Certain crepuscular afternoons in Julien [Levy’s]’s apartment above the gallery provide sustained late-day magic along with the dry martinis. It is an appropriate term, magic, perfectly describing the glow that pervades the sepia-painted room, the painted and unpainted people who move in and out of it, artists all in their way….At Julien’s there are, of course, painters to talk to…like Eugene Berman who had seen my first pictures. He led me to Balanchine across the room. “She is just the artist you need for the sleepwalker sets. Costumes too,” he told him. These were the days when ballets had “scenery,” and George Balanchine was as keen on it as anyone else.

A momentous meeting, for it began a collaboration that literally swept me off my feet. Because, studying my maquette one day (this was October 1945, and we were in my studio, on East Fifty-eighth street), George Balanchine, in a burst of creative fervor cried, “Yes! Like this!” And, to demonstrate, swept me up in the air, a one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound lump, my embarrassment adding another hundred pounds. Oh, how to be light and supple, how not to be a dead weight on his famous spine that normally took on thistle-light girls, trained to make themselves so. Of course, it only lasted a moment. He put me down gently as he talked with our composer, Vittorio Rieti. The ballet, The Night Shadow, was presented by Les Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in the old Metropolitan Opera House in March 1946, under the leadership of George Denham (I’ve forgotten his real Russian name). The Night Shadow had the distinction of participating in the last season ever of the company and of the old opera house….

     –from Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001, pp. 84, 86.