David Levine's Magazine Covers

A gallery of some of David Levine's magazine covers

Paintings and Drawings by David Levine and Aaron Shikler

Some of you might remember this exhibit in April, 1971.  If you click on one of the images, it will enlarge.

David Levine, the teacher is gone

David Levine Memorial Service

A memorial service was held in Brooklyn Heights on Monday, February 1, 2010.  Here's a link to a report on the event.  Here's the text of what David's son said at the service.

"For some reason, when I was little, I couldn’t go to sleep without my father telling me a bedtime story about my stuffed animals, led by a cocker spaniel named Tacko, and how they came to life the moment I fell asleep. 

They slid from my bed, tip toed down the hall and, every night, my father invented a new way for them to open the apartment door.  Then they were free.  Whatever their night’s adventure involved, it always ended the same way, with them finding their way to a building out in Brooklyn where the slaughterhouse livestock was kept.  They would free the sheep and goats and cows and let loose a stampede, right under the nose of a guard who would tear his hair out and shout, “They’re driving me crazy!”

That part would drive me crazy with laughter, and I’d beg him to show me how the guard pulled out his hair, over and over again.  Then Tacko and friends would sneak back in bed with me, just before I woke up. 

So much of my father is in that story.  His ability to fill the inanimate with life.  His sense of justice.  His love of the underdog.  His compassion for all living creatures.   The humor he derived from the flaunting of an individual’s right to expression in the face of authority.  And his understanding that play and playfulness are the keys to freedom.

Everyone who knew him – and there are so many of us! – knows that he was first and foremost a man at play.  His caricatures were questions in the form of statements.  They made you engage his perspective. Essentially, they made you play with him. 

His paintings were explorations of the possibilities of paint, hung on the human figure, or on the crumbling remnants of monuments to play.  A finished painting was never his objective, but time to play with paint was something he fought for.

His tennis was pure joy.  He could care less about winning.  What he wanted was to be involved in an interesting point, or simply to be on the court with an interesting person.   And just about everyone he met was interesting to him in some way, even if he secretly disliked someone, which was rare.

This is not to say that my father was all ease and pleasure.  In fact, he explored, without compromise, every gesture and every statement made in his presence.  Maybe two weeks before he died, I was visiting him in the nursing home and I had an awful sense that he was so sick I might never see him again.  But all I said was “Gotta get back to the office, dad.  I love you.” 

“Now why did you say that?” he said.  “You said that because you’re afraid I might die.  Now, I certainly am going to die, but not tonight.  Now go one, get outta here.”

In the same way that I couldn’t get to sleep without a story from my father, perhaps my greatest fear in life was of losing him before I could be filled with everything he had to offer.  There seemed to be an endless wealth of surprising wisdom that flowed from him, of startling points of view that I wished I had thought of, of stories that went to the heart of being human, of reassurances that, no matter what the anguish of my situation, I had better get back to play because that’s where life was lived and the rest was really a waste of precious time.

But a surprising thing happened the moment he took his last breath.  Serenity and a smile came over me.  I think that’s because the pain of losing him is only fleeting, in the grand scheme of things.  The richness of knowing him is something we’ll always have.  And I know he’d want that for us."

The Watchful Eye of David Levine: Interview by Gary Groth (Part One of Six)

I conducted this interview in the spring of 1994 in Levine’s tastefully decorated and alarmingly neat Brooklyn apartment. He was a gracious host and we spent the better part of a day together. He is a terrific talker, lucid, urbane, erudite, opinionated, and, like most artists who protest their lack of verbal skills, immensely articulate. He takes special delight in great draftsmanship and subtle expression and conveys his love for both with great passion.
-Gary Groth


Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

On David Levine (1926–2009)

Garry Wills

It is a charming little dog, meticulously drawn, that faces us, all its curlicue hairs traced, its cantilevered thin legs ending in little paws (1971). Only on a second look do we see that the tiny face staring out at us from this fluff ball is that of Richard Nixon. Then, in a double-take (click!), we realize that this is Checkers, the dog Nixon used in his maudlin television address to stay on Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential ticket in 1952. A less adventurous artist might have done the obvious—made Nixon cower behind the dog he was using as protection. Levine did the unexpected. He made Nixon the dog. And as usual, there was a deeper purpose. He was saying that Nixon would not only do anything to get what he wanted, he would become anything. Later, when abortion was the issue, Nixon would become a fetus (1971). How does one give a fetus identity? With the nose, of course, the Nixon nose that Levine celebrated so relentlessly.

Having to puzzle out, however briefly, why the dog is Nixon was a typical reaction to Levine’s cartoons. They teased. Why is General Westmoreland’s neck so long and curving (1976)? A moment makes one realize it is an ostrich neck, the better for hiding one’s head from reality. Why does Linda Tripp’s head sit atop the body of a large bird (1998)? Oh, of course—a stool pigeon. A Levine work often needed deciphering. Sometimes this was because the attributes were so clever. Al Gore was drawn “straight” during his presidential campaign, but what are all the little clothes suspended around him (2000)? A closer look shows the tabs used to put different dresses on paper dolls, Levine’s comment on how Gore was changing personae.

But Levine did not need attributes to get his meaning across. He might have drawn Milton with a little devil beside him to show that the poet made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost. Instead, Levine shows the man himself as diabolical (1978). He might have drawn John Wayne as the sunny cowboy others depicted. Instead, considering Wayne’s support of every kind of war, he drew him with the face of a fanatical killer (1997).

