street. In 1943, the gallery moved to 42 East 57th Street, where it remained until its closure in 1949. The Julien Levy Gallery was situated during the years in the gallery district around 57th Street, where the Weyhe Gallery and the Norlyst Gallery were also located.

Levy specialised from the very beginning in American and European art and photography, focusing on the avantgarde network between Paris and New York. During the 1930s, the only galleries to exhibit photography as an art form were the Alfred Stieglitz gallery, An American Place and the Weyhe Gallery. Besides photography, Julien Levy’s gallery was also known for its exhibitions of contemporary art featuring new and international trends in painting, film and sculpture.
In his Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers exhibition in 1932, Julien Levy featured the work of European photographers and made them visible in the New York photography scene. Among the photographers exhibited were Ilse Bing, Herbert Bayer, Umbo, Walter Peterhans, Maurice Tabard, László Moholy-Nagy and André Kertész. Many of them had their first exhibitions in the U.S. and were unaware that just a few years later they would be emigrating to New York. Ilse Bing's work, for example, gained a considerable reputation thanks her participation in New York exhibitions in the 1930s. It was during this time that she had the opportunity to travel to New York and made her first visual encounters with the city. When she was obliged to emigrate to New York in 1941, her reputation failed to reach the heights it had enjoyed in 1932.
It is not known whether Julien Levy’s gallery particularly focused on émigré photographers in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, showing their work in his exhibitions, as he did with émigré avantgarde and surrealist artists such as Férnand Léger, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, but he was very interested in transatlantic artistic exchange.
During the late 1930s and 1940s the German émigré painter and photographer T. Lux Feininger (the brother of the photographer Andreas Feininger) had three exhibitions at the Julien Levy Gallery on his paintings. From May, 5 until December, 31 1937 his first one man show Paintings of Ships run at the Julien Levy Gallery. Following in 1940 with the two men show together with the artist and photographer Ben Shan and in January 1947 with a solo exhibition. T. Lux Feininger emigrated in 1936 to New York. Beside his career as painter he photographed the city also focussing like in his paintings on nautical topics as well as the urban infrastructure and transportation system and everyday scenes on the street.