Max Levai Directs the Marlborough Chelsea WHAT were you doing when you were 24? Blogging about an annoying boss? Living with your parents while trying to find meaning after college? Occupying Wall Street? Couch surfing? It's likely that you were not the principal director of an imposing Chelsea gallery. And yet, that's what Max Levai is doing at 24. His father, Pierre Levai, who runs the blue-chip Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street, appointed him director of Marlborough Chelsea last year. Father, who is French-born, wears ties. His son wears sneakers, and says he tries not to dwell on the gallery's massive 10,000-square-foot size, where he sits downstairs in front, not in an office. "I'm still at the point of wanting to meet people," is how he explains it. At the Armory Show this week, his gallery will have its own booth, separate from the main Marlborough one. Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe are among the artists he will show. Their installation "Hello Meth Lab in the Sun" caught his eye not long ago at Jeffrey Deitch's gallery. "I saw it, and I knew I had to have them in my gallery," Mr. Levai said. Others he represents are equally provocative. One, Rashaad Newsome, mashes rapper imagery and European history, and will be the first performance artist represented by Marlborough. Another, Robert Lazzarini, fabricates objects like safes and skulls that look pulled like taffy. At 46, Mr. Lazzarini teases Mr. Levai that he's old enough to be his father. But Mr. Lazzarini also introduces him to people in the art world. "I'm just trying to learn from everyone, so I listen as much as possible," said Mr. Levai, who only seems innocent in a tough market, although it's also hard, with his russet hair, soulful brown eyes and pale skin, not to see him as looking like an older Max of "Where the Wild Things Are" who also set out on a hero's journey of sorts. At his father's openings as a child, and when he wasn't busy playing video games, he learned from what the grown-ups were saying about the work of Fernando Botero, Richard Estes, Dale Chihuly, Tom Otterness and other artists represented by Marlborough. His first art memory was a Red Grooms installation (another Marlborough artist) at Grand Central Terminal in 1993. Art runs in the family. Mr. Levai's great-uncle, Frank Lloyd, was a founder of Marlborough, in London in 1946. Mr. Levai's father, now 76, met his mother, Rosemary, when she was an assistant to Philippe de Montebello at the Metropolitan Museum in the 1970s. They are divorced. Looking at art was as regular an activity for father and son as fishing. "When my father took me to museums, I always wanted to rent the recorded-tour headsets," Mr. Levai said on a recent evening in a spare but imposing office he borrowed from a staff member of his gallery, since he doesn't have his own. But he said no because he wanted to talk and he also wanted to hear what I had to say. Was that a key to raising a son willing to step up so early without the requisite period of rebellion? "My father didn't push, but we'd go and look at art, and he'd tell me a little, and then we'd talk about other things," Mr. Levai said. He never pressured me to join the business, but he was always around for me. I see him as much as a friend as a father. Even when Dad disapproves of how things are going and son gets in trouble. That's what happened when he was late with the catalog for his first major group exhibition, "Blind Cut," a multi-generational survey of international artists held this winter. "He warned me the catalog would take longer than I thought," he said. But once it materialized, he added, it was so impressive that his father had nothing but praise. "One of the reasons I started here right away is that he's in his mid-70s," he said, sitting below a sculpture of a stretched skull by Mr. Lazzarini that seemed to be rushing forward into the future. There isn't a lot of time for me to learn how his business runs. There was sadness in his voice, perhaps at the thought of his father's mortality. But then, he is without the glibness and buoyancy of the young. Well, as Shakespeare wrote, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." That was the sentiment of Henry IV, whose cutup son, Hal, eventually bucked up to step up and become Henry V. How does the younger Mr. Levai, who not so long ago was playing basketball for the Browning School, then studying art history at Marymount Manhattan College, escape the responsibility of the insurance, the shipping, the critics and all the curatorial conversations? He goes to Knicks games with his father, hangs out with artists and hits the occasional club, too. Lately he's been cooking in his East Village apartment for school pals, many who live in Bushwick or Greenpoint, Brooklyn, or with parents. He also smokes. "But only recently in front of my father," he said while inhaling a Camel Light in front of his gallery on West 25th Street in the dusk. I guess that means I'm really a grown-up now. Cigarette finished, he opened the impossibly heavy glass doors to his monumentally modern glass building, where his gallery occupies a couple of floors. Two tiny figures passed though, looking about as big as raccoons. They said hello: the Olsen twins, formidable fashion designers at an early age. "I think they're 25 now," Mr. Levai said. Old people!