Starting with Lines, but Ending with Truth

The New York Times, 12/30/2009

Michael Kimmelman
Difficulty Level: Medium

#3

VOCAB to know before you read

mull
caricature
unambiguous
marginalia
hark
lofty
anachronism

burgle
indelible
contrive
opaque
emanate
hangdog
unpretentious

blithe
proprietary
eulogy
deft
imperious
wily
foible

bemusement
felicity

Tributes to David Levine, who died on Tuesday at 83, have been mulling over his place
among todays cartoonists and caricaturists. Fair enough. But his genius was really that
he wasnt like anybody else.

Art Spiegelman used the word sobriety when we talked on Wednesday, and thats right.
Mr. Levine brought sobriety back to caricature, among much else. Its useful to recall
that when he came onto the scene the dominant mode was a lighter, comic illustration,
and Al Hirschfeld was the reigning master: the pure grace of his line served caricatures
that condensed characters to unambiguous nuggets. Mr. Levine started out doing his own
witty marginalia for Esquire magazine. But it wasnt long after he settled in at The New
York Review of Books in 1963 that he found his voice, which aimed for the reverse.
Like Daumier is how Mr. Spiegelman, the author and comics artist, put it, meaning that
Mr. Levine harked back to the loftiest ambitions of great 19th-century illustration. He
wanted to be biting but at the same time searching, not just for a swift likeness but for the
whole depth of a given subjects character.
Unlike Honor Daumier, who found depth through a liquid, soft-edged line and pools of
shadow, Mr. Levine revived from the dead the dense, more precise cross-hatching that
brings to mind Thomas Nast and John Tenniel, who worked for the old Punch magazine.
This guaranteed a far less glamorous visual style than Hirschfelds. Mr. Levines works
now look almost brave in their gravity and anachronism, but this was also what made

him look fresh in the 60s and accounted for all the imitators who burgled his bobbleheaded, slender-bodied figures.
His political illustrations in The Review were a biweekly fix for the fuming left back in
the 1960s and 70s. But plenty of angry cartoonists soothed the savage public, then
slipped down the memory chute. What has made Mr. Levine endure why, hands down,
hes the greatest modern-day caricaturist and one of the great artists of the last halfcentury is his embrace of ambiguity. The power of his famous image of Lyndon B.
Johnson with a map of Vietnam scarred onto his stomach, a classic of American satire,
derives from the fact that while he clearly reviled the president, he also allowed him his
complexity. Thats also why his art became the indelible face of a journal so fiercely
devoted to the power of words.
But how so one of the great artists? Every great artist inhabits a genre, and remakes it.
Saul Steinberg reinvented the gag cartoon, Jules Feiffer the comic strip, Herblock the
political cartoon. Mr. Levine, by insisting on soul-searching gravity, did the same for
caricatures even while remaining funny most of the time.
He did more than 3,800 drawings for The Review, thousands more for other publications.
Privately he said his small paintings of garment workers and Coney Island bathers were
his proudest achievements, and who knows how history will judge them, but he was
clearly one of those artists (a throwback in this sense too) for whom the commission
provided an obligatory framework. Limits liberated him.
The Review would supply him with the manuscripts of the articles he was illustrating,
along with what the editors called scrap, meaning whatever collection of photographs,
reproductions of paintings or prints or other images they could rustle up. These would be
delivered to the Heights Casino, on Montague Street in Brooklyn, where Mr. Levine
played tennis. It was his version of Sartres Caf de Flore or Thomas Bernhards Caf
Brunerhof. Then a few days later a messenger would return to the casino to fetch the
finished drawings.
Mr. Spiegelman recalled how Hirschfeld once complained to him about having to
contrive some illustration from a photograph, as opposed to drawing the subject live.
Photographs are killers for artists. Illustrators suffer them by necessity. But it was a
feature of Mr. Levines greatness that he managed somehow to rescue figures from their
photographs, to see beyond the opaque surface toward some deeper reality, to give them
what the tennis fiend Mr. Levine might have called sufficient English.
On Wednesday I asked Robert Hughes, the art critic, about the caricature Mr. Levine
drew of him back in 1987, which also derived from a photograph, and he said, I dont
think the photograph was anything like as truthful as the drawing.
Most caricature is no more than cartooning, he added. But with Levine you always
knew there was some truth emanating from the drawings. You always had the sense he
was telling a truth, even when it was most unwelcome.