Levine often did the unexpected. After all, he had a huge range of subjects to cover when illustrating articles in The New York Review—classical figures (working from statues), Renaissance figures (relying on paintings), modern figures (from photos). What other American cartoonist was asked to draw, say,Jonathan Sumption (2000) or Fernando Pessoa (1972)? He even had to draw ideas—linguistics (1963), Mannerism (1965), finances (1964), the military industry (1964), art (1968), automation (1968).

In order to represent such a wide range of subjects, he needed a vast store of techniques. Obituaries reduced him to a few characteristics—heavy cross-hatching, big heads on small bodies, etc. Actually, he used large areas of pure black or pure white for many of his faces. Look, for instance, at Harold Lloyd hanging from a girder—his face is a white blank, except for the shade thrown by his straw hat (1984). John Quinn is all white, even his hair (1978). So, of all people, is Rubens, the master of chiaroscuro (1978).

And he was not trapped in the big head, small body format. He often did normal-size bodies—Elvis Presley(1981), John Pope-Hennessey (1991), Ford Madox Ford (1966), Twiggy (1968), Aldous Huxley (1977), Cesar Chavez(1975). He had to do Michael Jordan full length because he presented him as Leonardo’s universal man in the circle and the square—the image on the Italian one-euro coin (1999). What’s more, he often reversed “his” format and drew small heads on big bodies—Charles II (1979), Charles V(1977), Richard Ford (1987), Velázquez (1986), Paul Taylor (1987), Orson Welles (1972), John L. Sullivan (1988). He made each of Marilyn Monroe’s breasts bigger than her head (1973).

Levine had a larger field for originality because he realized that readers of The New York Review would get arcane references. When he had a tiny grotesque Nixon crouch on the fallen female body of Vietnam (1973), he knew the readers would see the reference to Fuseli’s incubus—only where Fuseli’s imp is instilling a nightmare in the woman, Nixon is delicately dropping a little bomb down her throat. When he drew the fictional character Zuleika Dobson (1966), his audience would know why he used Max Beerbohm’s style (with its mockery of Beardsley). When he drew the fictional Pamela, they would know why she covers her pudenda with a letter (1972). The picture of Nixon devouring himself (1974) would bring to mind Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

Levine was a man of high intelligence, wide reading, and solid artistic training. He composed, shaded, and drew with the eye of a practiced painter. But more than that, he had great psychological insight into his subjects. What he revealed could be scathing. The sadness of Richard Burton’s career is in the picture of his drink-raddled face and bleary eyes as he poses, in his Hamlet costume, tiptoe on the skull of Yorick (1989)—the real death’s head is his own.

Despite such dark visions, Levine had a kind of surreal imagination that took the next step, the way Mark Twain used to. It was not enough for Twain to say that a train was so slow it had no need of the cowcatcher; he added that the cowcatcher was needed in the rear of the train to keep cows from ambling aboard. In the same way, Levine began with a picture of Lyndon Johnson crying little crocodiles for tears (1965). But later on, he had to top that—he shows a crocodile shedding little tear-images of Lyndon Johnson (1966).

Given the run of his working years, his great subject had to be Richard Nixon. Herblock, too, was a great artistic foe of Nixon, but his Nixon is often a stick figure and Levine’s is a rounded tragic portrait. Consider the two men’s treatment of the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the White House tapes. Herblock shows a little Nixon doll dangling in the gap, holding on to the severed tapes on either side of him. Levine shows a seated and solemn Nixon, his hand over his heart in a pledge of truthfulness, but he had phlebitis at the time, and from his swollen left trouser leg some tape reels are spilling (1974). Levine brought us many aspects of the man—Nixon in sheep’s clothing (1970); Nixon asleep with a panda bear doll beside him on the pillow (1971); Nixon dangling from the last helicopter leaving Saigon (1971); Nixon crying dollars for tears in the ITT scandal (1975); Nixon as a rugby player, with the globe as the ball (1973); Nixon as Boss Tweed (1973), as Queeg (1974), as the Godfather (1972). The sixty Nixon drawings should be put in a book, to be called The Nixoniad.

The treasure house of Levine images—thousands of them—contains actors, athletes, musicians, scientists, philosophers, movie makers, pontiffs, all brought to life (sometimes brought back to life) by a magic pen and an incisive brain. What a loss that he is gone.

"Excuse me, are you David Levine?"

I was introduced to the work of David Levine during my first year at the School of Visual Arts and was immediately taken by the wonderful lines of his caricatures and the soft, eloquent tones of his watercolors.  I scoured the library for as much as I could on this artist.  I found his book, “The Arts of David Levine” in a used bookstore and spent a good portion of my very limited budget to purchase it.  

A couple years later I attended one of David’s openings at the Forum Gallery where I very nervously shook his hand and told him how much his paintings meant to me.  As luck would have it, he passed me the following day on Henry Street in Brooklyn. Recognizing him I asked, "Excuse me, are you David Levine?" I told him I had been at his opening and reiterated my admiration for his work.  During our very brief conversation it came up that I was a painter.  I had recently moved to Boston and was not feeling particularly confident in my work at that time.  He very graciously offered to look at some of my paintings and provide some feedback.  “Would that help?” he asked.  I, of course, was thrilled at the prospect of receiving a critique from the man whose work I held in such high regard.  I quickly jotted down his mailing address and thanked him for his time.  The following week I mailed a few drawings and small watercolor paintings to David.  A few weeks later I received a letter filled with straightforward, sincere criticism and advice which I continue to refer to this day.  I will forever hold a place in my heart for this generous artist and teacher who so kindly took the time to help a stranger. 

e. halvorsen