Muriel Streeter Papers

Muriel Streeter (1913-1995) was an American artist known for her surrealist and neo-romantic paintings. Before moving to New York in 1937, Streeter honed her skills as a painter and model. Her works feature women in flowing gowns set against dreamlike landscapes. Streeter was a prominent artist in the Surrealist movement, not only marrying art dealer Julien Levy but also being captured in works by other leading figures like Dorothea Tanning, Man Ray, and Lee Miller. Her work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Muriel Streeter's biography written by Stephen Robeson-Miller for Sotheby's in 2015:

Muriel Streeter was born in Vineland, New Jersey, in 1913, the daughter of Quakers. She would always say that she "was born interested in art," and from an early age wanted to be an artist. To this end, during the 1930s she studied in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Franklin Watkins, and in New York at the Art Student's League. In 1937, en route to France on the Normandy, she met, through her friend Pierre Matisse, the Surrealists' New York art dealer, Julien Levy, and the two traveled together in Europe that summer. In 1944 she and Levy were married, and she began to exhibit Surrealist works at his gallery and that of Peggy Guggenheim, as well as in annual exhibitions at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Corcoran Gallery in Washinton. In time, her work came under the influence of the Neo-Romantic artists Leonid and Eugene Berman, and she developed her own style of hauntingly poetic landscapes, which were aquired by such people as Joseph Cornell and Max Ernst. Photographed by Man Ray and Lee Miller, and painted by Dorothy Tanning, she maintained her friendships with the Surrealist coterie even after her divorce from Levy in 1957. She died of cancer in Tucson, Arizona, in 1995.