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David Levine Self-portrait |
David Levine
(1926)
Born in 1926 in Brooklyn, David Levine studied painting at Pratt Institute, at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and with Hans Hofmann. His work has been exhibited extensively in major galleries and museums throughout the world and several collections of his paintings and drawings have been published. His work has appeared in The New York Review since 1963.
John Updike, who was one of the artist’s frequent subjects, paid tribute to Levine more than thirty years ago when he wrote:
Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a comic art ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease. Levine is one of America’s assets. In a confusing time, he bears witness. In a shoddy time, he does good work. Here he is.
Among other publications in which his work has appeared are Esquire, Rolling Stone,The New Yorker, Playboy, The New York Times, and Sports Illustrated. American Presidents, a book of Levine’s caricatures of US presidents drawn over five decades, was published in 2008.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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| David Levine_Self Portrait painting at the beach |
David Levine
by ARH
It’s a beautiful winter night tonight in London, Ontario. I’m 32 years-old and sometimes I find it hard to remember exactly how this all started. For now at least, let me say that the organic nature of the digital world has always given me great satisfaction. We’re empowered with technology that would have our predecessors positively salivating. That’s not to say there haven’t been frustrations or complications. Of course there have been. Siteway started off much as it still is: an on-going experiment. I’ve moved the blog and the Siteway illustrations offline for now, and not because I don’t want them accessible (I’ll soon be putting my illustrations back). It’s because I want to show you a new side and sometimes that means making the typewriter ring its bell and throwing in a fresh sheet. It’s a gesture. I’m not one to disrespect the past; by now that much should be clear. For the time being I’m going to press on, as my father says. More simply, I’m going to show you what’s going on today. I had the good fortune to see David Levine speak in NYC last winter. I flew to that great city to see him, Jules Feiffer, and Edward Sorel give a talk at the Museum of New York (Stan Mack was also part of the panel but I was not familiar with him or his work prior to my booking). It was a tremendous day for me, but as I was alone there isn’t usually a platform for expressing the memory. Mr. Levine is certainly one of the greatest living illustrators of our time, and his talk was the most memorable of all the panel. My inexplicable and erratic shyness blocked our actual meeting (though I did get a chance to have Feiffer and Sorel, two other heroes of mine, sign copies of their books), I listened to Mr. Levine joke about his start in the arts. It wasn’t complicated: he painted; he drew; he had the support of a loving wife and the fortune and mindedness to continue painting and drawing. He joked about how his early paintings were mocked. He joked because he knew at some level his paintings were worthy, and he’s right.
Levine’s caricatures have been seen in Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Nation and, for more than forty years, The New York Review of Books, as well as in numerous solo and group shows.
Levine exhibited paintings with the Davis Gallery in New York from 1954 to 1963, before joining the Forum Gallery. In addition to fifteen one-man exhibitions at Forum, Levine has had exhibitions in Paris, Stuttgart, Washington, Munich, Oxford (England), Beverly Hills and Columbus, Georgia.
His most recent show, in 2004, is David Levine: Escape, featuring his iconic watercolors of Coney Island, whose landscape of bazaar and decay has inspired Levine for six decades.
His caricatures and paintings are part of permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum, NY, the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., the Cleveland Museum, the National Portrait Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, England’s National Portrait Gallery and the Pierpont Morgan Library, NY.
Numerous books featuring Levine’s art have been published, including The Arts of David Levine (Knopf, New York, 1978), The Fables of Aesop (Gambit, Boston, 1975), A Summer Sketchbook (Mitchell Press, Vancouver, BC 1963) and Pens and Needles (Gambit, Boston, 1969).
