Silvano Levy


Silvano Levy is an academic and art critic specialising in surrealism. He has published on Belgian surrealism with studies on René Magritte, E.L.T. Mesens and Paul Nougé. His research on The Surrealist Group in England began with a film on Conroy Maddox and the book Conroy Maddox: Surreal Enigmas, while a wider interest in the movement led to the publication of Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality and Surrealism. Levy has curated national touring exhibitions of the work of Maddox and Desmond Morris, and has published a monograph on the latter entitled Desmond Morris: 50 Years of Surrealism, which was followed by the enlarged re-edition Desmond Morris: Naked Surrealism. Subsequent books on Morris include Lines of Thought: The Drawings of Desmond Morris and two volumes of an analytical catalogue raisonné spanning eight decades. Silvano Levy's monograph on Maddox, The Scandalous Eye. The Surrealism of Conroy Maddox, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2003. 2015 saw the publication of Decoding Magritte. Further studies cover Sheila Legge, Toni del Renzio, André Breton, Dina Lenković, Jean-Martin Charcot and Birmingham surrealism. Dr Levy is editor of Surrealist Bulletin and has held academic posts at the University of Liverpool, Newcastle Polytechnic, the University of Bath, the University of Hull and Keele University, where he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in French in 1998 and then to Reader in 2005.

Papers