"Color Solid" device, a color chart in three dimensions (view 2)

Through his New York gallery in the 1930s and 1940s, Julien Levy played a pivotal role in introducing European avant-garde art to America. Levy had studied fine art at Harvard under Arthur Pope, a color theorist who invented the “color solid” device pictured in this photograph. The mathematical model, rendered here in wood, was designed to describe a spectrum of colors arranged according to their saturation and intensity. In his 1977 Memoir of an Art Gallery, for which this photograph was likely taken, Levy wrote that the model appealed to his love of gadgetry and—to the dismay of his conservative professor—his interest in abstraction.