Barbara Poe Levee

Barbara Poe Levee (1922–2013), born Barbara Reis, was an American surrealist painter, art collector and benefactor.

Early life Poe Levee was born in New York on March 4, 1922. Her parents were among the art connoisseurs and collectors who, in the early 1940s, supported European artists fleeing the Second World War. Her mother, Rebecca, was a painter, and her father, Bernard, a wealthy accountant. Both were avid collectors of modern art, an enthusiasm their daughter came to share. She was educated at the Rudolph Steiner School in New York, the Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and the International School of Geneva, Switzerland. Her education was supplemented with travels with her family throughout Europe during the 1930s.

She became friends with the painter Pegeen Vail, the daughter of Peggy Guggenheim. Other friends in the 1940s included artists such as Luchita Hurtado, Roberto Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, and Robert Motherwell. She studied painting and engraving with Kurt Seligmann. In 1941, Poe Levee went with Motherwell, a fellow student, Matta and the artist Anne Clark to the mountain town of Taxco, in Mexico. They also visited the British surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford, who lived at Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán. In January 1943, Poe Levee exhibited in the Exhibition by 31 Women, organized by Guggenheim in her Art of This Century gallery in New York, showing a painting called The Enchanted Bull, which had strong surrealist influences. She was the youngest of the artists represented there. Her work also appeared in Guggenheim's follow-up exhibition, The Women, in 1945. In 1943 she returned to Mexico, visiting Mexico City with Vail, where she met the surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington. Her last public exhibition was with Les Biller in Santa Monica in 2008.

Poe Levee was a significant art collector and made donations of works from her collection to several American museums, including the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, giving the Death Mask of Amedeo Modigliani by Jacques Lipchitz. She donated a surrealist Immortal Life by John D. Graham to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Hammer Museum at UCLA also received gifts.

Death Poe Levee continued painting into the late 1980s, working on smaller watercolors that could be handled from a chair. She died on September 13, 2013 in Santa Monica, California. Her paintings are now held by, among others, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Lasker collection, the Getty Villa, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.