It helped that Mr. Levine spent a lifetime drawing live models. And it also mattered that
he read closely the articles he was illustrating. Brooklyn born, a red-diaper baby who
believed it was Stalin, Trotsky and the other Soviet leaders who spoiled what he still
called, even toward the end of his life, a beautiful idea, he was in person down to earth,
unpretentious, a working stiff with a hangdog air as Franoise Mouly, The New
Yorkers art editor recalled, a loyal and kind soul. He seemed to want people to think
that the book reviews he illustrated were, intellectually speaking, over his head. But his
brilliance lay in weaving their ideas with his own.
Hence the remarkable drawing he did in 1969 of Ludwig Wittgenstein, slyly kicking
away a book. Its a masterpiece of psychology. The balletic gesture, typical of Mr. Levine
who conveyed in the slight slope of a shoulder or the gentle swing of a hip or some
other little bodily detail a large fact about his subjects character in this case suggests
the arrogant philosopher blithely distancing himself from philosophy.
His drawing of Pushkin in 1971 captures the impulsive, proud, independent quality of a
gay man whose many affairs with women were a means of filling the emptiness of
boredom, as the author of the piece it illustrated wrote. And Ive got a fondness, a little
proprietary maybe, for the illustration he did of the pianist Alfred Brendel, for an article
I wrote for The Review in 2003. He caught the slightly comic air of a man resigned to a
fame he seemed to bear with a mix of bemusement and resignation.
Johnson, Wittgenstein, Pushkin, Brendel: the range of subjects mirrored the range of The
Review, a felicity of employment for Mr. Levine. Who else covered that range? Robert
Silvers, The Reviews editor, asked rhetorically.
Eulogists are stressing the political satire but he was just as deft, and will be just as
prized, I suspect, for drawing Fred Astaire in motion; or the dead Igor Stravinsky in
Venice as a nose floating in a gondola; or Count Basie at the keyboard with a lighted
cigarette still between his fingers; or Anthony Blunt, the Cambridge-trained art historian
and Soviet spy, whom Mr. Levine renders in tweeds with one limp fist raised in a Red
salute.
Mr. Levine studied with the Abstract Expressionist teacher Hans Hofmann, but ultimately
rejected abstract fashion, which maybe had something to do with that family-bred loyalty
to Old Left tastes, and with all those Communist pamphlets he saw growing up,
illustrating beefy workers battling fat-cat capitalists. Speaking of which, we once played
tennis together, doubles with the artist Wayne Thiebaud and Waynes son, Paul. Our
match came to mind while looking on Wednesday at his caricature of Madame du
Deffand, from 1994. She was one of the great French salonists of the 18th century, a
mistress of the bon mot and of the cutting remark, an old blind dbauche of wit, as
Horace Walpole described her.
Shes exactly like that in the drawing, as well: blind but all-seeing, imperious, wily,
special. I thought of the tennis match because Mr. Levine, although he had his physical

limits, made a fool of his opponents by relying on what came naturally, in art as in life:
his great touch, his killer instincts, his feel for human nature and foibles.
Oh yes, and his wicked slice.

Questions to Think About

1. Write a one paragraph (5-7 sentences) summary of the authors discussion about
the life and career of David Levine.
2. What, according to the author, are the most significant qualities of David Levines
work? What makes his work particularly unique? What does the author believe to
be the most enduring quality of David Levines work, and why does he believe
this?
3. Define from context, to the best of your ability, the following words: burgle,
indelible, contrive, opaque, obligatory, eulogy, foible.